Review: Turn the Night
An innovative solo performance framed in the context of a karaoke night where underlying tensions get exposed and examined.
Genre: Solo Performance
Review: Too Young to Stay In, Too Old to Go Out!
Nigel Osner delivers an audacious rendition into the vulnerable and egregious lives of those growing in years
Review: The Tailor of Inverness
A story, a thread, a suit and intrigue, bound in a fascinating tale told with a violin and a cracking narrative; Mathew Zajac masterfully weaves and unfolds layers of the stories of his father.
Review: Achilles
A bold reimagining and interpretation of Achilles’ grief and revenge through a superior technical evening of storytelling, dance and song
Review: Gigantic Lying Mouth
An engaging one man exploration of lying at the end of his life, helped with video, a disembodied voice and facing the harsh truth of his own (previous) existence.
Review: Baby Face
An uncomfortable night facing uncomfortable truths with comfort coming when you have the decency to condemn the truly indecent
Review: Private Peaceful
This is as good as a one-person show of this kind gets. Andy Daniel should be up there above his own rows of five-star ratings.
Review: Put a Little Shimmer in Your Life
A fascinating well written and performed entertaining and uplifting show!
Review: Dandy Darkly’s All Aboard!
Deliciously provocative, cynical, creative, poignant, entertaining, uplifting, impactful show. Do not miss it!
Review: The Mermaid’s Tears
Well crafted and performed - an entertaining ride that piques the senses and imagination with humor, pathos, fantasy, melodrama!
Review: My Preferred Pronoun is We
Fascinating well crafted show with depth and humor – topical, very well performed, poignant + impactful!
Review: Enough
A violent attack on the social norms which drive self-harm in its many and varied forms.
Review: How to Keep Time: A Drum Solo for Dementia
There are no words to describe the power or impact of this show
Review: Gie’s Peace
Inspiring Stories of Courageous Women - An Exploration of War Through Storytelling and Music
Review: DUPed
Solo exploration and expose of the worst of the DUP in a relaxed performance style that draws you in and makes you truly think.
Review: Achilles
Fusing dance, physical theatre, prose, and raw, dynamic acting Ewan Downie breathes new life into the ages old tale.
Review: A Christmas Carol
"I urge you to go and rediscover something you thought you knew all too well, and join the standing ovation at the end."
Review: HUFF
A gut-wrenching tale of Indigenous brothers caught in a torrent of solvent abuse in the wake of the death of their mother.
Review: Dandy Darkly’s All Aboard!
Well written and performed, deliciously eccentric character, fascinating and entertaining!
Review: The Unknown Soldier
A poignant reminder of the aftermath of war and the unsung heroes it leaves behind.
Review: A Modern Guide to Heroism and Sidekickery
Not Just for Comic Fans, Modern Guide Inspires the Underdog Hero in All of US
Review: There But For the Grace of God (Go I)
A rare instance of an actor knowing exactly how to direct himself. It’s a super-Fringe show well worth reviving, and Welsh clearly puts his life into it.
Review: Gyles Brandreth : Break A Leg
Master class in comedic storytelling from a new national treasure
Review: Notes From the Field
What makes this harrowing selection work is how Smith varies, gradates and paces her interviews; and builds a climax. It renders the experience a memorial; it’s what such artistry’s for. You will experience nothing like this and leave reeling.
Review: Fleabag
Original, raw, brilliantly funny and devastating. This production is Fleabag neat. Its harrowing streak of genius burns like a healing scar torn.
Review: random/generations
In a season featuring not before time several superb women dramatists – Enid Bagnold and Charlotte Jones follow – starting with tucker green is a proud moment for Chichester.
Review: An Evolution of a Sexual Bean
The Funny and Empathetic Show Our Inner Teenagers Needed to See
Review: One Woman Alien
I can predict that by the end of its run, this should be the most outstanding one-person show you’ll see in the last week.
Review: She Wolf
So what did Harvey Weinstein and the fifteenth century European ruling classes have in common? Exactly. A lot. English has achieved a phenomenal amount. She co-ordinates everything as she directs and manages her own minimal props.
