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- Being Yerma is a daring adaption of Lorca's 1934 folk tragedy, performed by the Italian ensemble Teatro Dei Borgia. This is a play which brings to life the sense of danger and creative energy which un...
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- This gory tale of a vigilante murderer dishing out justice to priests who abuse children is well told in an engaging and confrontational performance by Owen O'Neill.
O'Neill's style is slick, bol...
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- The publicity for this show sells it as something rather more exciting and unusual than it is – “a climber hangs halfway up a Siberian rock formation. His name is Hal. And he's screaming.&...
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- A comic-book style tale of intrigue, politics and corruption centred around a new, terrifying, cure for cancer this darkly funny and original adventure story oozes playful wit and panache. Admittedly...
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- Johnny Depp: Renaissance man, pirate, sex god and less than adequate barber. He can even play the guitar! What a guy! No doubt he will one day get his rightful place in the pantheon next to Dante, Sha...
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- The Angel and the Woodcutter is a traditional Korean folktale. An angel comes down to earth and is found by a woodcutter and his besotted mother. The angel and the woodcutter fall in love, making the ...
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- It was always going to be a brave move to cast such a controversial celebrity like Michael Barrymore for such an ambitious role, as comedy giant Spike Milligan. This is especially the case when consid...
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- This is a deliciously abstract and richly metaphoric piece of theatre brought to The Fringe by a Czech physical theatre company. A young man steps into an old man's shoes and starts the magic as he vi...
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- One of the very best shows at this year's Fringe comes from the Central School of Speech and Drama, whose students and graduates have devised this spectacular and experimental piece of work. Based on ...
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- Writer and performer Jane Arnfield knows a thing or two about the Killing Fields, working as she does for the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, a non-profit organisation dedicated to collecting and re...
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- Samantha Bloom has by no means made things easy for herself. Taking a 50 minute slot in the sizeable White Belly armed with little more than a modernist poem and accompaniment from cellist is certainl...
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- In the Pleasance's new space The Undergrand (a former air-raid shelter), the theatre company goose, goose gander have created a composite piece of site-sympathetic theatre on the the importance of hom...
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- This is a unique and intriguing show with an incredibly talented cardsharp who also has a commanding stage presence. Guy Hollingworth narrates the story of Milton Andrews, fellow cardsharp whose brill...
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- A painfully slow beginning takes the audience into a mental asylum where three women are confined. One woman has a thing for spitting out pebbles and touching water, another had been raped and tries t...
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- What is madness? Can we say with any certainty that one man is sane and another insane? Where do we draw the line? Borderline provokes some interesting questions in this respect by presenting us with ...
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- This thoughtful and very worth adaptation of an Evelyn Waugh short story, is an impressive effort from a young, talented and independent cast. Senility gets the better of the elderly Lord Moping who i...
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- Victims of Duty is Eugène Ionesco's obscure and surreal play containing nice, cultured Madeleine and husband Choubert, who quite enjoy discussing theatrical ideologies in their comfortable home. They ...
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- You will not enjoy this show. But that is exactly the point of this award-winning company's 7th production. The Factory deals with the experience of dying in the Nazi Gas Chambers; as a member of th...
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- Plastic takes place in the atmospheric cellars underneath the Pleasance courtyard, one of the Fringe's quirkier venues. The audience is not seated, instead we are led from room to room to discover a s...
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- This show is bafflingly odd – it must be hard to envisage but imagine a monologue that somehow manages to include papier-mâché skulls, hysterical laughter and a hint of audience interaction. It ...
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- Life as the foremost Palestinian poet must have inured Mahmoud Darwish to the tragedy of the continuing relevance of much of his work. However, even in death, context was not done playing tricks.
...
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- Written by Fringe First winner Joel Horwood, this is by far the best thing I have seen this year at the Festival, which might be surprising, given the name of the show.
It is a humorous yet realis...
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- This is fringe theatre at its best. The audience of eleven is bundled into an aging camper van and then encouraged to cram themselves into the limited seating and spend an hour with two Polish émigrés...
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- Watching brilliant shows is one of life's great joys. Unfortunately for the Cholmondeleys and the Featherstonehaughs, they won't experience this one: firstly they're in it and secondly, well, they're ...
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- I have only once visited a gay club. This was something which I only gradually realised after half an hour of deciphering why so many males had turned up in lipstick and for what reason ‘Chicago...
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- Somewhere between cartoon and theatre, Slick is a fast-paced and colourful tale unleashing the cruel potential of adults and the celebrating the heroic efforts of trodden-on children. Little Malcom ha...
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- In our current secular age we like to think that entertainment has advanced from the public executions, gladiatorial games and visits to the asylum, for an ogle at the local loonies, that have permeat...
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- Barrie Kosky's International Festival debut, Poppea was a sumptuous, witty and intelligent re-staging of a Monteverdi opera, punctuated by new arrangements of Cole Porter's best loved songs. Kosky's o...
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- There has been a lot of negative press about teenagers recently. So when I was asked to review the adolescent show ‘Once and For All We're Gonna Tell you Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen', I was...
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- Conor McPherson's rambling tale of a drunken Irish theatre critic who, increasingly dissatisfied with his life, runs off to London only to befriend a house full of Vampires is witty and endearing, but...
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- Dealing flimsily with a whole range of serious issues – including child abuse, mental illness, suicide and murder – Torn Out Pages is a weak script blandly realised by mediocre performance...
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- The horrors of sex trafficking are a complex, sensitive issue, and The Paper Birds' new show tackles this weighty subject with aplomb. The three performers devised the piece based on their own researc...
