Royal Lyceum Theatre 5 stars It’s a glorious sleight of hand, putting Brechtian style cabaret performed by a genuine Fringe phenomonan into the Edinburgh International Festival theatre programme. In Irish chanteuse Camille O’Sullivan’s vivid rendering of Shakespeare’s epic poem of one woman’s bloody violation and the self-destruction it inspires, EIF, along with the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose banner Elizabeth Freestone’s production falls under, have struck gold. The intensity of what ensues is difficult to gauge from O’Sullivan’s chattily casual entrance with pianist and co-composer Feargal Murray. Dressed in a floor-length death-black dress and wearing her hair tied up on a sumptuous-looking stage piled high with stacks of paper and descending wall-hangings that veer from stained to distressed, O’Sullivan segues her introduction into Shakespeare’s verse with a seamless charm her Irish accent lures you in with. This already is streets ahead of old-school readings of the poem, but when O’Sullivan moves into song, it becomes something else again, with Murray’s stark, down-tempo arrangements off-setting O’Sullivan’s mixture of torch-balladeering and laments with exquisitely nuanced richness. Together, all these elements conspire to construct something that is part contemporary spoken-word, part late-night songspiel, with the bluesy rasp that seeps out from around the edges of O’Sullivan’s voice lending a frightening and emotive weight to the story. This isn’t just a concert, however. When O’Sullivan removes her coat to reveal a plain white slip, she lunges out of narrator-mode to take on the role of Tarquin with a brutal venom that works her discarded garment into the fatal act that follows. The final song, delivered partly without accompaniment, may be laden with tragedy, but such a gorgeous piece of work can feed into O’Sullivan’s repertoire for decades. The Herald, August 23rd 2012 ends
When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
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