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Fringe Theatre Reviews - Quietly – Traverse Theatre – Four stars / Grounded – Traverse Theatre – four stars / Fight Night – Traverse Theatre – four stars / Have I No Mouth – Traverse Theatre – four stars

Two men seek closure in a late night Belfast bar in Quietly, Owen McCafferty's new play presented by Dublin's Abbey Theatre in Jimmy Fay's firecracker of a production. Robert the Polish bar-man is watching the Poland/Northern Ireland match when Jimmy arrives, full of pent-up rage and gallows humour. When Ian arrives, things threaten to explode into violence, but quickly subside as the pair attempt to purge themselves of what happened almost forty years earlier, when sectarian violence in Belfast was at its bloody height. What follows is, as Jimmy observes, a more intimate and less formal take on a truth and reconciliation committee, as the pair unravel the history that binds them. It's a devastating little power play that sums up a battle-scarred nation's collective psyche in miniature, with the football game on television pointing to pointing up the lingering tribalism even more. Fay's production, played out in a working bar-room, is blessed by

I'm With The Band and The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning - Tim Price Goes Independent

It's Tuesday night in an uncharacteristically muggy Edinburgh, and in a city centre basement bar sweat-box, a band is about to play their first – and possibly final – gig. The musical set-up is tried and tested; an all-male indie-schmindie four piece consisting of vocals, guitar, bass and drums. There's a chemistry between the quartet as they go through the paces of their brief, four-song set, even as they sound rough round the edges and at times appear to be tugging in different directions. That's nothing new in a pub venue of this size, and in the end it doesn't matter, as the two refreshed east European traveller girls who get their picture taken on the lip of the tiny stage the band are playing on testify to. Despite the fact that they've never played together before outside of a rehearsal room, the band can bluff it enough to make the audience believe everything they're hearing. This is the case even if they're not in on the joke that this b

Adam Smith, Le Grand Tour - Vanessa Oltra's Wealth of Nations

Money talks. Or at least that's the case judging by the foyer-full of French economists packed into a small studio theatre ticked off a bustling shopping street in Bordeaux city centre. The economists are coming to the end of a week-long conference at the nearby university, and clearly have plenty to say about it all. In what looks suspiciously like an end of term treat, they're gathered to watch a performance of Adam Smith, Le Grand Tour, a new play written and performed by Vanessa Oltra with fellow actor Frederic Kneip. The production, by Compagnie Les Labyrinthes, which arrives at the French Institute this week for an Edinburgh Festival Fringe run, charts the journey of Mary and Fred Smith, who travel to Edinburgh in search of the real Adam Smith, the Kirkcaldy-born moral philosopher and seminal author of his 1776 tome, An Inquiry into the nature and causes of the Wealth of Nations. More often shortened to the catchier Wealth of Nations, this book is regarded a

Traverse Theatre Fringe Reviews 2013

The Events – Traverse Theatre – four stars There's something surprisingly light about The Events, David Greig's new play set in the aftermath of a mass shooting of a community choir by a boy who appears to believe he holds the moral highground to commit such an act. This isn't necessarily a bad thing in a piece which more specifically, the play focuses on Claire the liberal priest and leader of the choir who survives, possibly because she is white. As traumatised as she is by the experience, she remains desperate to understand the rationale behind the Boy's actions. She sees his face in everybody she meets, from her increasingly estranged female lover, to members of the extreme right wing party the Boy was a member of, and, in a final attempt at closure, she visits the Boy in his cell. This is achieved by having Rudi Dharmalingam play all key parts other than Claire, while, as the Boy himself, he relates his story not as some unhinged monster, but with an i

Edinburgh Fringe Reviews 1 - The Surrender – Gilded Balloon – 3 stars Bath Time – Gilded Balloon – 4 stars The Epicene Butcher and Other Stories For Consenting Adults – Assembly, 4 stars London Road, Sea Point – Assembly – 3 stars The Veil – Pleasance – 3 stars

If the Edinburgh Festival Fringe must start with a bang, there are few more graphic ways of doing it than with Spanish actress Isabelle Stoffel's solo adaptation of Toni Bentley's singular sexual memoir, the Surrender. In both the book and the play, Bentley is a woman in search of spiritual enlightenment who finds it through the physical extremes of anal sex. While such libertine excesses aren't anything which the likes of the Marquis de Sade's works fantasised about a couple of centuries back, the fact that Bentley made it flesh gives her story an extra edge. While Bentley's words lean towards the sort of counter-cultural confessionals of the 1960s, in Stoffel's hands, and indeed every other part of her body, it's not nearly as po-faced as it could be. While Stoffel's delivery is laced with an apposite sense of levity, theatrically, she either cavorts on a bed or behind a screen, places candles on a wooden shrine or else listens to her own

Edinburgh Festival Fringe – Three Essential Venues

If there is one venue that is an essential visit during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, it is the Traverse Theatre. This legendary home of new writing has been around in one building or another since 1963, and is arguably the home of the Fringe, even though its current home just off Lothian Road beside the Usher Hall is infinitely glossier than the former High Street brothel where it first opened its doors. Co-founded by a coterie of 1960s bohemian types that included ex American GI turned founder of the UK's first ever paperback bookshop, Jim Haynes, and art impresario Richard Demarco, the Traverse has blazed a trail over the last half century, and over the last decade has won numerous Herald Angel awards. If all goes well, the theatre' fiftieth anniversary programme should prove no exception. One of the Traverse's flagship shows will feature former Taggart star Blythe Duff in Ciara, a new one-woman play by David Harrower. Duff has more than proved her mettle as

Blythe Duff - Ciara

It's not every day that a major writer pens a play with a specific actress in mind. This is exactly what happened, however, when Knives in Hens and Blackbird author David Harrower approached former Taggart star Blythe Duff, who performed Harrower's two-hander, Good With People, at last year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe before transferring with it to New York. The result of this collaboration is Ciara, a solo piece in which Duff plays a woman who runs a successful Glasgow art gallery, but who also happens to be the daughter of a just-deceased big city crime lord. “David told me he wanted to write something about Glasgow,” says Duff of the roots of the play that now forms the flagship production of the Traverse Theatre's Edinburgh Festival Fringe season. “That was in 2010, then in 2011 he came back, and we worked quite closely on the play. It was so exciting being part of that process, and what we've got now is this piece about a woman in her fifties who has e