Summerhall

20.00

only on today (10th)

Portobello Beach is one of my favorite places, its softness a welcome antidote to the harshness of city living. The perfect venue and performance to review after a hard day of enjoyment.

When we got to the beach, everyone placed a set of headphones on & were serenaded by a soft sea shanty melody, complimented by the sound of the waves crashing on the beach. We all walked together towards a crew of castaways looking out to sea, searching for the rescue that would take them home.

This was a lovely thing to experience, the script was relayed through headsets, so that everyone could make sense of the beautiful scene that was unfolding.A really long rope and a long line of castaways all dressed in blue, Members of the cast came and took the audience two by two. to form two V shapes. Then as the sun sank into the sea, a selection of the cast walked into the sea together until they were completely submerged.

And that was it. A totally beautiful evening filled with thoughts of mermaids, cockles and whelks. 

When I don’t understand art. I stop trying to understand it and accept the beautiful sensations that good art gives me. Everyone was softened and healing took place. A perfect end to a long day.

Five Stars for this sell out show of experimental magic

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Reviewer : Mark ‘Divine’ Calvert 

Summerhall

8-2 August (not 12)

£9-£12

16.35

Inventive, beautiful and even so original, even the instruments are unique to this performance. A beautiful Yorkshire lass falls in love with a creative visionary who is too preoccupied with his artistry to see the gift of amour devoted only to him. His muse however, and the heroine of this tale, is his personal striving for perfection. Perfection in sound and perfection in presentation.

The lighting that brings the glass instruments to life, all purples, crimsons and pinks, create a perfect ambiance for the exquisite music that billows round the stage. Eye candy and ear candy. The Yorkshire accents are lovely too. You always know where you are with Yorkshire folk.

Four Stars for brilliance and an extra star for being from Yorkshire.
So That’s Five Stars.

Reviewer : Mark ‘Divine’ Calvert

31stJuly ­- 24 Aug

Traverse Theatre

(times vary)

£18

I first saw Chris Goode around 12 years ago by chance in the festival with his play ‘Kiss of Life’ and since then whenever the festival arrives the first thing I check is to see if he is performing. He is a playwright of unbelievable magnitude and delivers his one man show as a monologue that hooks you from the first line and holds you mesmerised in the true tradition of storytelling.

Men in Cities is a haunting and very human narrative of numerous characters in a city, each simultaneously going about their seemingly unconnected lives. It’s the little moments that make it resonate with such a believable punch. Framed by the fallout from two violent deaths ­ the apparently inexplicable suicide of a young gay man and the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich 2013, Men in Cites presents fractured snapshots of dozens of seemingly disconnected lives that together offer a challenging, but radically humane portrait of how we live now.

Chris Goode has a raw and rare honesty and he expertly interweaves his own life story along with the fictional ones to the point that truth and fiction blur into one complex volatile piece of work. Watching his Men in Cities is like going on a cinematic journey of the mind, watching the movie unfold yet hearing every murmur behind the actions of each person and understanding on a deeper level where each characters intentions and desires truly lie. This epic dark comedy performed with a seething honesty is an elegant portrayal of both his characters, and himself, in the process of creating them.

People queue up afterwards to buy a copy of the script (myself included), to savour this playwright’s masterpiece in the comfort of their own home. A testament to the quality of the writing, yet the delivery is such an intimate and honest experience nothing will compare with the performance. Chris Goode feels like a modern day reader of epics, a wordsmith of our time, expertly laying bare our fractured realities, while at the same time subtly hinting at how they are inexplicably woven together. FIVE STARS

Reviewer : Glenda Rome

Sweet Venues – International 3 @ the Apex International Hotel
£9/8
16.00
31 July – 24 August (not the 11th or 18th).

Making her UK debut  has brought her tale of adolescence to the Fringe. Her one woman show,  Love. Guts. High School. takes you though 10 years of awkward, confusing, fun, painful and very real experiences of being a teenage girl, a teenage girl in love.

Based on her own adolescence and written using exerpts from her own diaries, Jeanette’s one woman show explores how her first love impacted her as a teenager and also shaped her as an adult.  It is a tale of school crushes, first kisses, losing inocence, and the web of emotions that we wend our way though in life, oh, and Love.

Walking into the small, dark room Jeanette greets you, up close and personal.  Using very few props, she takes you straight back to the days of her 13 year old self fantasising about kissing boys and gossiping about who has a crush on who at school.  As the years pass by we share her experiences of flirting with boys,  denying her crushes to her friends, and what happens after friendship becomes sexual.

The show was brilliant.  She captured with real depth, the experience of being a teenager, morphing in to adulthood.  There were many points of cringeworthy empathy where she captures those teenage experiences of working out how to relate to boys and takes you back to your own experiences of teenage love. THREE STARS

Reviewer : Nina Jones

Summerhall

£10-£12

18.30

6-24 August

In this centenary year of the outbreak of WW1, there are plenty of Great- War related offerings on offer in Edinburgh… but O my god, this is a piece of abstract theater that left my senses literally numbed into submission as I left the cellars of the Summerhall & stepped blinking my astonishment into the evening sun.

