Irene Brown
Cirque Berserk
★★★☆☆ Zip(po)’s into town:
Newbury based circus company Cirque Berserk! appears at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre as part of its 2020 tour. The company brands itself as ‘Real Circus made for Theatre’ and it does exactly what it says on the tin.
The Secret Garden
★★★★☆ Blooms with delights:
The Secret Garden, Fife-based Red Bridge Arts has once again given a children’s classic a radical makeover without losing the heart of the original story.
Manipulate is nigh!
Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival 2020:
As the year turns chillier and darker, it’s always good to have good things to look forward to warm the heart and soul if not the body.
Heroes
★★★☆☆ Fails to soar:
Two well established Edinburgh based companies working in physical performance, All or Nothing Aerial Dance Theatre and Room 2 Manoeuvre, bring their new family show about superheroes to this year’s Fringe.
Nancy’s Philosopher
★★★★☆ Polished and Impassioned:
Nancy’s Philosopher, the story of unfulfilled love between David Hume and society beauty Nancy Ord unearthed and written by David Black, was first performed at the fringe in 2016.
Review – Calotype
Jessie Mann, credited with the first surviving photograph taken by a women, is given an inventive life in Foolproof theatre’s Calotype, at the Central Hall, Tollcross, all week.
Review – HeLa
★★★★☆ Immortality unsought:
Summerhall’s anatomy theatre is the perfect location for Adura Onashile’s revelatory one woman play about Henrietta Lacks, whose body cells have been vital to modern medicine.
Review – The Edinburgh Literary Pub Tour
★★★★☆ Douce and dirty
An evening stroll through Edinburgh’s Old Town to its New Town, visiting some of Edinburgh’s oldest pubs on the way, offers an entertaining evening of enlightenment told through the Capital’s rich and varied literary history.
Review – Being Tommy Cooper
Being Tommy Cooper is an odd amalgam of tribute act and exposé of the man beneath the famous fez – which ends up being neither.
Review – Calum’s Road
Fine, slow-paced energy, permeates this co-production between the National Theatre of Scotland and Gerry Mulgrew’s Communicado that tells of a man’s solitary and dogged fight against bureaucracy as he makes the choice between being defeated and being defiant.
