MacBain   Summerhall   *
A heavily stoned couple, identified in the program as Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, attempt to have a coherent conversation between his repeated nodding off and her fits of giggles. Some stage smoke transports us into Shakespeare, and the two actors pop up from behind a couch like Punch and Judy to enact – badly – roughly half of Macbeth. More smoke, flashing lights and sound effects and the modern couple are back, quarrelling about things like parents killing children, children killing parents, and spin dryers, with frequent but not particularly useful quotations from Macbeth. A glass ceiling over the set gradually lowers until it pins them under it, and the play stops. I will admit to not being as immersed in the myths of Kurt and Courtney as some, and there are no doubt allusions and in-jokes (like that spin dryer?) I missed. But Shakespeare is not illuminated in any way by being filtered through Kurt and Courtney, nor do we learn anything about Kurt and Courtney through the Macbeth comparison. The performances are clearly impaired by having to be in English and by too loose a directorial hand (if there was any), that allows too free an indulgence in silly voices, ad libbing and general messing about. The whole thing smacks of an opaque private language and to-hell-with-the-audience self-indulgence.  Gerald Berkowitz

Made Up  Underbelly     ****
The Fast Food Collective's short and peppy piece follows a quartet of Dublin girls as they go clubbing. Performing on a small bare stage the actresses are aided by lighting and music changes to take us from homes to dance floor and back again. The evening begins when the inclination to stay home and watch TV is trumped by the dreaded FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) Syndrome, and the possibility looms of meeting a Spanish millionaire who will whisk them off to Marbella in his private jet, or, marginally less unlikely, of encountering an ex who will beg to be taken back. It is no spoiler to report that neither event occurs, but the girls get to dance and flirt, and while one may be ready to give up the hunt, another goes home with someone new, and there's always another night. Aoife Leonard's writing, in witty rhymed couplets, is sparkling and fun, with a particularly telling section on what a girl looks for in a guy and what she's willing to settle for. The four performers - Heather O'Sullivan, Aibhilin Ryan, Eimear Sparks and Tilly Taylor – keep the energy level high and form a tight ensemble while still establishing a distinct identity and personality for each girl. Of course the concept for this show is not brand-new, and the shadows of John Godber's Shakers and Willy Russell's Stags And Hens hover benignly over Made Up, reminding us that as anchored in time and place as Made Up is, much the same story could have been set any time in the past forty years.  Gerald Berkowitz

Milk  Traverse  **
There are three separate story lines to Ross Dunsmore's new drama, tied very loosely by theme rather than the few plot crossings. A young couple meet a crisis when her inability to nurse her baby makes her feel a failure as a woman, a teenage girl is desperate to become sexual, and an old couple sustain their love with shared memories of the child they lost years ago. There is something about the need to love and to nourish in all three stories, but it is tenuous at best, and so they never really connect and are generally too incomplete and sketchy to stand on their own. I offer some spoilers because they're not really all that surprising – one of the older people dies, the mother is convinced to bottle feed the baby, and the girl causes a lot of trouble for others with her sexual flirting. That we can't really get too involved with or concerned about any of this is reflected in the fact that the most memorable character is the secondary one of a teenage boy the girl toys with, actor Cristian Ortega creating an attractive portrait of a kid who, all things considered, would rather have some fried chicken. Veteran Tam Dean Burn, stepping in as a replacement late in rehearsals, may be limited to playing generic sweet old man, but he does it with easy expertise.  Gerald Berkowitz

Mr Kingdom's Queen Victoria (or A Little Of What You Fancy)   Assembly Hall   ***
Fringe veteran and pioneer of the solo show Bob Kingdom presents a portrait of Queen Victoria that may not have very much that is new or unfamiliar in it but that benefits from the performer's own considerable charm. His Victoria rarely strays far from the conventional image of the rather formal and dowdy lady in black, and indeed one of the pillars of his characterization is that the Queen was very comfortable within that image and resisted any admonitions to break out of it in the slightest. The one liberty that Kingdom allows Victoria to allow herself is the occasional daydream of what life would be like as a Cockney housewife, though he makes it clear that her conception of such a figure would be generated more by music hall performers than by any real experience. Victoria is far more comfortable imagining herself arguing with God as an equal or with Albert, John Brown and various Prime Ministers as the unquestioned superior. The monologue is loosely structured as a stream of consciousness, with Victoria abruptly jumping from topic to topic, and it is sometimes unclear whether the occasional hesitation about what to say next is the character's or the actor's. Very much a safe and unchallenging choice for ticket buyers, but one that delivers on its promise of a pleasant afternoon hour.  Gerald Berkowitz

