The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars As gossipy Magic Circle members might tell you, Derren Brown’s feats of mental skulduggery he bamboozles his fan base with aren’t anything new. Brown himself admits in the second half of his latest theatrical extravaganza that the hardest thing for him to do during his two and a half hour performance is to keep an eye on a deck of cards to see which way one lands. The fact that he tells us this via subtitles on a screen that covers the Playhouse stage’s entire back wall while those cards are shuffled speaks volumes about Brown’s exemplary shtick. And while those self same Magic Circle members may be correct in their professional observations, if they ever let slip how Brown’s tricks actually worked, chances are such a breach of protocol would see us all have to do a disappearing act. Things begin quietly enough with pre show phone footage testimonies from a stream of satisfied but bewildered customers about how Brown appears t...
Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars In the city there are eight million stories. Edinburgh being Edinburgh, it would probably like to boast it has a fair few more. Given the Athens of the North’s Jekyll and Hyde style credentials, whereby it puts on a pretty facade for the tourists, while the real tall tales emerge from more intimate exchanges out of sight behind closed doors, this might well be the case. So it goes with Lyceum at Home, an initiative spearheaded by the capital theatre’s artistic director James Brining, who commissioned four writers to create a quartet of thirty-minute monologues. With each set in Edinburgh, in a project led by outgoing associate director Zinnie Harris, these were then performed around town in people’s living rooms, where sofa bound audiences were unavoidably up close to the action. Now the mini tour is over, the quartet of new works were brought back home to the theatre that sired them, where they were performed on the s...