Review: Shostakovich 24 Preludes and Fugues
Powell makes more of the interconnectedness of this music perhaps than anyone since Tatiana Nikolayeva, and more lucidly than anybody ever. Acclimatising himself to the St Michael’s acoustics he delivered something extraordinary.
Review: The Sorrowful Tale of Sleeping Sidney
This is a gem of many colours. Do see it. The miraculous construction’s matched by Jordan’s storytelling and sense of dark mischief. In Jordan’s hands it’s a re-possession of lost innocence by a strange sleight of a knowing child.
Review: Metamorphosis
If you decide on one storytelling piece of theatre in this half of the Fringe, I doubt you’ll do better than experience this.
Review: Female Parts
Adult Orgasm Escapes from the Zoo. That title, from the 1983 version of one of the plays presented here summarises what you can expect. Sadly, subversion has to be rationed. Franca Rame and Dario Fo’s five short plays from 1977 Female Parts, get two outings – they’re joined in a similar bid for self-determination by OneNess Sankara’s The Immigrant, the first black woman in space. Go: it’s likely someone will vault over your head.
Review: Love Letters to the Public Transport System
Uplifting and as enjoyable as it is inpsirational
Review: Girls & Boys
When you hear an opening like: ‘I met my husband in the queue to board an easyJet flight and I have to say I took an instant dislike to the man’ you relax. Too soon. Thus the chippy wit of Carey Mulligan’s opening of Dennis Kelly’s monologue Girls & Boys at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs, directed by Lyndsey Turner stretches ninety minutes into something else. Fourteen years after her debut on this stage, it confirms Mulligan as a great stage actor.
Review: Woman Before a Glass
Judy Rosenblatt’s reading irradiates Robertson’s and indeed Peggy Guggenheim’s rationale into a morphology, something felt along the gut. The appalled and occasionally appallingly purity of Peggy Guggenheim is laid bare. More widely, this work addresses the limits of patronage, of rescue, of greed and altruism, of comic high-Bohemianism and sexual affirmation before the sexual revolution. Which of course began in 1963.
Review: My Mum’s a Twat
‘Have you ever tried to sustain a relationship with a twat?’ Some debuts establish more than a new voice. Anoushka Warden’s My Mum's a Twat certainly revels in its compelling and sassy distinctiveness; but it nails to this a cause. Beyond this though is the thrill of a debut writer with the tang of their own voice stinging the air. As Warden says about something else: ‘You’ll have to take my word on that.’ So see it.
Review: The World of Yesterday
Stefan Zweig lends himself peculiarly to a theatrical dimension. It’s over in a blink. If you’re at all near, you won’t regret the Print Room’s opalescent sliver of magic conjuring the best out of this production.
Review: In Memory of Leaves
On a moored barge Natasha Langridge re-enacts her own In Memory of Leaves updated from a run last year to include this year’s tumultuous events. This is a fine, necessary work inevitably in progress. Let it settle in the water a bit more, and glitter.
Review: Dandy Darkly’s Myth Mouth
Wickedly mischievous, creative, joyous, boisterous, lyrical, brash, poetic, funny and entertaining show!
Review: Half Breed
An astounding solo performance that covers all sorts of prejudice and leaves you the better for it
Review: The Majority
If Rob Drummond’s /Bullet Catch/ charmed and alarmed at NT’s The Shed and Brighton Festival in 2013, here Drummond starts his odyssey of political immersion in a prison cell; for throwing a punch at a neo-Nazi. Opening three days after the Charlottesville murder, the timing’s eerily prescient and more charged than even Drummond might have imagined.
Review: Scottish Superwomen of Science – Minerva Scientifica
Unsung heroes of Scottish science, unsung no longer
Review: The Girl Who Jumped Off The Hollywood Sign
Poignant reminder that showbiz is not all glam and glitter
Review: Short Play Festival
This puts New Venture Theatre onto a new footing. Six new plays – two by actors taking part - and six directors, all developed by NVT’s nurturing over the past year culminates in this short festival. There’s If it was an annual, even bi-annual event, it would change things in the south east.
