Coffee-Table Notes

The Sibiu International Theatre Festival is in full swing, and outside the Radu Stanca National Theatre of Sibiu, Romania, the crowds are gathering. The reason is the world première of Gulliver's Travels, Romanian wunderkind Silviu Purcarete's latest epic reimagining of classic literature. Outside the theatre, the building's doors are flanked either side by two life-size cut-outs of cartoon knights in shining armour, with large holes where their faces should be, enabling passers-by to put their heads through. The effect is of a seaside pier sideshow, made even more so by the pair of extravagantly frocked damsels drumming up trade for photo opportunities beside them. While at first glance this stunt might look like a conceptual gag to accompany Purcarete's production, which arrives opens this week as part of Edinburgh International Festival's theatre programme, on closer scrutiny it becomes clear that all this is an elaborately staged ad for a well-known brand of cle...

The last time Maurice Roeves appeared at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe was in Gregory Burke's debut play, Gagarin Way. While the sell-out run at the Traverse introduced the world to a raw new writing talent in John Tiffany's production, for Roeves, an even more significant moment came at the end of the play's run. That was when he and his partner, Veronica Rawlings-Jackson, tied the knot, with a civil ceremony that took place in the upstairs foyer of the Traverse itself. “Vanessa and I knew each other years ago,” says Roeves, “but I was having too good a time after my divorce [from Scots actor Jan Wilson], and she went off and got married, and that seemed to be that. Then, years later, I was doing a play in Kilburn, and she walked in to the theatre. I recognised her, and things took their course. We were the first people to get married in the Traverse after the law changed. A decade on, Roeves and Rawlings-Jackson are still together, and are the joint driving...

Daniel Kitson – As of 1.52pm on Friday April 27th 2012, This Show Has No Title Traverse Theatre – 3 stars The first surprise of Daniel Kitson's new show is his appearance. The stand-up turned sit-down story-teller's shaggy locks and beard of old have been excised in favour of a shaven-head that makes him look, well, harder. Second, it's his material. As the title hints at, there is the distinct possibility that Kitson didn't have a clue what he was going to do when he signed up for his Edinburgh run. Or maybe he did, because the script he reads from while sat at a trestle table on a bare stage is a stubbornly self-reflexive form of anti-theatre cum artistic suicide note that would put Alfred Jarry to shame. The story Kitson reads, then, is categorically not the sort of lo-fi affirmation of life that he could have dined out on and charmed audiences with until time immemorial. Rather, it's an angry and contrary two-fingers to expectations which charts hi...

When Will Merrick signed up to join his school drama group, he never expected to be sitting in a Cornwall hotel room on his day off from the latest Richard Curtis film. Such a high profile role may have come as a direct result of the exposure he received playing horny farm-boy Alo in series five and six of cult teen TV, drama, Skins, but Merrick never expected to be in that either. As the nineteen year old prepares for an Edinburgh Festival Fringe run of Simon Stephens' play, Punk Rock, with the theatre company he formed with friends from school, this is more where the Herefordshire-born actor expected to be at this stage in his career. As it is, the tellingly named No Prophet theatre company's two week Edinburgh run is likely to attract more attention than many similar shoestring outfits. “In a way this makes sense of how I got into acting,” Merrick says. “We all used to come up to Edinburgh with a company called Close Up Theatre, which was the school compan...

Statements After Arrest Under the Immorality Act – Assembly Hall – 3 stars As shocking as it seems in the twenty-first century global village, marriage between races is still illegal in some countries. Athol Fugard’s apartheid era play that forms part of Assembly’s South African season of work may date from 1972, but its depiction of state control of the most intimate acts remains timely, and could apply as much to the recent outcry regarding same sex marriages as the situation Fugard depicts. A white woman lies naked in bed with a black man, sharing private moments that go beyond sex. If it weren’t for the shadowy figure sitting in a wheelchair in the corner, this could be scene from some multi-cultural Eden. As it is, such a liaison is a risk to both their lives. While even the idea of an immorality act sounds like something from a dystopian fiction, the full horror of such an invasion of human liberty never quite hits home in Kim Kerfoot’s production for the Theat...

Lowland Hall, Royal Highland Centre 4 stars Don’t be fooled by the first half of the title of Christoph Marthaler’s musical and physical romp for Theatre Basel. Marthaler’s audacious production may give a nod to Lerner and Loewe’s showbiz reinvention of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, but it too is a Frankenstein’s monster of a mash-up, with sources as diverse as Ravel, George Michael and Bryan Adams to give its characters voice. One shouldn’t look too hard for plot either among the 1970s retro geek-chic attired adult pupils of a language lab overseen by a dapper if increasingly drunk Henry Higgins type who oversees his charges with flamboyant disdain. As the shopping channel plays out on a flat-screen TV in the corner above a row of booths, words become increasingly meaningless as each pupil’s inner life blossoms through the international language of song. At times this resembles the sort of old-time Christmas variety shows that the likes of Glee have lampooned so well. A...

When Woza Albert! first appeared in Edinburgh during the Festival Fringe of 1982, apartheid was still firmly in place, and black contemporary South African theatre was largely unknown in Europe. As a major revival of Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema and Barney Simon's devised play arrives in Edinburgh in a production by the Market Theatre of Johannesburg, who first presented it more than thirty years ago, the major season of new South African work that follows in its wake suggests things have changed for the better. But have they? Prince Lamla, director of this new production of the trio's satire about what happens when a born again Christ turns up in apartheid-era South Africa is as pertinent as ever, if not more so. “South Africa is a very complex country,” Lamla says. “Post-apartheid, we've experienced so much, and there is change happening very slowly, but it is not always good. The education system is getting messed up and so on, so I never see Woza Albert! a...