Mr Laurel and Mr Hardy Greenside Nicholson Square     ***
Despite its title, Mr Laurel And Mr Hardy is less about Stan and Ollie than about their fans, and serves as a reminder of an earlier time when some stars weren't just admired and appreciated but warmly loved. In the 1950s, their Hollywood careers over, Laurel and Hardy toured British music halls with an act built on familiar bits of business from their films, and found a fan base more loyal and ardent than in America. Bearing only the vaguest of physical resemblances to Laurel and Hardy, David Leeson and Colin Alexander don't make any real attempt at impersonation beyond a bit of tie-fluttering and head scratching and a half-hearted go at the Blue Ridge Mountains dance. Instead, Leeson and Alexander play two Manchester fans who worked in the theatre and had the opportunity not only to watch their idols onstage but to socialize with them, and the thrust of their reminiscences is the sheer pleasure of the stars' company. In the process they offer brief biographies of the two individually and as a team, amounting to little more than dates and names, and we might wish for more in the way of fact and anecdote. But in Leeson and Alexander's obvious affection for their subject, and the love they ascribe to the characters they play, Mr Laurel And Mr Hardy evokes the warmth between artists and audiences that a world of constant tweets and viral gossip has lost.  Gerald Berkowitz
Mrs Roosevelt Flies To London   Assembly Hall     ***
US President Franklin D Roosevelt's wife Eleanor was the first First Lady to have a public presence, as writer and speaker on progressive causes and as her husband's unofficial ambassador and agent. He sent her to Britain in 1942 to gauge national morale and provide assurance of American support. Alison Skilbeck's solo piece has Mrs. Roosevelt reminiscing twenty years later about being shocked at seeing bomb sites and impressed by the public's resilience. She has telling and sometimes cutting reactions to the King and Queen, whom she likes; Churchill, whom she doesn't; Queen Mary, who reminds her of her own gorgon mother-in-law; and General Eisenhower, whom she badgers about the state of soldiers' socks. Skilbeck structures the stream of consciousness so Eleanor can wander into other more personal topics, like the purely business arrangement that was her marriage and, discretely, the fact that her most intense emotional relationship was with another woman. As performer Skilbeck makes no real attempt to impersonate Eleanor in appearance, voice, accent or mannerisms, choosing instead to create the character from the inside as a woman born into a comfortable but emotionally stunted patrician class who discovered both a social conscience and a capacity for deep feelings only as an adult. For many people this is ancient history and the main value of the piece will be an introduction to the woman; for those who remember or know of Mrs. Roosevelt, Skilbeck's writing and performance create a believable and sympathetic characterization.  Gerald Berkowitz

My Eyes Went Dark   Traverse   ****
Two planes crash in mid-air and a man's wife and children are killed. He grieves, of course, but even worse than the grief is the not knowing why. Playwright Matthew Wilkinson posits a man for whom things must make sense and effects must have causes, and 'accident' and 'no one's fault' are unacceptable explanations. He pursues the investigation until someone – an overworked air traffic controller – can be blamed, and is then driven to make the punishment fit the crime. That what looks like vengeance can actually be the desperate need to put the universe back in order is an impressive and convincing insight. So is the play's demonstration that grief follows no neat order or process, but is a jumble of emotions, any one of which can dominate at any point. Cal MacAninch gives an intense but externally restrained performance as a man who may well be feeling a different emotion in each scene but retains a core of consistent identity. Thusitha Jayasundera provides solid support as Everyone Else, from therapists and lawyers to the wife of the man he blames. Both the individual story and the light it sheds on darkly complex emotions are moving, engrossing and dramatic.  Gerald Berkowitz
Nel   Pleasance Dome  ****
The all-female collective Scratchworks Theatre collectively tell a story so small as to be almost invisible, but tell it with such style and invention that you follow them happily. Nel is a sound effects technician on films, and when she isn't making footsteps or rainstorms on her tabletop she doesn't have much of a life. Her boss keeps inviting her to come clubbing, her aunt keeps trying to matchmake, but Nel is content to sit at home with the cat and goldfish. But then she does decide to try going out, joins a club, meets some people, and even begins to dress stylishly and trade her bike for a motorcycle. Impulsively she tells someone she's a producer and agrees to consider the new friend's filmscript, and it looks like her new life will crumble under its own fragility. With Sian Keen as Nel and Alice Higginson, Hanora Kamen and Laura Doble as Everyone Else, Nel's rise and perhaps fall is depicted through a constant flow of whirling movement, inventive sight gags – just putting on a coat is a precisely choreographed operation involving all four sets of hands – and music. Whenever Nel has nothing else to do she provides sound effects for the others, and when she's engaged they do it for her, and anyone with a free moment will pick up a musical instrument and play. It is no real spoiler to confirm that Nel ends up modestly happy, and anyway it is the journey rather than the ending, the inventive and endearing process of the telling more than the tale itself that holds and lingers warmly with the audience.  Gerald Berkowitz

The Nine Lives Of Antoine de Saint-Exupery  Assembly   **
This portrait of the pilot and author of The Little Prince opens with him playing chess with Death, who is imagined as a temptress he has loved all his life. There are footnotes there to Bergman and Fosse, but no indication in The Nine Lives of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that author/actors Bart Vanlaere and Louise Seyffert are aware of either borrowing. Nor is there much other imagination evident in this presentation that tells us lots of facts but shows us little of the man beyond his inveterate risk-taking, the title referring not to separate careers or personalities but to his tendency to crash the planes he was piloting. Particularly missing is any sense of the writer, beyond a couple of brief descriptions that have the evocative feel of his style and the brief appearance of a ventriloquist's dummy operated by Seyffert that claims to be the Little Prince but looks nothing like the familiar illustrations. As performers Vanlaere and Seyffert seem oddly uncomfortable with their lines, and on a small and cluttered stage take turns fumbling with props and bumping into the set. Audiences who come in knowing nothing about Saint-Exupéry will learn a little, but this seems to be a case of research insufficiently digested and performance insufficiently rehearsed.  Gerald Berkowitz

