Tag: edinburgh fringe

I stand at the top of The Royal Mile and look out across the mass of faces pushing through the throb of people. As flyers glide about of their own accord, seemingly bereft of owners, more paper is pushed into my reluctant hands. I filter in between shoulders, searching for a familiar face. My luggage […]

  ✮✮✮✮ Amongst the talk of the recent Edinburgh Fringe festival, it is important not to forget the International Festival: starting a week after the Fringe with a three week run, the festival is known for larger scale shows, in contrast to the backstreet venues that characterise the Fringe. Back to Back Theatre’s production of […]

  Summarise REPLAY in one sentence. The play is the confession by a lonely music teacher of her intense attachment to a student, but this confession is highly stage-managed to the extent we can never be sure of the nature of the ‘relationship’. In what ways will the experience of performing REPLAY at the Fringe be different from when you performed it in Oxford?  Oxford of course […]

A hugely popular phenomenon in the US, the university a cappella craze has spent the last decade steadily spreading across the UK. Glee helped to boost it; so did 2012 film Pitch Perfect – and it seems now that the genre has reached its peak. Known for an inexplicable level of competitiveness for such a light-hearted craft, […]

Strolling up Jowett’s Walk, bound for a preview of the upcoming Playhouse take on The Producers, I couldn’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of dread. Previews are never the full shebang; nine times out of ten they’re poorly executed, and everything can feel a bit too rough-and-ready. And so, in discovering that the Michael […]

✮✮✮ A common theme of many shows at this year’s Edinburgh Festival was the difficulties of coming to terms with human acts of outrageous violence. While Yael Farber’s Nirbhaya exposed abuse of women in India and Sean McCafferty’s Quietly confronted the deep-set hostilities still remaining in Northern Ireland, the subject matter of David Greig’s new play, The Events, is the aftermath of […]

There was a rather smelly old man in a loudly-rustling coat at the back of this performance of John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger. For an entire hour he shuffled and rustled uncomfortably. In a great many plays this would have been a distraction. This performance, however, was so gripping – so suspenseful – that […]

“A Theory of Justice: The Musical.”  One imagines that the transcript of its conception mirrored that of a group of drunk teenagers negotiating the theft of a traffic cone: “This is going to be hilarious!” “We’re absolutely mental, aren’t we?” “I know, we are, we’re just mental.” Like much of the petty crime in Oxford, A […]

You probably remember David Wickenden from his weekly TV appearances on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross with his house band, 4 Poofs and a Piano, adding a rapturous gaiety to the entrance of the various celebrities who walk through the doors of the BBC Green Room.  The show’s cancellation in 2010 left 4 Poofs without […]

A city with an ancient, prestigious university, a confused road system and streets clogged with tourists and street performers seemed just the place to escape Oxford for a month. Edinburgh, however, was practically overrun by Oxford students as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival brought the brightest lights in theatre, comedy and music swarming onto the Royal Mile. […]

Frankie Goodway reviews Swan Song, an Oxford production current playing at theSpace on North Bridge at the Edinburgh Fringe.

 The Trinity Players have made a clearly popular choice in taking two of Noel Coward’s short plays to the Fringe this year – the performance I saw was almost sold out. However, the choice is also interesting; plays from Tonight at 8:30 are usually performed not in pairs but in trinities (see what I did […]

Opening a show in Edinburgh is a strange process. Because most of your ticket sales are through word of mouth rather than pre-sale, you have to do an awful lot of work to get an audience. This is especially the case with new writing, because no-one knows whether it’s going to be good or not (and […]

Caroline Davies, marketing and PR officer for Edinburgh fringe festival play ‘One Under’, talks to Sarah Gashi about the challenges of organising a play with a cast and production team from different universities around the country.