Latest news with #RawMaterial
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Scotsman
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Fringe theatre reviews Karine Polwart Windblown Lost LearThe Black Hole
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers 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... Karine Polwart: Windblown ★★★★★ Queen's Hall (Venue 72) until 13 August There's a touch of pure magic in the way singer, songwriter and theatre-maker Karine Polwart approaches the multiple crises that face us in this 21st century. Gentle, accepting, and full of wonder at the glory that still remains on our home planet, Polwart is also a wise and witty observer of the human folly that has destroyed so much, and of the tragedy of that loss. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Karine Polwart: Windblown | Mihaela Bodlovic In her latest show Windblown - produced by Raw Material, and briefly at the Queen's Hall this week - her subject is the mighty Sabal palm tree that once stood at the centre of the tropical glass house in Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden, but that finally had to be taken down in 2021, too old and unstable to survive the temporary removal of all the plants from the 19th century building, to allow for a major refurbishment. Polwart was artist in residence at the Botanics at the time, inspired to honour and celebrate the old tree, as it faced its inevitable end; and the result is an exquisite 60-minute song cycle, with linking narrative, in which Polwart reflects on the history of a tree that was brought to Scotland from Bermuda as a seed or sapling around 1800, and taken up from Leith docks to the old botanic garden in Leith Walk, then in the 1820's transferred with the rest of the plants - travelling through the streets in carts - to the garden's present home at Inverleith, and to a steel and glass plant house that soon had to be rebuilt to accommodate its growing height. Polwart's songs, in the voice of the palm itself, are wistful yet powerful, touching as they go on themes of colonialism and dislocation, and of the brutal shifting of living things from their natural habitat; yet also beautifully evoking the tender care with which generations of Edinburgh gardeners tended the tree to the moment of its death, and still tend the garden's millions of plants now. The songs unfold as part of a simmering, beautifully textured score co-created by composer and sound designer Pippa Murphy, with live piano accompaniment by Dave Milligan, against the backdrop of a gorgeous, turbulent palm tree sculpture by designer Neil Haynes, lit by Lizzie Powell. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad And when, in the end, Polwart quotes the essayist Maria Popova's concept of every living organism as a 'cathedral of complexity', it seems as though she has been using the magic of her voice, and of the artists with whom she works, to bring that great cathedral of nature gently back into the light; after centuries of neglect by everyone except the quiet fellowship of gardeners, who keep it alive, for us all. Joyce McMillan Lost Lear ★★★★ Traverse Theatre (Venue 15) until 24 August A key plot element of Shakespeare's King Lear is based on the relationship between the King, who wishes to divide up his domain and riches between his three daughters, and his youngest child Cordelia. Where her siblings Goneril and Regan try to flatter their father into excessive generosity, Cordelia refuses to dismiss his faults, even if it costs her material wealth. All of this is recounted here by a man (Manus Halligan) who addresses the audience with a hasty summary of the play before the curtain rises. Yet we discover he isn't talking to us; a rehearsal for a new production of Lear is about to take place, and he's bringing understudy Conor (Peter Daly in the performance I saw, although Gus McDonagh also takes the role on some days) up to speed. In this gender-swapped play-within-a-play, Lear is performed by Joy (Venetia Bowe), a grand dame actress of the stage whose demeanour is haughty and regal – in and out of character – as she sits upon Lear's armchair throne. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad When Conor reveals himself as singularly ill-equipped to be an actor, she scoffs and attempts to coach him on how to do it properly. 'Play the intention!' she jabbingly commands, as he struggles to communicate. It's difficult to take a description of writer-director Dan Colley's Shakespeare-adaptation-which-isn't much further, because the play opens up in a way which presents a wonderfully unexpected experience for the viewer. Suffice it to say that Shakespeare's theme of a feted, arrogant parent in conflict with a child who must tell them who they are and what they've done is brought hauntingly up to date. Although the audio-visual elements are perhaps over-used, this amusing and poignant play brings themes of aging and regret powerfully home through the intelligence of its script and the sheer quality of its performances. