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Vanishing Point - Lost Ones

SCHOOL'S out in downtown Colombo, Sri Lanka. It is a few days before the Sri Lankan new year in April, and, at the gates of Bishop's College, a few students are hoisting a banner for Exstastics, a Sunday night extravaganza that's a hipper version of a gang show. All 650 seats at the theatre are sold out, and there is an endof-term frisson in the air. Outside the theatre itself a beggar lies prostrate as the Tuk Tuks - the barely-legal three-wheeler taxi cabs - buzz by. Inside, a culture shock from the mysterious west is taking shape. The Glasgow-based Vanishing Point theatre company is preparing for the opening night of their Edinburgh Fringe hit, Lost Ones. This dark slice of gothic fantasy has arrived in town following stints in Kosovo and Macedonia, having first impressed the talent scouts in Edinburgh last August at the biennial British Council showcase. "Everything I bring here, " British Council Sri Lanka's arts manager, Ranmali Mirchan

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars When Jason Manford's down-at-heel inventor Caractacus Potts rebuilds a rusted old banger in this new touring revival of Jeremy Sams' stage adaptation of the Roald Dahl scripted 1968 musical film, he gets a lot more than he bargained for with the flying machine that results from his tampering. Inspired by Ian Fleming's short story awash with a trademark Bondesque array of customised cars, cartoon villains and exotic locales, the film's Bank holiday friendly songbook by Richard and Robert Sherman remains intact. James Brining's co-production between West Yorkshire Playhouse and former Festival Theatre boss John Stalker's Music and Lyrics company uses all the resources at his disposal to hone a facility for musical theatre developed while running Dundee Rep. With Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's adventures on land, sea and air brought to life by a mix of hi-tech back projections and old-school engineering, Manford h

Krapp's Last Tape

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Samuel Beckett's old man Krapp is already sitting there at his wooden table piled with his personal detritus as the audience file in to the Tron's tiny Changing House attic space that lends itself so atmospherically to Beckett's portrait of a lonely soul rummaging through his back pages. Gerry Mulgrew's Krapp peers out, pasty-faced and seemingly already dress-rehearsing the lie of an after-life that can't come too soon. There's a low electric hum in the air, the sound of amplified breathing into a microphone, and is that a disembodied voice keening in the ether? For the first ten minutes of Paul Brotherston's production, Krapp wordlessly strains himself through the basics of getting by, almost coming a comic cropper as he goes. As he rewinds his collected tape-spools that immortalise his younger self, innocence and experience seem to spar with each other as Krapp attempts to recapture the essence of his old loves.

The Suppliant Women

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars “How did it work, this thing called democracy?” one of the multitude of young women onstage asks their old father Danaus as he returns from arguing the case for this swathe of Egyptian asylum seekers in search of sanctuary in Argos. Given that the first part of Aeschylus' now largely lost Danaid trilogy is two and a half thousand years old, this is quite a question in David Greig's new version, brought to the stage for this flagship production of Greig's new tenure as the Lyceum's artistic director by Ramin Gray. It begins with the performers running through the auditorium before lining up onstage as actor Omar Ebrahim introduces a knowing lesson in theatrical economics delivered by real live MSP Willie Rennie. As an opening gambit drawn from ancient Greek civic ritual it is as inspired and as relevant as everything that follows in this co-production between the Lyceum and Actors Touring Company. In the women we can

Dario Fo - Dancing With Colours, Whipping With Words

Somewhere in Italy, Dario Fo is talking about his relationship with Scotland, a country where actors and theatre-makers have adopted the plays of the veteran director, actor and political provocateur like few others and made them their own. As the author of modern classics such as Accidental Death of An Anarchist, Cant Pay? Won't Pay! and Trumpets and Raspberries prepares to return to Edinburgh like an adopted prodigal to take part in Dancing With Colours, Whipping With Words, a month-long festival of his work and influence on contemporary political theatre, the now ninety year old Nobel Prize winner sounds in remarkably rude health. At the other end of the line, two translators from the Edinburgh Italian Cultural Institute hang on to Fo's every word, chuckling occasionally at something he says. They refer to Fo as Maestro, a suitably grandiloquent word for an artist who, along with his artistic and life partner Franca Rame, changed the face of theatre, but whose craft is ro

Philip Prowse - Venice Preserved

PHILIP Prowse's reputation travels well before him - exactly what you'd expect from a designer/director of such sumptuous visual finesse, who's pretty much defined the look of Glasgow's Citizens Theatre over the past 34 years as one-third of the outgoing directorial triumvirate alongside Giles Havergal and Robert David MacDonald. His final production, of Thomas Otway's little-known seventeenth century, Venice Preserved, which closes this weekend, effectively ending an era, is as fitting a swansong as long-time Citz aficionados could hope or imagine. A big, brutalist epic of political conspiracy in high and low places, so rich is Venice Preserved in painterly intent, it almost bursts out of the proscenium and spills over into the auditorium. It is a play Prowse has worked on twice now. In the early-1970s, he designed a production by Robert David MacDonald, since when ''I've always wanted to do it, and I figured,'' he says, resignedly, '

Georgina Hale - The Cherry Orchard

Only an actress of magnitude could get away with wearing specs to match her outfit, but, elegantly clad in various shades of red, Georgina Hale carries it off with surprisingly understated aplomb. With such a display of well-coordinated show-stopping flamboyance in mind, you might expect such a veteran of stage and screen, including a Bafta winning-turn in Ken Russell's musical biopic, Mahler, to come on strong with a winning set of well-worn anecdotes and name-dropping bons mots, all ready-made for the prime-time chat-show circuit. Expectations, however, are decidedly confounded. Because, as Hale trawls through her back pages, as she knows she must, during a break from rehearsals for the Citizens' Theatre's production of The Cherry Orchard, in which she's playing Madame Ranevsky, there's a world-weary languor about her. It is as though she's just come across something in her bottom drawer she'd long-since put out of her mind, or given up for dead in a