Ben Flaumenhaft

Aug 24, 2024 | threeweeksedinburgh.com | Ben Flaumenhaft

ED2024 Reviews ED2024 Theatre ReviewsNear the close of ‘Funny Guy’, the eponymous neon marionette “funny guy” announces the end of “this little morality play.” That’s one way I’d describe this hour long exploration of two intertwined modern couples with marriage and career problems. I might also use the word moralising. With conflict revealed so plainly in dialogue and acting so imprecise, the characters and their problems are entirely too explicit and unnatural.

Aug 23, 2024 | threeweeksedinburgh.com | Ben Flaumenhaft

ED2024 Comedy Reviews ED2024 ReviewsJohn Hegley’s hour is put up in a lecture hall, which feels both fitting and not so. As is made clear in his material, Hegley often works in educational settings, but this piece isn’t quite a lecture or a lesson. It’s more poetry reading, sing-along, improvisation, autobiography, and workshop. Hegley has the kind of humour one expects to work on children, but of course never does.

Aug 19, 2024 | threeweeksedinburgh.com | Ben Flaumenhaft

ED2024 Reviews ED2024 Theatre ReviewsThe playing space is set with cardboard boxes, creating a rather obvious sense of shipment, of movement, of ungroundedness. Barton Williams’s piece of historical theatre weaves together emotional reflections and personal testimonies, crafting a narrative about the children adopted during the Vietnam War, and the often ungrounded nature of their identity formations. On a sentence level, Williams’s writing is bright, theatrical, and full of rhyme.

Aug 19, 2024 | threeweeksedinburgh.com | Ben Flaumenhaft

ED2024 Reviews ED2024 Theatre Reviews‘Instructions’ is like a play. There’s an audience and there’s an actor. There are even chapters, like a story. There is also, however, a camera, a monitor, and a turntable. It’s a distinct display of hardware that makes clear upon entry into the space the play’s intention to explore and imagine technology’s intervention in the theatrical tradition.

Aug 19, 2024 | threeweeksedinburgh.com | Ben Flaumenhaft

ED2024 Reviews ED2024 Theatre ReviewsThe archetypal horse girl is annoying and all too serious about her passions. The same could be said of this zany hour-long mythologization of that precise archetype – the type of girl who is just so enthused by the prospect of both riding and being a horse. The writing is delightfully weird and the design has a humorous, makeshift quality (spray bottles for rain and tap shoes for horse clip clopping).