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Edinburgh Festival Fringe Theatre Preview 1 - If You’re Feeling Sinister: a play with songs / The Brunch Club

If You’re Feeling Sinister: a play with songs, Gilded Balloon, Doonstairs.
Until August 26 (Not August 12), 3.45pm.

The songs of Glasgow indie-pop sensations Belle and Sebastian have always been steeped in everyday narrative. Sytuart Murdoch’s lyrics in particular are full of oddball characters embarking on adventures of their own making.It’s taken 23 years, however, for the words and music for the band’s second album to make it to the stage in full dramatic fashion.

This comes by way of this hour-long two-handed adaptation that teams up writer Eve Nicol with director Paul Brotherston to tell the tale of Boss and Kid, an unlikely pairing of an exhausted academic desperate to lose himself and a reckless artist waiting for life to begin. Together they look set to pull off Glasgow’s greatest heist as they go on the run, barely able to keep their hands off each other and their eyes on the road ahead.

Where songs from Belle and Sebastian’s original If You’re Feeling Sinister album such as The Stars of Track and Field and Judy and the Dream of Horses fit into this remains to be seen. With writer/director Nicol, who recently directed Abi Morgan’s The Mistress Contract, and director Paul Brotherston of Glasgow enfant terribles Blood of the Young at the wheel of this co-production between BBC Arts and Avalon in association with the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, the possibilities are endless in a story about dreaming, shame and the fear of being left behind.


The Brunch Club
Pleasance Pop-Up Levels.
Until August 24, 8.15pm.

Fans of 1980s John Hughes coming of age movies could do worse than check out site-specific veterans Grid Iron Theatre’s up close and personal homage to more innocent times when awkward outsiders were still finding their tribe. In a co-production with the Scottish Drama Training Network and Pleasance Theatre Trust, The Brunch Club introduces to the world The Network Ensemble, a group of eight recent graduates from colleges and universities all over Scotland to become an ungainly assortment of rebels, geeks and princesses. Together they hang tough, form unholy alliances and fall in and out of love en route to taking on the world in a rites of passage that will stay with them forever.

The Herald, August 3rd 2019

ends






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