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- There is little, if anything, about Carl Hiaasen's knockabout adventure novel Lucky You which makes it particularly ripe for theatrical adaptation. The story of JoLayne Lux, a Florida woman who wins t...
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- Is it possible to love a place in the same way that one can love a person? Can a human being's longest and most fulfilling relationship be with the place they call home? Daniel Kitson, in writing and ...
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- In an increasingly connected world the idea of an inescapable blood tie to our past, something stronger than borders or reason, sits uneasily in multi-cultural society. It unnerves us to challenge an ...
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- Exciting young company Pangolin's Tea-Time are back with the follow up to the show Haozkla that arrived at the Fringe to massive critical acclaim in 2006. With expectations high it is a shame that the...
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- One of three productions being staged by the Weaver Hughes Ensemble, the Six Wives of Timothy Leary is just as the title suggests, played out with an admirable economy of form. In a technique reminisc...
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- Welcome to Britain in 2013 where Glastonbury has become a Guantanamo-style prison camp, the BNP has merged with the BBC, and our basic human rights are being undermined by aggressive anti-terror laws ...
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- Reasonable Doubt is a play about the shifting nature of truth written by a lawyer, perhaps the best qualified professional to deal with such a theme. Mitch and Anna meet up in a penthouse hotel suite ...
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- This play tells the story of a couple in the 1950s, a teenage mother-to-be who just wants the boy she slept with to think she's pretty, and her twins whose bickering and rivalry as they grow up draws ...
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- Yasser Mansour bursts into the dressing room. He's due on stage in under an hour to play Shylock in the Merchant of Venice, yet his briefcase, containing the prosthetic nose which he sees, not totally...
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- As the shadow of an almost spherical gut, spindly legs and large clown shoes emerge from a piercingly bright light on stage, it is clear the audience is in for something mesmerizing. Al Seed is a mast...
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- A celebrated American playwright faces imprisonment having written a controversial play the government has interpreted to be inciting terrorism. The Patriot Act is a conversation between the playwrigh...
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- With superb performances, direction and writing, this play is an absolute gem. The style of Noel Coward is used to mingle the jolly, unsuspecting Britain of the 1940s with terror-filled modern warfare...
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- Men can be split into three categories, one promiscuous character informs us, “gay, married or pricks”. This is about the level of intellect and depth you can expect from the rest of this ...
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- It's late July 1890 in Paris, a week ago Vincent Van Gogh committed suicide, and now his brother, Theo, wants to set the record straight. This monologue carries the air of a lecture, in which the arti...
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Dull, unbelievable and simply bad, this play made me despair at its lack of anything worth watching. If there had been a freshly painted wall, I would have been watching it. The play i...
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The Bird and The Bee are two plays designed to function together, telling two sides of the same story and approaching the prickly issue of teenage suicide from two different angles. They fu...
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A moving tale of grief, injustice and uncertainty, Sherman Cymru's new production is (although not ground-breaking) brave, slick and powerful.
Part family tragedy, part court-room ...
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We have fourteen words [...] for cruelty, but only one for hope.
Zinnie Harris' new play presents us with a cruel, bleak and utterly chilling world. She deals with the trial of four...
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Pitched as a play which ‘captures Britain as it crashes from the euphoria and promise of the 2012 Olympics announcement into the devastation of 7/7', Simon Stephen's script is on...
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- Having been so impressed with Ferguson's other play ‘The Plan' last week, I was expecting equally great things of this one. Unfortunately, ‘Heart and Sole' lacks the spark and wit that Fer...
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A slide clicks into place to introduce the first disaster, American Airlines Flight 1572, and immediately creates a palpable sense of tension. The pilots are unsettlingly calm, unawa...
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Both incisively simple and deliciously complex, Mark O'Rowe's exquisite Terminus is bold, ambitious storytelling at its absolute best. Three beautiful, witty and evocative stories inte...
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From the surreal opening scene jam-packed with excessive and uncomfortable nudity to the even more bizarre closing monologue recited over the All Black's Haka, Foreskin's Lament is &n...
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- Iraq, immigration and racism - three themes which have stormed their way into many theatrical ventures in the last ten years and as such three themes which have already found their own clichés and tro...
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This one man show offers us a biographical portrait of the infamous newspaper tycoon from the intimate space of his study. As Philip York enters on stage with what looks like a stuff...
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- If recent political mutterings are to be trusted the subject of absent fathers is once more good cause for public hand wringing. Motherland, running in a dank cavern in the underbelly, clearly has som...
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- The promotional material for Up the Republic! features very prominently a quote from public beard stroker Christopher Hitchens, declaring that the show catches an atmosphere and context in French poli...
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- Lynn Manning was shot and blinded in an L.A. bar at the age of 23. This is his story. The monologue is both written and performed by Manning who delivers a meandering tale of abject poverty, abuse and...
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- From the opening image the cast of Before We Remember set out their visual manifesto: stage front, a woman, apparently lost, gazes wonderingly at some discarded shoes, while behind her, lifted onto th...
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- Ben Moor presents us with a strange and intriguing tale where a diary has the power of prophecy and a man has developed procrastination to an art form. He takes on the characters of a failing but chee...
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- Two security guards eat pot noodles and guard an old tower block that no one will ever want to buy or move into. The building is home to deadly flies, a kind of female ‘Thing' from ‘The Ad...
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- It is now over five years since British and American troops entered Iraq, and it remains a hot topic at the fringe. In Conflict voices the results of interviews carried out with American veterans retu...
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- Lynn Ferguson, as a kind of sassy female grim reaper, counts deaths on a blackboard, and switches between ‘Ave Maria', Reggae singer Shaggy's ‘Angel' and news reports on the radio. Her pla...
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