Often Onstage    Pleasance Dome     ****
Figs In Wigs is an all-female company seriously devoted to looking unserious, and the result of that dedication is one of the most delightful hours on the Fringe. Their current show is a collection of clever and satirically effective theatrical in-jokes that sometimes look like drama school end-of-term party pieces. We get an object lesson in how to milk a curtain call, along with a catalogue of different curtain call styles. A bit of arty interpretive dance is all but invisible behind a wall of stage smoke, while another is done to the accompaniment of a motivational video. The frantic farce of a four minute get-in and get-out between shows is particularly appreciated in the Edinburgh context, and the idea of an all-girl tribute to 1990s boy band The Backstreet Boys is satisfyingly silly. One of the dance routines, built on walking in formation in business suits, is actually quite lovely apart from its satirical content. Just about every sketch and musical sequence scores, a remarkably high ratio for a revue, and the only criticism to make is that some linger on after making their comic or satiric points and lose a little power as a result. This is a case in which everything in the show is good, and a little less of some of it might be even better.  Gerald Berkowitz

Oliver Reed - Wild Thing   Gilded Balloon   ***   (Reviewed at a previous Festival)
Rob Crouch as Oliver Reed enters in a monkey suit, and a recurring theme of the monologue that follows (after quickly removing the fur) is that the public wants some of their celebrities to be animals and wildmen. And while Reed didn't find playing that role on and off screen particularly difficult or foreign to his instincts, he still was aware that it was a role and that his living depended to a large extent to his maintaining it. So, he insists, some of the bizarre and drunken behaviour on TV chat shows that has become part of his legend was pure (well, almost pure) play-acting. Crouch's Reed doesn't deny being a heavy drinker and hell-raiser, and he happily recounts some of his misadventures, but insists that he was far more in control of his actions and his image than may have seemed possible. Crouch makes Reed quite an amiable drunk, with the charm of the totally unapologetic, so we share his pleasure in reporting that he is descended, through several levels of bastardy, from both Peter The Great and Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and respect the respect he shows to the performers (and carousers) he considers worthy, from Robert Mitchum to Keith Moon. Never really transcending the conventions of this sort of impersonation-personification, the fast-moving hour succeeds in making us feel we know the man a little better.Gerald Berkowitz
The Other   Institut Francais d'Ecosse  **
The Other is a performance piece of two unequal halves, the larger section an engaging fairy tale told principally through shadow puppetry and shadow acting, the later part an angry denunciation of immigration bureaucracy in an entirely different style. The first part is weakened by technical infelicities, the second by coming out of nowhere, forcing the audience to adjust abruptly. Writer-performer Gaël Le Cornec introduces the play as a young girl's magical journey from a war-ravaged planet to a more peaceful one. Acting in her own person or through puppets, Le Cornec spends most of this section behind a screen, occasionally weakening the shadow magic through misjudging the optimum distance from the light source. Much of the journey is done in front of the screen, and some episodes aren't fully integrated into the plot. Then,when the girl reaches her destination, Le Cornec is subjected to ruthless and demeaning interrogation by a disembodied voice, able to reply only through pointing at words written on her body. That's a strong image of the helpless feeling of having to answer questions in a foreign language, but with its wholly new mode and darker tone it seems to be part of a different play than the one Le Cornec started the hour with.  Gerald Berkowitz
Out Of Our Father's House  Gilded Balloon   ****
Sketches for a feminist history of the United States are drawn by writers Eve Merriam, Paula Wagner and Jack Hofsiss from Merriam's book about lesser-known female heroes. From a 17th-century spoiled rich girl to a 20th-century businesswoman and journalist, the characterisations by four actress-singer-musicians share the theme of becoming aware of and in some cases escaping the culturally assumed limitations of their gender. While the earliest can only speculate on what ambitions she might have let herself have were she a man, most rebel against and a few triumph over external and internalised sexism. There's the 19th-century woman whose progressive father encouraged her education but whose highest praise was 'You should have been a boy,' and the 20th-centory businesswoman and writer who didn't set out to become the family breadwinner but is quietly pleased to discover she has. And for a select few, like the former slave turned civil rights campaigner or the labour organiser, the trivial inconveniences of gender become irrelevant. Smoothly directed by Marya Mazor, the cast of four move rapidly among several characters each, pausing from time to time to punctuate the narrative with traditional American folk songs that take on surprising feminist resonances in this context. Never strident or preachy, this is a gently persuasive reminder of what is too often left out of history books.  Gerald Berkowitz
Oxford Revue   Assembly  *
The last time two people kidnapped the Oxford Revue and used the title for their own show was in the 1970s, when the culprits were Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis. Somehow I suspect that this year's pair will not have as successful careers ahead. Most of the current show's satiric targets – Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, J K Rowling, The X Factor, H from Steps – are well past their find-a-good-joke-about dates, running gags like changing the performers' supposed names with each link are simply not funny, and a video sequence is dreary. At the second-week performance I saw, the audience walk-outs began around the half-hour mark, and really threw the pair off-stride, which is odd because they should have been used to it by then.  Gerald Berkowitz
Parish Fete-ality - A Game Of Scones  C Chambers Street     **
Bristol's Tobacco Tea Theatre attempt a parody of a Midsommer-style English country village mystery, but the humour is strained and the production lacks the sharpness and pacing a satire requires. People are dropping like flies in the village of Jowlhurst, and for once there is no lone killer. Like many peaceful-looking villages it is filled with disputing factions, and the standard method for dealing with your foes on the Council or unfriendly neighbours seems to be to eliminate them by shooting, poisoning, choking or even more arcane methods – 'By the time we scraped the jam off him it was too late'. No sooner do we meet some of the village's colourful residents – the sex-mad squire and his sex-mad family, the megalomaniac vicar and the like – than somebody who doesn't like them bumps them off. But, as directed by playwright and company co-founder Christopher Cutting, this is neither effective satire or funny in itself. That line about the jam is the best and almost the only real joke in the script, and the small cast, playing two or three roles each, distinguish among them by making them all extreme caricatures, without a hint of an anchor in reality or in the archetypes of the genre. Actors look too often like they're not sure where on stage they should be standing, and pacing throughout is languid and haphazard, delays generated by costume changes and the like leading to gaps between scenes.  Gerald Berkowitz