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad When Lear inevitably begs forgetting and forgiveness for being 'old and foolish,' all that's gone before lends those words striking new power. David Pollock The Black Hole ★★★ theSpace @ Venue 45 (Venue 45) until 16 August Initially deceptively formless and pleasingly abstract this new psychological drama from actor-writer-director-producer Vkinn Vats repays attention. Alone in a shared space — an ethereal new age music score suggests limbo but it could be anywhere — a couple dance, kiss, share intimate moments and eventually some hard emotional truths. The setting may be elliptical but Vats and his similarly convincing fellow actor-collaborator, Rosalind Jackson Roe have real chemistry, and manage to keep this mostly grounded and relatable. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Gradually, as the couple's conversations begin to take the shape of a developing relationship; from flirting to physicality. From the perhaps ill-advised 'did you ever..?' sex chat — which proves a surefire way to ruin the moment — to buried resentments and affections. The couple's conversations are admirably straightforward — mostly; Vaks' statement that he doesn't like birds because they fly and his mother left him and his father on a plane is rather inelegant. Also, while the new age soundtrack is effectively atmospheric, the moments where it's used to underscore dialogue feel unnecessarily heavy-handed. The ambiguity of the ending feels inevitable, deliberately left for individual interpretation, but the significance of the title may remain a puzzle. Rory Ford Crocodile Tears ★★★ theSpace at Venue 45 (Venue 45) until 17 August It's tempting to describe this new play by Jessica Ferrier as a satire on the ethics of reality TV or something similarly high-minded. While that wouldn't be entirely inaccurate, it's also informed by — you suspect — a sneaking fondness for the genre as it fees all-too-plausible and has a firm grasp on the dynamics of a group under manufactured duress. As ratings plummet for the current season of reality TV show, Castaway Island, the producers manipulate events behind the scenes to create further tensions between the remaining contestants. Ferrier is strong on introducing characters — here helped by the 'diary room' entries — and has fun with the TV format; one of the best gags comes when the show cuts to a commercial. The cast are at their best when insulting each other — Ferrier gives good invective — and it's always fun to watch the magnificently unbothered Lex Joyce as Jake, a character who sometimes seems as if he's wandered onstage by mistake but it is frequently the funniest presence there. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The constantly accelerating pace stumbles over the climax somewhat and you suspect the show hasn't found its perfect ending yet but this is good fun. Rory Ford The Pornstar Martini Effect: A Bartender's Guide to not K*lling Yourself at Christmas ★★★ theSpace @ Niddry Street (Venue 9) until 16 August There's more than a hint of John Godber's Bouncers to the early scenes of this solid two-hander written and directed by Ella Kendrick. Convincingly set in a busy pub on Christmas Eve — the very effective sound design blares Slade and The Pogues — we're privy to the interior monologues of Kat (Zane Marsland) and Tom (Finnen McNiffe) two harried bartenders just counting out the clock until closing. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Both are sexually objectified by older, drunken patrons and both deal with it with fixed grins and desperate eyes. Marsland and McNiffe are both convincingly harried, you feel lived experience through them and Kendrick's script, but as the shift ends and the pair decide to share a couple of drinks ('tis the season and all that) that the mood changes. It's (perhaps deliberately) unclear how long Kat and Tom have known each other but their dialogue with each other is not entirely convincing as they slip rather too easily into laying all their emotions on the table. The gear-change from raucous bar chat to near therapy-speak is a little jarring but Kendrick keeps the production moving even with the deliberate change in pace. Rory Ford
The Herald Scotland
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
I've seen dozens of shows at the Fringe... these are the best
On the Fringe, Karine Polwart's Windblown, an exquisite meditation on a dying palm tree in the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, has also finished its run at the Queen's Hall, With any luck, Raw Material's meticulously put-together evocation of Polwart's song cycle will return. In the meantime, there is still plenty of life on the Fringe, with the following some of the best on show. She's Behind You Traverse Theatre, various times until August 24 Johnny McKnight has been a pantomime legend over two decades now, both as a writer and the grandest of dames. This solo show by McKnight began as a lecture at the University of Glasgow, and is both a history of the original people's theatre and a deeply personal memoir of McKnight's life-long love affair with panto and the changing mores within it. This fleshed-out production is overseen by director John Tiffany, and makes for an essential primer into what