September 28, 2009
This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but with ‘An Audience With John Smeaton’. The sweaty, shit-stained hands of The Sun newspaper are behind this one, with Arnold Brown (a now doddering comedian looking perilously ready for the glue farm) interviewing John Smeaton, the baggage handler who earned his fifteen minutes of fame by kicking a terrorist at Glasgow Airport. Smeaton is honest and likeable, but this was an excruciating experience, like watching pop culture trying to sodomise and eat itself at the same time. This is the abyss of our civilisation: Z-list celebrities dancing to a tabloid tune whilst the idle crowd looks on, their empty lives rotting away even as they sit and stare indifferently.
1/5
This review was originally published here.
September 28, 2009
Sometimes men kill, not for money or love or belief, but simply because they want to. ‘Weepie’, based on a real life murder, follows two youths as they train their bodies and their minds in preparation for a cathartic, random act of violence against a stranger. It is powerfully acted, and there were moments of real intensity, but the script is a mess, and the productions mistakes wild rantings for profound explorations of the psychotic and assumes that constant shouting equals high drama. It has interesting things to say about the homoerotic element of male violence, but these ideas are buried deep within an incoherent and rambling script. A play filled with sound and fury that ultimately signified nothing.
2/5
This review was originally published here.
September 28, 2009
Unfortunately, performance poetry sometimes attracts people who aren’t good enough to be either comedians or poets and thus try to be both at once instead. This spoken word event wasn’t terrible by any means (although the less said about Ernesto the Naked Poet the better), with the amiable and amusing Simon Munnery on good form and Claire Askew providing a few strong poems, but most of it was too weakly written to satisfy as poetry and considerably less funny than standup comedy. There is a different line-up each day, so anyone interested in poetry should give it a try at least once, but there wasn’t much worth listening to when I was there.
2/5
This review was originally published here.
September 28, 2009
If you think the Fringe can offer you no more surprises, then wait until nightfall and head over to ‘Power Plant’. Using the verdant landscape of The Royal Botanical Gardens as a blank canvas to be worked upon, this multimedia installation almost defies description. Wandering from greenhouse to greenhouse like a visitor to some strange alien pod world, you are greeted by chirruping mechanical insects rustling in the bushes, electric sparks dancing amidst the branches of a tree, haunting voices emanating from torn dresses that are hung above a pond, and numerous other strange, playful and often downright spooky sound and light installations. This fusion of nature and technology is weird and wonderful, though a touch overpriced.
4/5
This review was originally published here.
September 28, 2009
Do yourself a favour; give this a miss and read ‘Paradise Lost’ instead. Set in the garden of Eden (with an appropriately naked cast), this weak play offers only bland characters, a script devoid of invention and a ludicrously abrupt ending to its audience. It’s anything but a glimpse of Paradise, with a troubling, shallow portrayal of male / female relationships and lack of any kind of humour, drama or meaningful insight. The cast and crew need to chew on the fruit of knowledge for a while longer before they have another crack at theatre: Adam and Eve leave the garden of Eden at the end of the story, but plenty of audience members managed to escape long before they did.
1/5
This review was originally published here.
September 28, 2009
Some plays, even Pulitzer winning plays by great authors, should be left to gather dust on the shelves. Thornton Wilder’s ‘The Skin Of Our Teeth’ is one such play. The time hopping script follows the Antrobus family as they try and stay together throughout ice ages, Biblical floods and seven years wars, and with its allegory, symbolism and direct addresses to the audience, doubtless it was daringly inventive in 1942; now it seems mannered and incoherent. The cast stage it competently, but they fail to make the Antrobus family likeable or believable, giving the audience no human story to engage with. This play needs a radical vision and superb ensemble acting to work, neither of those are present here.
2/5
This review was originally published here.
September 28, 2009
How far would you go to create a paradise on earth? Utopia becoming dystopia is a wonderful basis for a story, and so it’s a shame that this play goes so badly awry from the very beginning. It may have been terribly written in its original Polish or just badly translated, but the script was filled entirely with clumsy lines and painfully obvious allegories. The actors had this dud of a script to wrestle with, but their wooden and mannered acting ensured that nothing on stage ever seemed believable, and the live music, consisting entirely of cheesy dramatic chords at obvious moments, was the final kiss of death to a performance that was flawed on every level.
1/5
This review was originally published here.
September 28, 2009
There’s plenty of free comedy on offer in Edinburgh during the Festival, and it’s worth taking the time to see ‘CoolFun Comedy’, featuring a young and energetic quartet of stand up comedians with more wit and skill than many of the more experienced comedians on the Free Fringe. Particular highlights include compère Ed Gamble, who improvises with a great spontaneous wit and banters confidently with the audience to get things warmed up, and Nish Kumar, whose skilful delivery and intelligently constructed set rounds the gig off nicely. It’s not exceptional comedy by any means, and all of the youthful performers are still finding their feet as comedians, but it is a fun stand up show that’s free to see.
3/5
This review was originally published here.
September 28, 2009
It’s rare to see a two-person band fill a room quite like Mazaika. In little under an hour, they took the small but appreciative audience on a dizzying musical world tour, beginning with Russian folk music and taking in tango, jazz, gypsy and even Italian opera along the way. Igor Outkine’s versatile work on the electric accordion was impressive, but Sarah Harrison’s fiendishly quick work on the violin provided the real highlights of the evening; the finale of ‘Lark’, where her violin seemed to burst into birdsong and be on the verge of taking flight, was exquisite. To listen to Mazaika is to hear a triumphant celebration of world music, played with wit, passion and virtuoso skill.
4/5
This review was originally published here.
September 28, 2009
Sharp suits, smooth performers. The well-presented comic quartet that is WitTank put on a polished, energetic but erratically-written hour of comedy in this zany sketch show. The four of them have great confidence and natural chemistry, working slickly together to keep the laughs coming. The performances are usually quite a way ahead of the quality of the writing, however, with many sketches relying more on the relentless energy of the cast than on a witty script to deliver the laughs. This said, they are fun to watch, and they had the audience howling throughout most of the show. Worth seeing, if only for the ball-breakingly funny Lord Nelson sketch.
3/5
This review was originally published here.