A Play, A Pie and A Pint: Conflict In Court   LeMonde Hotel  ***   (Reviewed at a previous Festival)
This venerable lunchtime Fringe institution does indeed include food and drink in the ticket price, along with a setting in a somewhat posher hotel space than the usual Fringe venue. This year's play is a timely courtroom drama, with a Tory MP suing a tabloid newspaper for libel over a story accusing him of spending a night with a rent boy. With volunteers from the audience in the jury box, barristers for both sides question the politician and the editor, followed by questioning from the jury, which requires some ad libbing in character from the witnesses. Then the jury is polled, and on this particular day they went with the MP. To keep things lively there's a certain amount of courtroom humour between the lawyers and judge, and inevitably there's a surprise witness and a last minute after-the-verdict confession. Characterisations throughout are deliberately just this side of cartoonish, to keep the energy level up and the tone light, and a large audience, of a significantly higher median age than is typical of the Fringe, have an enjoyable break in the middle of their day. Gerald Berkowitz

Fringe veteran and master of the self-written character monologue, Pip Utton lifts the genre onto a new plane with his embodiment of Margaret Thatcher by flying without a net or, in this case, a script. After a conventional opening during which Utton plays a fictional actor preparing for and beginning a performance as Thatcher, he stops and announces that he would rather take questions from the audience, and proceeds to ad lib the rest of the hour, in all cases answering as Thatcher in convincing guesses at what she would have said. Granted that some likely questions could be anticipated and prepared for in advance, Utton has clearly done a massive amount of research on the lady's words and thoughts and organised it in his mind so that the appropriate thing to say about the Falklands, the poll tax, the miners, David Cameron or whatever surprise question comes up is quickly accessible. So thoroughly has Utton absorbed the politician's way of thinking that even when he deflects a question into one he'd rather answer, or when you can sense him vamping for a few seconds until his brain retrieves the proper file, it is exactly the way the Iron Lady would have done it. A remarkable piece of research and memory combines with Utton's signature talent for becoming his character even when, as here, he does not physically resemble her, to create an evocative, provocative and altogether fascinating hour. Gerald Berkowitz
Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally   Pleasance   ****
A small story is brought alive through playwright Kevin Armento's original approach to it and by an energetic and eclectic staging in One Year Lease Theatre's Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally (which, to get it out of the way, is evidently a mnemonic used in algebra classes). The algebra teacher confiscates a student's phone and, after returning it, impulsively texts him, and before either of them can keep track of what's happening, they're in the middle of a brief affair. The playwright keeps this potentially sordid story light by telling it in the voice of the phone, reporting with wonder on what its camera is seeing and its screen reading, and there are comic lines, like the phone referring to a pocket as its studio apartment, and plot twists, like the teacher's boyfriend and the lad's mother both completely misreading what's happening, in different ways. Meanwhile director Ianthe Demos, with choreographer Natalie Lomonte, creates a constantly fluid movement in which individual cast members or the whole group take turns being the voice of the phone, peeping at, reacting to and swirling around the principals. The mix of dance, mime and Story Theatre takes the play away from deep drama to create a celebration of theatrical energy that offers assurance that all will turn out pretty much all right. Gerald Berkowitz