McKnight highlights as a subversive art form that speaks to mass audiences in a way that more highbrow forms rarely take on. Consumed Traverse Theatre, various times until August 24 The Irish Troubles hangs heavy over this remarkable new play by Karis Kelly, which sees four generations of women convene in Northern Ireland for the ninetieth birthday of family matriarch, Eileen. What initially resembles an episode of Mrs Brown's Boys – or girls – takes a more fantastical turn in a staggering study of how violence and division can linger. Lost Lear Traverse Theatre, various times until August 24 Shakespeare's King Lear is the starting point for Dan Colley's play, set in a care home in which a woman holds court, acting out scenes of the play with the help of those who work there. Even her son is co-opted into the everyday drama in a moving look at how the debilitating effects of dementia can be offset by tapping into memories that create alternative realities in a show that uses puppetry and video to moving effect. Red Like Fruit Traverse Theatre, various times until August 24 A journalist working on a large-scale domestic abuse story finds herself confronting her own past in Hannah Moscovitch's play for Canada's 2B company. Out of this she asks a man to read out her written account of her experience in an attempt to understand them better. This is told quietly in this fascinating and troubling dissection of the long-term effects of sexual abuse in which the woman listens as rapt as the audience. The Beautiful Future is Coming Traverse Theatre, various times until August 24 Flora Wilson Brown's plays moves across time in its meditation on the climate crisis that humanises things through the experiences of three couples, with the women in particular at the helm. From nineteenth century scientific research to biblical floods to the uncertainties of fifty years from now, Wilson Brown's play is shot through with hope. Eat the Rich (but maybe not me mates x) Pleasance Courtyard, 2.15pm until August 24 Jade Franks is a wonder in her new semi autobiographical solo play, in which she charts the journey of a Liverpool call centre worker who ends up going to Cambridge University. The class-based prejudice Jade overcomes there while working as a cleaner makes Franks' play the natural successor to Willy Russell's 1980s tales of working class women, Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine. The entire Edinburgh run of may be sold out, but if there's any justice Franks' funny and incisive performance should tour the nation. Tom at the Farm Pleasance at EICC, 3.3pm until August 24 Given the scale of Armando Babaioff's Brazilian version of Quebecois writer Michel Marc Bouchard's psychosexual thriller, it should probably be on at Edinburgh International Festival rather than the Fringe. The play sees a man visit his dead boyfriend's family farm, where he becomes embroiled in a mud spattered tug of love and hate with his boyfriend's bullying brother, their mother and a woman who claims to have been his girlfriend. Don't sit too close to the front, or you might get wet. Trouble, Struggle, Bubble and Squeak Pleasance Courtyard, 2.15pm until August 24 There is something deeply moving about Victoria Melody's latest work, which sees her relate how she joined a historical re-enactment society after becoming fascinated with the English Civil War. With seventeenth century agricultural activists the Digger becoming a particular focus, Melody ends up leading the charge against developers in her local community. Directed by Mark Thomas, Melody's work is a grassroots drama full of heart. When Billy Met Alasdair Scottish Storytelling Centre, 8.30pm until August 23 Novelist Alan Bissett's new solo play sees Bissett pay homage to Billy Connolly and novelist Alasdair Gray by imagining what might have been said by the two pop cultural giants when they met at the 1981 launch of Gray's mighty novel, Lanark. Bissett's impressions of his subjects as he recounts potted histories of their brilliant careers are well enough, but it's when he steps out of character that things move beyond a fine tuned piece of fan fiction to become a meditation on the perils of the working class artist. Pussy Riot: Riot Days Summerhall, Dissection Room, 10pm until August 23 The Russian art provocateurs returned this week with a new version of their incendiary stage show that draws from key member Maria Alyokhini's memoir of the group's assorted actions and her subsequent imprisonment in a show that has lost none of its sound and fury in a ferocious call to arms. Read more: Philosophy of the World Summerhall, Red Lecture Theatre, 10.45pm until August 25 The starting point for this wild new show by the In Bed with My Brother company is The Shaggs, the 1960s band made up of three sisters who were once described as the best worst band ever, and who became something of a cult. The three women performers take the band's brief lifespan as their cue for a ferocious meditation on power and control in a man's world which, in Summerhall's tiny Red Lecture Theatre, you fear might explode in a show that looks like something Pussy Riot's kid sisters might have dreamt up.
