EdFringe 2013
Review – The Man Who Planted Trees
★★★★★ Beautiful, entertaining morality tale:
With simple but elegant staging and charming puppets and puppetry, Puppet State Theatre Company presents a genuinely touching and engrossing adaptation of Jean Giono’s novel.
Review – We Will Be Free
✭✭✭✭✩ Heartfelt, intelligent and entertaining:
We Will Be Free! is this year’s Fringe offering from Townsend Productions, who were responsible for last year’s excellent adaptation of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. This production, dealing with the story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, is every bit as successful.
Review – Kiss Cuddle Torture
Edinburgh writer Jennifer Adam’s first full-length play, Kiss, Cuddle, Torture, is an unsettling exploration of issues surrounding domestic violence.
Review – Sanctuary
David McFarlane’s Sanctuary is a low-key, subtle meditation on the break-up of a relationship which manages to carry some real emotional weight in the cramped confines of the Chapel at St John’s Church.
The Extremists’ C.J. Hopkins interviewed
The fringe is a wonderful beast, full of strange delights and tortured ideas being ejected onto stages in all sorts of emotional states. Here, Extremist playwright C.J. Hopkins gets so extreme, he interviews himself.
Review – Bobby Gould in Hell
David Mamet’s tongue-in-cheek thought experiment on speech, action, the nature of the conscience and atonement is given an engaging and energetic production by New Celts Productions and Northern Spark Theatre Company.
Review – Lifting the Mask
Life in as a sex-trade worker and a travel monologue are pushed together in this underachieving new co-production between New Celts Productions and PromisKus Theatre.
Review – The Hawke Papers
Edinburgh is the setting for young local company Produced Moon’s engaging late-nineteenth century period murder mystery, playing at the Blind Poet.
Review – Liz Lochhead: Apple Says Aaah – and Other Poems, Pommes and People
There are many fine writers who cannot do justice to their own material in performance, let alone impressing when reading the works of others. Liz Lochhead, as always, is an exception.
Review – Last One Out
Scottish Opera’s Last One Out is described as ‘ a haunting mix of opera and Country’. Gareth Williams’ music and Johnny McKnight’s libretto combine to produce an elusive, impressive tale of how the past continues to influence the present.