Police Cops   Pleasance Dome   *****   (Reviewed at a previous Festival)
The opening shot is a kid cradling his dying brother in a dark city street with the tearful promise that that he’ll become a police cop, the best. Cue police academy, rookie beat, curmudgeonly partner, the first case. Thrills, spills, betrayal and a father complex ensue in this rollercoaster parody. Will the partners survive the pressure? What new perversion will the station captain reveal? What’s the connection with The Simpsons? And who is the evil Mexican cat? Between them, Zachary Hunt, Nathan Parkinson and Tom Turner, armed with nothing but enviable stamina and a box or two of manky props, somehow concatenate a thousand 70s police movie/TV plotlines, back stories, through stories and subplots. Milking every cliche in the manual, each spoofed villain, cop or civilian seems to have a troubled past, most sport moustaches and everyone has a hat. You’ve seen this sort of thing a million times before, so what makes this show so special? Well, for a start the writing hits an impressive high as trashy exploitation goes, yet there chugs under it a fully fledged script with a solid arc that allows the trio to develop a gallery of throwaway characters into convincing, plot-driven portrayals while still earning the laughs. They’re a supremely generous ensemble too, putting in supercharged performances with a (possibly unintended) physicality that puts them firmly in Total Theatre territory. And their connection with the audience is unbeatable. Nick Awde
Queen Lear   Assembly Roxy   ***
Ropnnie Dorsey has written a touching tribute to women's ability to bond over shared pain and disappointment, and rather arbitrarily and unconvincingly attached it to Shakespeare, to no great effect. A queen is undergoing an extremely painful labour, tended by a devoted servant and a doctor, the latter having a secret never really integrated into the rest of the play. As the queen's pains become unbearable she begs first that they kill her if necessary to save the baby and then just that they kill her. The other two wrestle with the implications of this and ultimately reach a decision. It isn't until more than halfway through the hour that we are told that this is the wife of Shakespeare's Lear, and even later that we understand what is at stake as she is desperate to give him a son after three daughters. Other than passing mention of Lear being an unpleasant man and young Cordelia being bullied by her sisters, Queen Lear gains no resonances from the Shakespearean connection and offers none back. Its strength lies in its portrait of a generic woman in physical and spiritual pain, and in the moving performances of Jane Goddard and Mary McCusker as the all-but-helpless witnesses and especially of Alice Allemano as the woman whose desperation drives her to welcome the death she fears. Gerald Berkowitz

The Red Shed   Traverse   ****
Comedian and activist – and the two are not labels that frequently go together – Mark Thomas offers a salute to the institution that got him started on both paths, The Wakefield Socialist Club, housed literally in a red shed and celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. Part social club and bar, part venue for radical speakers, part a symbolic home, it houses memories and inspirations that Thomas skilfully turns into funny and occasionally moving stories. His hour is built on two narrative spines, of going back to Wakefield and reuniting with old friends and comrades, and of being inspired by an old half-memory set during the miners' strike to track down the true story. Thomas's political commitment and righteous anger are never far below the surface, but his performer's instincts keep that surface light and entertaining, and he's at his best when he can blend the two – as when a present-day anecdote is interrupted by someone racing into the Red Shed bar, demanding an instant beer and blurting 'Did you see who they've made Foreign Secretary?' It helps to be sympathetic to Thomas's political position, but it's not necessary, and the only ones likely to be bothered by his show are those of any political persuasion who think it's all far too serious to laugh about.  Gerald Berkowitz
The Remains of Tom Lehrer  Gilded Balloon   ***
American satirical singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer has an enduring appeal. His wit rarely feels dated and can often be incisive, while his parodic music is generally spot on. Adam Kay goes beyond playing the piano and singing a series of Lehrer’s greatest hits, though he does deliver a good number in the hour. In addition, Kay presents a limited biography of a mathematician whose status as a prodigy must have been confirmed when he entered Harvard aged 15. Kay also updates songs and creates his own new versions, particularly refining the “Elements Song” in at least four versions. The highlights are generally predictable, “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”, “Masochism Tango” and “We Will all go Together When we go” as pleasurable as ever, even with the sometimes clunky but occasionally very funny updated versions. Lesser-known ditties such as “National Brotherhood Week” also amuse. Overall, Adam Kay pleases when he sticks to the originals (although he doesn’t attempt the accent) but does Tom Lehrer fewer favours when he tries to improve upon the originals, which generally need no help, even when some references would now mean little to us today.  Philip Fisher
Revolt, She Said. Revolt Again.   Traverse   *** 
The flyers say that Alice Birch's new play, here produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, 'examines the language, behaviour and forces that shape women'. I think it is both more tightly focused and broader in its implications. The text is a string of separate interactions among characters we won't see again, with the most apparent common thread being the power and danger of language – power because its effects are as real as any physical force, and danger because it is imprecise and ambiguous. What is intended by a speaker may not be what is heard by a listener, and the effects will be real regardless. A couple sitting at opposite sides of the stage flirt, their sex talk slipping into corrections of grammar and vocabulary, as exactly how something is expressed carries implications of power and control. A man proposing marriage is rejected because what means love, commitment and happiness to him translates as surrender to patriarchal domination to her. A mother who abandoned her family retains what control she has over the outcome by refusing to talk about it, even at the expense of emotionally damaging her daughter and granddaughter. That there are women involved in every sequence is of course significant, but even at the play's most gender-aware, the primary tool of both repression and rebellion is language. The problem is that the play itself is written in language, and I have made it sound more coherent than it actually is. Some sequences drown in language, others are too spare to be clear, and by the end there is a lot of shouting and everyone talking at once as the play, perhaps intentionally, descends into empty noise.  Gerald Berkowitz
The Road To Huntsville   Summerhall   **   (Reviewed in London)
Writer-performer Stephanie Ridings, or a fictionalised version of herself, was intrigued and amused by stories of women writing to convicted murderers in America's Death Rows, falling in love with them and even marrying them as they awaited execution. But as she researched the syndrome she found herself - or, as a creative writer, imagines herself – falling into it, writing to a Texas prisoner, visiting him and even considering marriage. The spine of Ridings' story is the central irony of the speaker's complete conversion, but both as writer and actress she has difficulty navigating the many changes in character, tone and performance style. The ridicule and ironic comedy of the opening gives way too abruptly to objective reporting, polemic (in several digressions on the morality of capital punishment), romantic fantasy and rude awakening. Meanwhile the production mode also keeps changing, from Dave Gorman-style mock Power Point presentation, to documentary use of film and talking heads, to narration, to melodramatic acting. The writer-actress and director Jonathan V. McGrath give us too little guidance through these constant changes and too little preparation for which version of the woman we are seeing at any moment. I saw the show during its pre-Edinburgh tour, and some of these awkward clashes of tone and style may be smoothed out by the time you see it, perhaps earning it an additional star, but what I saw was a complete rewrite away from success.    Gerald Berkowitz

