Fringe 2025 – emerging Edinburgh company make their debut
An unwelcome visitor. A bombshell that changes everything.
Emerging Edinburgh-based theatre company Locked In Thought Theatre make their debut at this year's Edinburgh Fringe with Intrusion, an original play by James Cumming, in which the consequences of the past spill into the present.
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Scotsman
2 hours ago
- Scotsman
What's on at Edinburgh Fringe: Glasgow & Bristol based theatre makers bring powerful show to festival for 2025
Ad Infinitum Productions A powerful piece of theatre will have its Edinburgh Fringe debut this year – be ready for a production critics have called 'Tremendous', 'Extremely moving' and 'Exceptional'. Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... When The Scotsman reviewed Last Rites, the critic called it 'A mighty theatrical lyricism' and audiences can expect a feast for all the senses when the performance comes to the Pleasance Courtyard, as part of Edinburgh Fringe this August. What's the story? The beating heart of the story, and the performance, is Arjun. His father has just died and, as well as coping with that profound loss he has to find a way to honour him through his culture's traditional funeral rites – and it's not easy. It's a journey that takes him back to India, where ancient traditions meet modern reality. But here's the twist. Arjun and his father couldn't communicate - Arjun is Deaf, and his father never learned to sign. Theirs was a complex relationship built on love but without a common language, which brought its own tensions. As Arjun starts to look back at his time with his father, it is through this lens that the story unfolds. Even in his grief, Arjun's memories are not all dark. He remembers his father with humour and tenderness, and recalls the exhilaration and wonder of growing up. And though he can't fix everything in the past, there is hope for the future - in the form of his own son, Krishna. This boundary-breaking production has been devised to be accessible to Deaf, hard of hearing and hearing people and is told through a mix of movement, music, visual imagery, sign language and projected text. The bass-heavy sounds can be felt pounding in the body, animated captions projected onto the screen help the story to flow, and above all the intricate, dynamic and expressive movements of Arjun lead us through this emotional journey into Arjun's past. George Mann & Ramesh Meyyappan, the show's co-creators, said: 'The show is powerful, funny and moving, and ultimately uplifting. Everyone will relate to this show – the story is so universal, so human.' Ad Infinitum Productions Scottish connections Last Rites is the latest show from award-winning company and Fringe favourites Ad Infinitum and is co-created by Ad Infinitum's Co-Artistic Director George Mann and Glasgow-based theatremaker Ramesh Meyyappan. Ramesh takes the role of Arjun, a man who left his homeland behind for a new life in the UK but who now finds himself called back to his father's deathbed and expected to fulfil the duties of the eldest son in Hindu culture. Ramesh, who is himself Deaf, is able to express the complex relationship, the intense emotions and frustration and anger of his situation and his grief, through this performance which uses the movement, lighting, words, images, sounds and signing to add to the narrative. Ramesh is based in Glasgow, and came to Edinburgh Fringe last year with Love Beyond, a co-production with Raw Material and Vanishing Point, which won the Leading Light Award for Best Scottish Production at the Scottish Theatre Awards On the Fringe. An internationally award-winning artist, Edinburgh audiences will recognise him from his titular role in this summer's critically acclaimed Lear at the Traverse Theatre. Ad Infinitum has been coming to the Fringe since 2007 and has a longstanding relationship with Pleasance Theatres. Known for their signature physical style and dynamic storytelling, their last performance at Edinburgh Festival Fringe was 2023's Beautiful Evil Things, a fast-paced retelling of the Trojan war through the eyes of Medusa. The run was hugely successful, with a 5* review from The Scotsman describing it as "dynamic, illuminating and hugely entertaining". Last Rites premiered 18 months ago as part of MimeLondon 2024, but this will be its Fringe debut as part of the Here & Now showcase, one of four showcase programmes of work from the four UK nations at the Edinburgh Festivals. Here & Now focuses on forging new relationships between artists making performance in England and international partners. Ad Infinitum Productions Book tickets Last Rites is suitable for ages 14+. The show contains occasional flashing video and lighting, haze, loud music and heavy use of bass and contains themes of grief and death, parental abuse and trauma.