The stage is a cellar of the Summerhall, & the audience are gathered around a table or leaning against the brickwork, with the two lovers – a soldier & a nurse – either talking to each other when the soldier is on leave, or communicating through letter-like monologues.

The story is based upon a real life tale, in which the great aunt of  Badac theater’s Steve Lambert lost her lover to the war, & never went with another man for the rest of her nine decades on earth.

What left me stunned, however, were the scenes in which the soldier recreated his assaulting the trenches, shouting & ducking to the machine-gun effect provided by the nurse chopping the table with a knife.

Another marvel is the script, where short & snappy staccato lines are repeated hypnotically over & over again as we follow the characters slightly manic, war-obsessed & love-begotten trains of thought. I shall leave you with an example – with the nurse attending to her wounded lover;

So much pain. So much agony. My hands. Covered. Covered with blood. His blood. Watching the pain. I love you. I tell him. I lov you. I’ll fix you. Still. each stitch. Screaming. Each cut. Screaming. The insanity. The insanity. In my head. With each scream. The insanity.

A worthy FOUR STARS

Reviewer : Damo Bullen

Assembly George Square Studios

5^th– 16^th

August £19

18.30

Who, indeed, is Torsten? We are introduced to this tragic character and his grossly elongated and broken life as he explodes onstage, breaking into dramatic, theatrical monologue, to uncover the black sadness of the transience of true love he has long endured. His rich, lyrical prose and powerful lingering notes hang by the throat like some bizarre sex game, whilst he relaxes, elegant, camp and defiant, smoking in an Elvis armchair and dinner suit and begins to unfold his tale.

Effortless and oozing skilled, professional stage presence, all-too-obviously gained from his charismatic ‘Pop’ years, Andy Bell portrays his alter-ego, backed by choice retro film projections and accompanied by keyboards n sax, which add without distraction from his enigmatic presence.

He unfolds his story with each song covering another broken, black chapter of a troubled, seedy & colourful life, but which is punctuated with glittery, sparkling camp humour. Cold, cheap sex, emotional abuse and superficial party whores flavour and colour each song in a riot of sensory overload as they are intensely ejaculated over the eager audience one after another in a seemingly endless stream – with little time to bask in the satisfaction and glory of the previous. His poetic, powerful prose carried by an undoubtedly superb vocal range deliver a breath-taking punch to the gut as his dark story unfolds.

‘Songs are postcards from the hotspots of memory’

An unashamed display of love, heartbreak and the bleakness and futility of transient love and life. FOUR STARS

Reviewer : Teri Welsh

Summerhall
1st to 24th August

20:15

£11-£13

Lesson learned for this show; always consult the blurb before attending. Expecting a piece of scripted theatre and perhaps a disappointingly morose look at sex work and sexuality from this performance, I was rather astounded at what turned out to be a fearless, boundary pushing piece of live performance art.

Not for the faint hearted or indeed those below 16, this show contains full nudity and acts of a sexual nature. Not for gratuitous purposes, but rather to make the spectator think about the norms of what we sexualise, how we change from a time when being naked just meant childish innocence, and attitudes towards non-heterosexual relationships and working in the sex industry.

Not an easy task to cover these important subjects in one hour, but Amy and Rosana Cade manage to do so with aplomb, leaving inhibition at the door and drawing you in to their life experience using audience participation, imagery, true life experiences and honest self examination.  A strong, feminist and forceful production which was both the most unsettling and fantastic event I’ve seen so far… An excellent FIVE STAR

Reviewer : Antoinette Thirgood

Aug 1-10, 12-18, 20-24,

16.35

£7

Susanna Hilslop is a rather talented lady – with acting, writing & directing all feathers in her belt. Combining all these skilss she has brought a show to Edfinburgh in which she channels the spirits of Margaret Thatcher, Virginia Woolf  and Marilyn Monroe onto the stage. This, incidentally, is found in the Red Lecture Theater of the majestic Summerhall. The dialogue itself is carved from the diaries & letters of those three women of status, & gave us tantalising insights into their ‘real’ lives.

Unfortunately, sleep deprivation was taking its toll on Divine and I was struggling to keep my eyes open, before finally succumbing to the sleep that was taking over me. In a moment I was abruptly awakened by a screaming Margaret Thatcher demanding that I wake up and pay attention. Of course I paid attention. Dennis her husband was scowling at me in the corner.

So… Susanna Hilslop is a very fine talent who eloquently summons this certain set of personalities back to life. Interesting, but not astounding, Divine gives this show three stars.

Reviewer : Mark ‘Divine’ Calvert