Saturday Night Forever   Underbelly Med Quad   ****
In a curious way this monologue play by Roger Williams, performed sensitively by Delme Thomas, is is a companion piece to Fabric (see review). In both, someone thrilled to have found real happiness in life and love has it violently taken away in a manner that raises the question of how real and safe it was to begin with. Here the speaker is Lee, an amiable Cardiff gay man who drifts away from his partner because the guy is too compulsively into the party scene and Lee is looking for something quieter, settled and long-lasting. After the mild comedy of a dry spell, Lee meets someone new who shares his interests, his sense of humour, his taste for evenings in and his desire for a long-term relationship – and is a dish, to boot. And then one night they walk down a dark street and some drunks are coming in the other direction, and the world comes to an end. Physical wounds healed and mourning underway, Lee must face a world in which the existence of people like the attackers makes happily-ever-after too fragile a dream for him to believe any more. As directed by Kate Wasserberg, Delme Thomas not only takes Lee believably through an extraordinary range of emotions but gives a performance of great subtlety and effect, expressing complex emotions with the slightest adjustment in a smile or twitch of a hand.  Gerald Berkowitz
Scorched   Zoo Southside   ***
In Lisle Turner's Scorched, news reports of the 1991 Gulf War send a Second World War veteran back into memories of his own experiences in the North African campaign. Some are presented with striking theatrical invention, as when cartoon projections onto his body evoke the home-made tattoos of young soldiers. Later the entire demob experience, from the arrival back in Britain through the first fish and chips, first dance, first knee-trembler and first child to home and family, sweetly evoked in a sand castle, is mimed in the course of a single Benny Goodman record. Sand has a recurring role in the play's imagery, connecting later memories to the desert experience that led to them, and the sometimes surprising ways sand finds its way into Andrew Purvin's otherwise realistic domestic set help create a fluid movement between reality and memory. But some sequences are opaque either in meaning or in relevance to the war theme, and only a press release explains what the performance itself doesn't, that we are meant to be seeing what are in fact irrelevant bits of the man's memory being jumbled in because a dementia that is not otherwise evident can't keep him focussed. Failure to communicate that is director Claire Coaché and actor Robin Berry's one big misstep in what is otherwise a quietly evocative portrait of the persistence of memory.  Gerald Berkowitz

Screw Your Courage! (or The Bloody Crown)   Greenside Infirmary Street   ***
American actress Klahr Thorsen sets out to tell the story of her lifelong ambition to play Lady Macbeth, and ends up capturing larger truths about the actor's life. She begins with Shakespeare's witches cursing the child who will never have her mentally ill mother's love with the need to search for its replacement in acting roles and audience applause. Thorsen goes on to mix Macbeth quotations with her own cod-Shakespeare and natural speech, taking herself through acting school, workshops, an aborted self-produced Macbeth production, and a side trip to Scotland for spiritual recharging, to an actual one-off performance of the Scottish play at London's Globe, all on an essentially bare stage. Along the way she observes and plays a string of wickedly sketched comic caricatures, from the dim acting school stud through the confidence-shaking director and an amiably drunk Scot, to a London luvvie. Thorsen is telling her own personal story, but perhaps without her fully realizing it her experience, as she presents it, sounds like only a minor variant on both the psychology and career stages of many young actors, and it is the broader vision of a life made up of neediness, ambition, dedication and even obsession that audiences are more likely to respond to. Screw Your Courage! could be an exhortation to all young actors, and resonates most fully as the story of all young actors.  Gerald Berkowitz