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘Robin Williams said: 'I'll buy the club!'': how The Comic Strip set the UK comedy scene ablaze
It was the moment comedy broke with sexism – yet it happened in a strip club. It was a fervour of free creative expression – yet it retained a commercial, careerist edge. It was one of the longest-running and most successful brands in UK comedy history – which few people could now recognise. At the Edinburgh fringe this summer, The Comic Strip Presents … will be memorialised in a series of film screenings and Q&As with its creator and prime mover Peter Richardson. Richardson was the impresario behind the legendary comedy club The Comic Strip, which opened in 1980. When he and his star performers – Rik Mayall, Alexei Sayle, French and Saunders among them – created Channel 4's The Comic Strip Presents … a couple of years later, he could legitimately claim to be the man who brought alternative comedy to television. This being a celebration of an iconic moment in UK comedy history, one might assume Edinburgh's Usher Hall or the 750-seat Pleasance Grand has been set aside to host. But one might assume wrong. 'When I started [showing these films] about a year ago,' Richardson tells me, 'we didn't have the money to advertise them. So we'd arrive at theatres that had about 30 people who had somehow read our minds that we were going to be there. And 30 people in a 300-seat cinema can be hard work.' The Comic Strip Presents … ran for three series on Channel 4 from 1982-1988, then it moved to the BBC in the early 90s before making a return to Channel 4 for one-off specials, the most recent in 2016. But it's not a big name in comedy – far less so than, for example, The Young Ones, the BBC sitcom starring some of the same talents and broadcast at the same time. 'It wasn't good television,' admits Richardson, 'because it wasn't repetitive, and television is about repeating a formula and people getting to know it well.' And was it even comedy? One of the show's stars, Mayall, argued that it shouldn't have been called The Comic Strip, and that 'Interesting Films' might have been a better fit. In fact, the series was – like Inside No 9 more recently – a tonally varying anthology show, a suite of standalone films united only by sensibility, and by the performers bringing them to the screen. 'I told Channel 4,' says Richardson, ''These performers are so good they don't need to be stuck playing one-dimensional characters. They can play all sorts. One week they can be a heavy metal band, the next week they can be The Famous Five.' You could call it bad television, because you're not seeing more of the same. But as it's gone on, it's become a collection of very memorable one-off moments and that's what people now remember.' The performers also included Adrian Edmondson, Nigel Planer and Richardson himself, with a rotating supporting cast that included Keith Allen, Robbie Coltrane and more. At the time, they were setting the UK comedy scene ablaze. That all started at the Comedy Store, a strip club and the anarchic HQ of what had recently been called 'alternative comedy'. Richardson's coup was to cherrypick the most exciting voices of that generation, and cart them off to another strip club, a little less anarchic, a few blocks up the road: the Raymond Revuebar. Here, with the financial support of the Rocky Horror Picture Show producer Michael White, he opened The Comic Strip club – a name that seems obvious, although 'the New Depression Club' was, according to Edmondson, a very near miss. For a year from 1980-1981, the Comic Strip was the hippest and hottest comedy night in town. 'The bouncers at Raymond Revuebar had a simple rule of thumb for who was directed where,' Sayle later wrote. 'If they reeked of aftershave they were sent to the strip show; if they smelled of beer they came to us.' Celebs piled in: Bianca Jagger, Dustin Hoffman. Robin Williams came and demanded to perform, to impress his guest, David Bowie. Sayle offered him 15 minutes. Williams said: 'I told [Bowie] I'd do an hour'. Sayle: 'You can't.' Williams: 'I'll buy the club!' Sayle: 'We don't own it. It belongs to a bouffant-haired pornographer.' The buzz even reached the pages of the London Review of Books, whose critic noted, 'within seconds, [Sayle] has the audience agape. Most of them, it seemed, had never been called cunts before.' Then Channel 4 came calling, looking for cutting-edge talent to help launch the new broadcaster on to the country's airwaves. Richardson was given carte blanche. 'They said, 'What do you want to do?' and I said, 'I want to make six films, all different.'' The first, Five Go Mad in Dorset, was transmitted on the station's opening night, and the controversy around its satire of Enid Blyton attitudes gave that event a front-page news fillip. But Five Go Mad will not be celebrated at the fringe this summer, says Richardson. 'Taking the piss out of racism and sexism [in that way] is long gone,' he says. 'It's not a funny issue like it was when we did it in the 80s.' One option might have been to re-edit the episode – a course of action in which Richardson, now 73, has freely indulged as the Edinburgh shows have come together. Not for him a bask in the glory of his youthful success. 