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
Myra McFadyen – Actress Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024 Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.” For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...
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