Shake  Lyceum Theatre     ****
Eat A Crocodile's antic deconstruction of Twelfth Night, performed mostly in French, is actually respectful to the play's festive spirit if free with the application of comic filigree around the core. The character list is cut to accommodate a cast of five, with the editing and doubling actually raising interpretive insights. Doubling Viola and Sebastian has been done before, but having the same actor, Antonio Gil Martinez, play Orsino and Malvolio reminds us that both are somewhat foolish lovers, and reducing Sir Andrew to a ventriloquist's dummy operated by Vincent Berger's Sir Toby is a vivid assessment of their relationship. A vaguely modern setting in front of a row of beach huts suggests that Viola is not the only one dressing up, with Valérie Crouzet's supposedly mourning Olivia in a new elegant gown and wig for every scene, and lets Orsino's musical tastes run comically to 1950s lounge music. Geoffrey Carey's languid Feste is a beach attendant who has seen it all and who occasionally exposes his attitude by choosing the music on the record player or pausing things for a string of music hall jokes in English. Malvolio is more a socially inept nerd than a stiff-necked prude, which makes the practical joke on him seem particularly cruel. Delphine Cogniard plays Viola with a hangdog expression and narrow range of emotions for too much of the play, but her gamin quality – she is a head shorter than the rest of the cast – carries her smoothly through the role of romantic heroine.  Gerald Berkowitz

Shakespeare For Breakfast   C Chambers Street   ****
Twenty-five years ago a Fringe company with an open morning slot put together a Shakespeare pastiche and parody, luring audiences in with free croissants. It is now a Fringe staple, though with a new script and cast each year, the two constants being a happily irreverent attitude toward Shakespeare and the free croissants. This year's edition is not one of the truly great ones, which means that it is merely pretty darned good and a lot of fun. A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is silly enough to begin with, is filtered through twenty-first century pop culture along with a salute to the show's anniversary in a smattering of 1990's references. So the four lovers act like escapees from Made In Chelsea, Bottom and his fellow actors have all auditioned for one TV talent show or another, and Oberon has survived a couple of typos to become Obi-wan. Accurate Shakespearean dialogue is likely to morph into 'nineties song lyrics or Facebook/Twitter jargon without warning, and the multiple-role-playing cast of five make the challenges of changing costumes or characters part of the joke. The only things keeping this from classic status is that once you establish the comic premise a lot of the jokes are predictable and that some of the inserted topical references and gags have a curiously dated feel, as if borrowed from some older script. Still, there's a lot to enjoy here, along with the famous croissants, making Shakespeare For Breakfast an excellent start to a Fringe-going day.  Gerald Berkowitz

Shylock   Assembly Roxy   *****     (Reviewed at a previous Festival)
Edinburgh is the home of the solo show and, all too often, the home of the tedious solo show. This play bucks that trend with great writing from Gareth Armstrong (and William Shakespeare) and a perfect performance from Guy Masterson as the put-upon Venetian Jew and his friend Tubal, whose calm perspective is valuable, as hatred takes over from business. Shylock works because it sets The Merchant of Venice and its central figure in perspective. The play looks at the Jewish experience in Europe over five or so centuries leading up to the play, culminating not only with Shylock but a brief burst of Barabbas from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. It also traces Shakespeare’s source to help viewers to understand where this creation came from. However, the main reason for rushing to Assembly Hall is to see Guy Masterson, under the direction of the writer, who has himself performed the monologue around the globe, affectionately playing Shylock but also those around him. He is especially good as the calmly cruel Portia, who takes anti-Semitism to a new level, at least on one reading of the text and context. Philip Fisher
Stack   Bedlam   ***
Ed MacArthur's all-but-solo show is so clever and engaging in its silliness that, even as you suspect that it is a perhaps twenty-minute sketch stretched a little too thin to fill an hour, you are willing to go along with it. Writer, composer and provider of all pre-recorded offstage voices as well, MacArthur plays a celebrity explorer and documentary film maker who is his own biggest fan. He's here to tell us of his most recent expedition to find a lost South American tribe, a journey only slightly marred by his tendency to accidentally kill his colleagues along the way and by the interference of the rival explorer who is his arch enemy not least for sleeping with his ex-wife. What we realize by that point is an absolutely characteristic string of accidents has him not only discover the tribe but find himself installed as prophet-king, happily addicted to a native drug that has the convenient side effect of making him able to speak and understand their tribal language and thus get along happily with the native bride played by Annie McGrath. MacArthur captures the comical dimness and unshakable ego of the character with a high energy performance that almost succeeds in disguising how little material there really is here and how one-note and repetitious the gags. In short, the kind of show you'll enjoy most of the way through and forget almost immediately after – which, by Fringe standards, is pretty good. Gerald Berkowitz

Stories To Tell In The Middle Of The Night   Summerhall   ****   (Reviewed in London)
A collection of short stories, or ideas for stories, or sketches of characters who might someday fit into a story, is brought together in a solo performance by writer-actress Francesca Millican-Slater that transcends the inevitable unevenness of the material to create an evocative dream-like hour. Using the frame of an all-night radio monologist filling the dark hours, Millican-Slater tells a dozen tales of small people's small lives. Some, like the would-be sleepers kept awake by neighbours' loud music, are little more than the ideas for stories she hasn't actually written yet. Some, like the woman finding almost pornographic fascination in violence, are nicely-imagined characters in search of a story. But at her best she creates complete and self-contained miniatures that evoke whole realities. A bickering couple come together through the shared sensuality of grocery shopping. A dying man redecorates his home in his friend's execrable taste before leaving it to him. An apparent serial stalker turns out to have the instincts of a matchmaker. As performer Millican-Slater may move about the stage and change her vocal delivery a bit arbitrarily, and is at her best when she just sits or stands there and lets her soothing voice transport the audience into each of the little worlds she conjures up.  Gerald Berkowitz