'What we've done,' he says, 'is revisited the films and said, '30 years later they need some adjustment.' Because things go faster now.' Western spoof Fistful of Travellers Cheques has been 'cut back a bit'. So too has late-period favourite Four Men in a Car. And a scene has been trimmed from The Strike, the show's faux Hollywood movie making mincemeat of the miners' strike. That one bagged a Golden Rose of Montreux comedy award, and starred Richardson (the only performer to appear in every episode) as Al Pacino playing, er, Arthur Scargill. 'I could do Pacino much better now,' he laughs, 'because I worked with John Sessions on Stella Street.' So now, he says, slipping into a convincing Italian-American accent, 'I can do Al.' Stella Street was another of Richardson's TV hits, undertaken when The Comic Strip Presents, by any measure his life's work, was in abeyance. Even when he was a jobbing comedian, in double act The Outer Limits with Nigel Planer, Richardson was a child of amateur film-makers and a wannabe film-maker himself. With The Comic Strip, he made movies for cinematic release: The Supergrass in 1985, and Eat the Rich two years later. Further TV specials included Red Nose of Courage, telling the tale of John Major's flight from the circus to parliament, and 2011's The Hunt for Tony Blair, imagining the ex-PM on the run having been accused of a series of murders. Both will be screened at the fringe, MC'd by comedian Robin Ince and with special guests including Sayle and Allen. Richardson is modest about the achievement of having brought these 30 years' worth of films to the screen. 'I always thought we were the new Ealing comedies. And [Ealing Studios at its peak] made about 150 films over 20 years, of which about 15 are remembered. So our strike rate isn't too bad. We made some flops, but at least one or two out of each series are really good.' Some, indeed, are carved on this writer's heart – notably Bad News Tour and More Bad News, the show's two-part heavy metal spoof, which predated This Is Spinal Tap and ended up with Edmondson, Mayall and co performing live on stage, under a hail of beer glasses, at the 1986 Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington. Richardson is at peace with the under-appreciation of The Comic Strip Presents, acknowledging that, as a bloody-minded sitcom refusenik way back when, he is the auteur of his own misfortune. He is delighted to be bringing the remastered films to Edinburgh, a city in which, back in the day, he and Planer once toured as a support act to Dexy's Midnight Runners. 'FrontmanKevin Rowland complained,' he says, 'that we didn't do new material at every performance.' Expect no new material at these screenings – but a new experience, perhaps. 'It's a great thing,' says Richardson, 'to show them in the cinema. You don't often get to share comedy television with an audience, and it changes the whole experience: people laughing around you. We've discovered that there is an audience around the country who want to see these films on the big screen and talk about them. It's fantastic that something we created 30 or 40 years ago is still creating laughter. I love it.' The Comic Strip Presents … is at the Fringe is on 2, 3, 8, 9 and 10 August at Just the Tonic, Edinburgh
NBC News
13 hours ago
- NBC News
'We're gonna use our cameras': Coldplay gives 'kiss cam' warning to concertgoers in first show since viral moment
Coldplay's Chris Martin made sure to give concertgoers a cheeky heads-up about their "kiss cam" during the band's first performance on Saturday following the viral moment that took the internet by storm last week. The concert at Wisconsin's Camp Randall Stadium was the band's first since their Boston, Massachusetts concert on Wednesday, where an embrace between Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and a blonde-haired woman was captured. Byron and the woman quickly hid when the "kiss cam" panned to them, and the moment went viral, with users claiming that he is a married man. However, NBC News has not independently confirmed this or identified the woman. In video posted to social media from Saturday's concert, Martin appears to try and steer clear of controversy by introducing the "kiss cam." "We'd like to say hello to some of you in the crowd," Martin said to cheers from the crowd. "How we're gonna do that is we're gonna use our cameras and put some of you on the big screen." Martin continued: "So please, if you haven't done your makeup, do your makeup now." He did not expressly mention Wednesday's incident. During Wednesday's performance at Gillette Stadium, a "kiss cam" was displaying couples in attendance on the screens. When it panned to one man and woman who were in an embrace, she turned around to hide her face, while the man quickly ducked out of the frame. "Oh, look at these two. You're all right," Martin said at the time, according to video footage from the concert that circulated widely online. 'You're OK. Oh, what? Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy.' The footage circulated like wildfire on the internet, and Byron was identified as the man embracing the woman. On Saturday, Byron stepped down from his role as the CEO of data company, Astronomer. Before his resignation, Byron was placed on leave from Astronomer. The New York-based company, which has under 500 employees according to its LinkedIn profile, appeared to address how the fanfare around the 'kiss cam' incident has affected its reputation in its Saturday statement. 'While awareness of our company may have changed overnight, our product and our work for our customers have not,' the company said.
