thu 22/05/2025

festivals

Edinburgh International Festival 2019 review: Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation

It’s the end of the world as we know it. At least according to Miles, scientist turned messiah, who lost his son in an accident at a frozen lake, and who experienced visions of an impending apocalypse in his subsequent coma.He’s established a colony...

Read more...

Edinburgh International Festival 2019 review: Roots

A fat cat who gobbles up everything in sight. A king who tests his wife’s fidelity with increasingly horrific trials. A man whose flatmate is Poverty. It’s hard to ignore the scathing contemporary resonances in theatre company 1927’s sly, witty new...

Read more...

Edinburgh Fringe 2019 reviews: Darren McGarvey AKA Loki: Scotland Today / Scottee: Class

Darren McGarvey AKA Loki: Scotland Today The Stand's New Town Theatre ★★★★★   Darren McGarvey (aka Loki the Scottish Rapper) won the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2018 for his book Poverty Safari, a startling,...

Read more...

theartsdesk in Oslo: Øya Festival 2019 review

The timing seemed odd. Sigrid is internationally successful. She’s Norway’s highest-profile musical ambassador since a-ha. Yet instead of headlining at 2019’s Øya Festival, she hits the stage at 6.45. Has she been demoted in favour of Tame Impala,...

Read more...

Edinburgh Fringe 2019 reviews: Sea Sick / Vigil / When the Birds Come

Sea Sick CanadaHub ★★★★   She’s not a performer, Alanna Mitchell tells us. She’s a writer and journalist. But what she’s discovered about climate change, and specifically about its effects on the world’s oceans, has...

Read more...

Edinburgh Fringe 2019 reviews: Deer Woman / Pathetic Fallacy / Blind Date

Deer Woman CanadaHub ★★★   You can feel the fury emanating from the stage in Tara Beagan’s incendiary solo play. Fury at the thousands of Indigenous Canadian women and girls who have gone missing in recent decades, abducted...

Read more...

Edinburgh Fringe 2019 review: Birth

Physical theatre company Theatre Re are virtually Fringe royalty these days, with a several-year history of fine shows under their belts, plus success internationally and at the London Mime Festival. And judging by their assured and richly resonant...

Read more...

Edinburgh Fringe 2019 review: Crocodile Fever

Chekhov famously pronounced that if you’re going to bring a gun on stage, you’ve got to use it. Is the same true for a chainsaw? To discover the answer, just head along to Meghan Tyler’s wild, over-the-top, gruesome Crocodile Fever at the...

Read more...

Edinburgh International Festival 2019 review: La reprise

Who’d have thought a play about a homophobic hate crime could be so much fun? Well, maybe that’s overstating things a little. But there are certainly lighter moments in La reprise, provocative Swiss-born director Milo Rau’s production with his...

Read more...

Wilderness Festival 2019 review - marvellous misbehaviour

The thing about Wilderness is that it’s just so jolly decent. Acres of decadence, sprawled safely over the yawning magnificence of Cornbury Park, Oxfordshire, combine to create a scintillating country fair reverie – a heady mix of good music, high...

Read more...

Edinburgh Festival 2019 review: Rich Kids - A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran

You can’t question Javaad Alipoor’s ambition. Ancient Mesopotamian empires, geological layers of chicken bones, the half-life of polysterene cups, Thomas Gainsborough, Susan Sontag, Iranian political history, gold iPhones, mallwave – all that and...

Read more...

Edinburgh Festival 2019 reviews: Enough / Spliced

Enough ★★★★   Immaculately turned out in winning smiles, navy and nylon, cabin crew Jane and Toni dispense comforting reassurance and flirty glances to passengers at 30,000 feet. Down on the ground, though, they’re juggling kids...

Read more...
Subscribe to festivals