Stunning The Punters  Spotlites  ****
George Dillon is an actor of broad gestures and larger-than-life effects in the Steven Berkoff mode, which is to say that he writhes, grimaces, swoops his voice up and down in volume and timbre, slides in and out of slow motion and has exaggerated gestures for every phrase. It can be a revelation for those who know only restrained naturalistic acting, and his first piece in this three-part program, Berkoff's Master Of Cafe Society, showing an embittered out-of-work actor's daily routine, is an excellent showcase for Dillon's mastery of the style. As if to prove he's no one-trick pony, Dillon plays Robert Sproat's Stunning The Punters in a much more subdued mode, allowing the monologue of a petty criminal convinced he's changing the world carry its own weight. The longest part of the evening, Dostoevsky's Dream Of A Ridiculous Man, is also the weakest as Dillon attempts to apply some of the techniques of the Berkoff to the story of a man driven mad, not by demons, but by the vision of a perfect world. Unfortunately Berkoff mannerisms, while not limited only to Berkoff texts – the man himself does Poe brilliantly – do require material able to support them, and even the toned-down Berkoff style of the Dostoevsky too often just looks like overacting. However uneven the program is, it is a valuable introduction to what will be for many an unfamiliar, but demonstrably powerful performance style. Gerald Berkowitz

Swansong  Pleasance     ****
A post-apocalyptic vision of an original sort, Dugout Theatre's Swansong finds its way from an almost comic premise to a convincing note of modest hope. When the ice caps melt and the Earth is flooded, four unlikely people find themselves in the unlikely refuge of a swan-shaped pedalo in the middle of the sea. Inevitably they're a disparate group: an amiably blokeish guy, a pessimistic intellectual, a sports and fitness fanatic, and a meditating new-age vegan. They get past the personality clashes pretty quickly when they realize that, should they ever find land, they have the opportunity and obligation to create a new world, taking the best of the old and not repeating its mistakes. They set out to create a somewhat idiosyncratic new world order, and the choices they decide on, and the choosing process itself, enjoyably make up much of the hour, while flash-forwards to an even more distant future in which their adventure becomes the basis for a new religion happily reassure us that all will be well, if just a bit silly. The script by Sadie Spencer and Tom Black offers equal opportunities for gentle character comedy, social satire and serious moral debate, and the four performers – Ed Macarthur, Tom Black, Nina Shenkman and Charlotte Merriam – have fun with the stereotypes they've been given to work with while nicely individualizing and rounding them out.  Gerald Berkowitz
Sweet Child Of Mine   Gilded Balloon     *
Australian performance artist Bron Batten has been touring this show, appearing with her father, for several years, but he dropped out at short notice, forcing her to employ a guest star dad for each performance. This produces what she evidently does not realize or care are some very uncomfortable moments, as when the fake father shares intimacies about his – i.e. her real father's – relationship with his father, and when she and the substitute recreate the moment earlier this year when she discovered that he – the real father – had succumbed to the severe depression that made him unable to be here himself. But even without those borderline lapses in taste, Batten has little to offer that is fresh or unique. She does some unimpressive interpretive dance, interviews her parents on video, tells us about her life, mimes being a chicken in front of a film of an egg-laying played backwards, and rolls around in a puddle of blue paint, things performance artists and their audiences got bored with forty years ago. The general theme of the show is that while her parents, who seem rather nice people in the video segments, don't have a clue what it is that she spends her life doing, that's their loss, because she is an Artist. If by chance you do not share Batten's high opinion of herself, you will find little here to hold you.  Gerald Berkowitz

Teatro Delusio  Pleasance  *****
Berlin-based Familie Flöz is a mask-and-mime company in the tradition of Britain's Trestle Theatre, creating purely theatrical magic by making inanimate masks seem to come alive and develop personalities. The performers wear larger than lifesize cartoonish heads, carefully designed to be blank of expression in a way that enables the actors' body language to create the illusion of changing facial emotions. Teatro Delusio is set backstage in a concert hall, as the stagehands go about their work or react to the passing musicians, opera singers and ballerinas. Inevitably episodic, since the few performers double and quadruple roles, the action rages from classic slapstick, as when an inept stagehand struggles with a ladder, through quiet beauty, as each of the workers in turn gets to imagine himself performing with one of the stars, to enjoyable nastiness as they find ways to take revenge on the more arrogant or nasty of the onstage figures. Meanwhile a constant parade of once-seen figures, from orchestra members to a cleaning lady, each have a moment of comedy or drama. Revelatory and thrilling the first time you encounter it, this style loses only a little of its charm when the novelty wears off, and Teatro Delusio, which by its very nature encounters no language barriers, is a sure audience pleaser. Gerald Berkowitz

Reviews - Edinburgh Festival 2016