4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
The reviews for Edinburgh's festivals are in...
Our reviewers have been busy on the ground, taking in all the best comedy, theatre, and performance. But what came out on top?
The Herald has teamed up with to make the purchase of tickets for the festival so much easier.
When Karine Polwart heard the story of the 200-year-old Sabal palm tree that was about to be felled in Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden, it sparked the idea for this new illustrated fusion of song cycle and storytelling.
Produced by the Raw Material company as part of this year's Made in Scotland Edinburgh Festival Fringe showcase, Polwart's story comes with a twist that lends even more charm to a work of monumental beauty, says Neil Cooper.
Superstar musicians playing the repertoire they learned in the 1990s is all the rage in Edinburgh this week.
In Nicola Benedetti's case, she was 11 years old and a pupil at the Yehudi Menuhin School in London where 15-year-old Alexander Sitkovetsky was one of the star students. He is now artistic director of Wroclaw's NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra and the second concert of its Edinburgh residency reunited the schoolmates to play music that they had played for Menuhin shortly before his death.
The result was not only the most joyous music-making but also the most perfect expression of Benedetti's position as a working musician directing the Edinburgh International Festival, writes Keith Bruce.
Which came first? Chicken or egg? In the case of this remarkable work by Belgium's FC Bergman company, who open the show by getting a real life hen to let loose an egg into the earth beneath, probably both.
Surrounded by the eight performers of this seventy minute ritual navigation through ancient Greek poet Hesiod's idea of the five ages in his poem that gives the show its title, the hen's egg drop is as golden a statement on new life as it gets, even if it does come a cropper later on, writes Neil Cooper.
At the production's heart are the two towering central performances by Grierson and Cox. Grierson is in typical chameleon-like form as Fred, presented here as a rather sad, pathetic figure without empathy or morality. Grierson doesn't crack a smile throughout, delivering each line with withering intent, writes Neil Cooper.
Good comedy requires light and shade. For the first ten minutes, she embraces the shade. Memories of her mother's death, four days before Rosie's 11th birthday, leave many of the sell-out crowd in tears. 'Don't worry, you haven't bought the wrong ticket. This isn't Angela's Ashes, The Musical. There will be jokes,' she promises. And there are. Jokes and anecdotes and gentle whimsy. She conducts the tempo and tone of this show like a maestro. We all lean in, writes Gayle Anderson.
Alison Spittle bursts onto the stage in an explosion of tulle and sequins. It's like a transformation challenge on The Great British Sewing Bee and they've raided the Strictly wardrobe. A seasoned stand-up, she's absolutely bossing that stage and she knows it. There's a couple of cracking Shrek puns and an Adele gag before she gets to the meat of this year's set, writes Gayle Anderson.
Dancer Dan Daw is unflinchingly forthright when it comes to describing himself.
He openly identifies as an 'Australian, queer, crip artist' - before adding the crucially important factor of 'kink'.
