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Aug 25, 2024 | 
festmag.com | Gareth Vile
Based in a healthy recognition that the stage is a space that can revel in symbolism, Assembly Hall is simultaneously a celebration of performance’s power to explore abstract concepts and a study in alienation and disconnection. Beginning with a committee that faces its own dissolution, it descends into a murky and imaginative recreation of a medieval hero’s journey, it alludes to the capacity of myth to infuse meaning into the apparently mundane and forges a distinctive movement vocabulary.
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Aug 13, 2024 | 
festmag.com | Gareth Vile
By Gareth K. Vile Published 14 Aug 2024 Despite a libretto by arch-surrealist Jean Cocteau, Stravinsky’s oratorio is a direct and taut retelling of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos, lent a magisterial weight by its use of Latin and leaning into the bleak fatalism that is at the heart of the tragedy.
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Aug 12, 2024 | 
festmag.com | Gareth Vile
By Gareth K. Vile Published 13 Aug 2024 Paines Plough’s prolific promotion of new writing has become an important presence in British performance: this year they celebrate the 50th anniversary of their foundation, recalling their commitment to discovering innovative and dynamic playwrights, from Sarah Kane to Vinay Patel, and their extensive touring programme.
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Aug 8, 2024 | 
festmag.com | Gareth Vile
close The theatre and opera director on her vision for Scottish Opera’s immersive staging of Oedipus Rex feature (edinburgh) | Read in About 4 minutes query_builder By Gareth K.
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Aug 8, 2024 | 
festmag.com | Gareth Vile
By Gareth K. Vile Published 09 Aug 2024 Gravity and Other Myths are a company who keep the focus tight on their acrobatic excellence, spicing Ten Thousand Hours with just enough thematic and dramatic spice to weave their routines into a cohesive whole. Based around the amount of time that enables mastery (in any art), their percussion driven episodes deconstruct the acrobatic routines, emphasising the processes, and the risks, that are hidden by their slick physical prowess.
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Aug 6, 2024 | 
festmag.com | Gareth Vile
By Gareth K. Vile Published 06 Aug 2024 Bella, played with steely precision by Madeleine Potter, is a tenured professor with a terminal illness. Because she is very clever, she alludes to authors to describe her feelings and makes a rational decision to end her own life. And so, her fatalism is given emotional weight, despite her personal restraint.
Adam Rapp is a playwright who has read Aristotle’s Poetics and thinks that a good tragedy needs to include many of the philosopher’s features.
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Aug 5, 2024 | 
festmag.com | Gareth Vile
By Gareth K. Vile Published 05 Aug 2024 Kate Hurley admits that the identity focussed autobiographical solo show is over-represented at the Fringe: while she has a charismatic presence and stories that illustrate her frustrated life progress, F**king Croydon struggles to escape the predictable gravity of the genre. Balanced between the personal and the resonant, the play embraces the telling detail of Croydon’s inertia, but the production is ambivalent about its topic.
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Aug 5, 2024 | 
festmag.com | Gareth Vile
By Gareth K. Vile Published 05 Aug 2024 For a duo working between clown, physical theatre and absurdist storytelling, Xhloe and Natasha capture a rare blend of accessibility and experimentation. For Letter, they inhabit a metaphysical space that matches childish imagination and warfare: two young men, Ace and Grasshopper, flicker between memories of childhood, scouting and patriotic fervour, before landing in manhood and the horrors of the Vietnam war.
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Aug 5, 2024 | 
festmag.com | Gareth Vile
By Gareth K. Vile Published 05 Aug 2024 Contrary to many solo Fringe shows, Performance Art is not merely an opportunity to drop familiar theatrical structures for an autobiographical ramble: it is a strategy to embrace subjects that erupt in violence from the artistic imagination and match the ferocity of the ideas.
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Aug 4, 2024 | 
festmag.com | Gareth Vile
Despite previous Fringe successes, Sh!t Theatre avoid formulae: after a gap of five years from Edinburgh, they delve into folk music, discovering a new perspective for performance and, crucially, the hope of revival after a time of torpor. Using the song of John Barleycorn – a celebration of the grain that gives forth beer – the duo lingers in their anguish but finds hope, or something close to joy.