The Herald Scotland
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'.
The Herald Scotland
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Review, Lear, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh: 'a mesmerising depiction'
Shakespeare's Lear is a man at war in Ramesh Meyyappan's radical reworking of one of the bard's mightiest plays. Standing shell-shocked in a mini arena circled by sandbags, Meyyappan's Lear is cast adrift from both his faculties and family, in conflict with himself as much as the three daughters who tend to him. Possessed with the overbearing anger of a parent whose children have learnt to stand up to him, Lear's own increasingly infantile nature comes to the fore as his psychic wounds get the better of him. All this is brought to life, not with soliloquies and verse, but with barely a word spoken over the show's hour-long duration. As Lear shelters from the blast, Orla O'Loughlin's exquisite production wraps an already moving depiction of a family at war inside David Paul Jones' score. Read more reviews from Neil Cooper: This moves between propulsive piano patterns and string based brooding to give the performance its emotional pulse. Derek Anderson's lighting design adds even more drama to the action played out on Anna Orton's dirt-laden set. Nicole Cooper as Goneril, Amy Kennedy as Regan and Draya Maria as Lear's much loved Cordelia navigate their way around it as casualties of the fallout. In execution, Meyyappan and O'Loughlin's construction recalls the wave of underground East European theatre that came up throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. Its lack of dialogue lends it a similar global appeal by way of an international language of human empathy in response to extreme political adversity. There is a richness and depth as well to its depiction of sanity, madness and the family and the scars of battle that wound all. O'Loughlin's production is presented by producers Raw Material in association with the National Theatre of Scotland and the Singapore International Festival of Arts, where it premiered prior to its all too brief Scottish run. The moving silences left in the play's wake should see it go a whole lot further in a mesmerising depiction of one of the world's great tragedies that is both intimate and epic.
The Guardian
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Koyo Kouoh obituary
At a conference held at London's Somerset House as part of the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in 2015, the name of the organiser came up again and again. 'Koyo Kouoh' hooted an Iranian participant to her eager audience. 'We need to have her cloned.' Over the decade that followed, it seemed as thought this might actually have happened. Kouoh, who has died aged 57 after being diagnosed with cancer, was impossibly ubiquitous. In 2015, she was living and working in Dakar, Senegal, where in 2008 she had set up an artists' residency called Raw Material. Seven years later, Raw Material had come to include a gallery, exhibition space and a mentoring programme for young Senegalese artists. Four years after that, in 2019, Kouoh was made director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (MOCAA) in Cape Town, South Africa – the largest institution of its kind in the world, but at the time on the point of closing down. 'I was convinced that the failure of Zeitz would have been the failure of all of us African art professionals,' Kouoh recalled in a podcast in 2024. 'For me, it became a duty to save it.' Among other groundbreaking exhibitions curated by Kouoh during her tenure at Zeitz MOCAA was When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, in 2022. This was still running at the time of her death, having moved to Brussels' Bozar centre earlier this year. (It closes on 10 August.) The New York Times praised the 'sophisticated breadth … aesthetic and art historical, painterly and political' of the show, and the curatorial thinking behind it – in particular, its exploration of what Kouoh called Black self-representation from across Africa and the Afro-diaspora. Kouoh described herself as a pan-Africanist, embracing the term 'Black geographies' to include all those parts of the world in which Africans had, for the most part involuntarily, found themselves. 'Their cultures have evolved, transformed and taken root,' she said. 