Skip to main content

Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2016 Reviews 4 - Milk - Traverse Theatre, Four stars / Diary of A Madman - Traverse Theatre, Four stars / My Eyes went Dark - Traverse Theatre, Four stars

Three couples pivot around each other in Milk, Ross Dunsmore's play for the Traverse Theatre company, which receives its world premiere in Orla O'Loughlin's production. Steph and Ash are fourteen and horny as hell. Cyril and May are coming towards the end of their lives and with a lifetime of togetherness to protect them from the world outside. Between the two are Danny and Nicole, who are expecting their first baby and flying blind into an abyss of responsibility no-one prepared them for.

Out of assorted moments of crisis, lives are disrupted and possibly changed forever in a play that reaches to the heart of how social isolation can prompt desperately extreme responses. Dunsmore's dialogue ripples with the uneasy exchanges of fractured lives trying to find a connection. Beyond Ash's troubling craving for human contact and Nicole's withdrawal, it is May and Cyril, beautifully played by Ann Louise Ross and Tam Dean Burn, stepping in at the last minute for an indisposed Cliff Burnett, who instinctively understand how love survives. The play over-riding message is that if anything resembling community is to survive, we need to care more, both for each other and for everyone else around us.

Runs to August 28

In Al Smith's audacious new take on Diary of A Madman, Gogol's nineteenth century short tale of ordinary madness is reimagined post independence and Brexit referenda South Queensferry, where the iconic shadow of the Forth Road Bridge looms large. Here Pop Sheeran is king, following in a long line of Sheerans who have painted the bridge year in, year out. Pop's world is rocked when university student Matthew White is apprenticed to him for the summer, leaving him no choice but to take on Braveheart's mantle to protect a world where his teenage daughter Sophie may be under threat while her pal Mel appears to be an agent for opposing forces.

Christopher Hayden's Gate Theatre production is peppered throughout with a slew of spoonerisms and Edinburgh Fringe gags, plus a pleasure-seeking Greyfriar's Bobby puppet who ditches the heritage industry's image of a canine cutie forever. Beyond this, Liam Brennan leads a fine five-strong cast, venting all of Pop's hand-me-down prejudices and an all too recognisable fear of otherness that eventually destroys him. In a post Brexit climate, it taps into how anyone made to feel impotent enough to rob them of their identity, will lash out with whatever fantasy deity can justify it.

Runs to August 28

There are times in My Eyes Went Dark when it's hard to have sympathy for Nikolai Koslov, the high-profile Ossetian architect whose wife and children are killed in a head-on collision between two aeroplanes. We first see Nikolai clutching high into a void of thin air at the opening of Matthew Wilkinson's ice-cool two-hander, first seen at the Finborough Theatre in London in 2015.

On a bare stage apart from two plastic chairs, the audience is privy to the inner workings of Nikolai's psyche as the action moves between timelines in a structure that rewinds to gradually put together an emotional jigsaw. With Cal MacAninch as the hyper-successful Nikolai and Thusitha Jayasundera playing all the other parts, the play lays bare the extremes of a process – from shock, awe and despair, to anger, revenge and some kind of healing – writ large in such a rarefied world. In the end, we also see the decision that set what follows in motion in a tightly-wound production of power and consequence.

Runs to August 28

The Herald, August 16th 2016

ends

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

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

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds

Big Gold Dreams – A Story of Scottish Independent Music 1977-1989

Disc 1 1. THE REZILLOS (My Baby Does) Good Sculptures (12/77)  2. THE EXILE Hooked On You (8/77) 3. DRIVE Jerkin’ (8/77) 4. VALVES Robot Love (9/77) 5. P.V.C. 2 Put You In The Picture (10/77) 6. JOHNNY & THE SELF ABUSERS Dead Vandals (11/77) 7. BEE BEE CEE You Gotta Know Girl (11/77) 8. SUBS Gimme Your Heart (2/78) 9. SKIDS Reasons (No Bad NB 1, 4/78) 10. FINGERPRINTZ Dancing With Myself (1/79)  11. THE ZIPS Take Me Down (4/79) 12. ANOTHER PRETTY FACE All The Boys Love Carrie (5/79)  13. VISITORS Electric Heat (5/79) 14. JOLT See Saw (6/79) 15. SIMPLE MINDS Chelsea Girl (6/79) 16. SHAKE Culture Shock (7/79) 17. HEADBOYS The Shape Of Things To Come (7/79) 18. FIRE EXIT Time Wall (8/79) 19. FREEZE Paranoia (9/79) 20. FAKES Sylvia Clarke (9/79) 21. TPI She’s Too Clever For Me (10/79) 22. FUN 4 Singing In The Showers (11/79) 23. FLOWERS Confessions (12/79) 24. TV21 Playing With Fire (4/80) 25. ALEX FERGUSSON Stay With Me Tonight (1980) 1. THE REZILL