'Their territories become extensions of the continent. So, from my point of view, Brazil is an African country, Cuba is an African country, even the United States.' As well as her formal posts, Zeitz's director had twice been on the curating board of Documenta in Kassel, Germany, organised Ireland's EVA International biennial in 2016 and a keynote exhibition at the Carnegie International in Philadelphia in 2018. At the end of 2024, Kouoh was named as commissioner for the 61st Venice Biennale, only the second African to be chosen for the job, and the first African woman. She died the week before she was due to announce the biennale's programme and theme. There was little in her past to suggest a stellar career in the international arts. Born in Douala, the economic capital of Cameroon, Kouoh described her background as 'very modest'. Her great-grandmother had been forced into a polygamous marriage as a teenager; her grandmother was a seamstress; her mother, Agnes, left Cameroon in the 1970s to look for work in Switzerland. 'This is the family I come from,' Kouoh told ARTnews. 'That is the essence of my feminism.' At 13, Kouoh joined her mother in Zurich. Like many children of aspirational immigrant parents, she was nudged towards a career in finance, studying economics and becoming an investment baker at Credit Suisse. Her heart was not in it. As she told the New York Times in 2023, she was 'fundamentally uninterested in profit'. It was while working in Zurich that she met a pair of Swiss-German artists, Dominique Rust and Clarissa Herbst. The world they introduced her to was captivating. In October 1995, Kouoh left for Senegal as cultural correspondent for a Swiss magazine. There were other reasons for her departure. Shortly before, she had given birth to a son, Djibril. True to her matriarchal roots, she would bring him up by herself: 'I couldn't imagine raising a Black boy in Europe,' she said. The discovery, in Senegal, of her own, non-European identity had come as a surprise to the young, Swiss-educated banker. 'I realised I was African and Black,' she told Le Monde in 2015. 'It was then that I first felt a hunger for Africa.' Her early studies in economics helped clarify her later thinking. 'Money is a fundamental component of our existence,' she said. 'Every sphere has its own economy, and art is no exception.' In this, too, she saw an African exceptionalism. The western model has been to measure artistic success by success in the saleroom. 'In Africa, it's a completely different story,' Kouoh said. 'I'm happy for artists who are successful in the market, but that is not synonymous with worth.' Her own philosophy, central to her curating and directing, was collaborative rather than competitive. One of the more surprising things about her appointment as commissioner for the Venice Biennale was that it was made by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the one-time leader of the youth wing of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement party and an ally of Italy's far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. What form Kouoh's biennale might have taken – indeed, whether the biennale will now take place – remains for the moment unknown. 'I will, of course, be bringing my intellectual and aesthetic baggage to Venice,' she said recently, in an interview on the website Next Is Africa. 'It will be true to my obsessions and my values.' Punning in French – one of a number of languages she spoke fluently – she laughingly said: 'Venice has given me carte blanche, and I am going to play my carte noire (black card).' Educated by Jesuits as a child in Douala, she came to embrace broader beliefs. After a merry interview in the Financial Times earlier this month, in which the brightly dressed curator confessed to a shoe obsession and shared the view that 'champagne is the only thing you can drink at any time of the day,' Kouoh grew more thoughtful. 'I do believe in life after death, because I come from an ancestral Black education where we believe in parallel lives and realities,' she said. 'There is no 'after death', 'before death' or 'during life'. It doesn't matter that much.' She is survived by her husband, Philippe Mall, by Djibril, and by her mother, Agnes, and stepfather, Anton. Marie-Noëlle Koyo Kouoh, art curator and director, born 24 December 1967; died 10 May 2025
