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The Myth of the Singular Moment

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Four stars A man and a woman sit either side of the aisle on the London train. Their eyes meet just for a second, but in that fleeting moment a world of possibilities opens up that sends each on their own personal life and death destiny. As one speeds towards a cliff top with the intention of throwing himself into the void, the other carries with her an unopened letter outlining the results of what may or may not be a life-threatening disease. From such everyday beginnings, Jim Harbourne’s piece of lo-fi musical storytelling blossoms into a rich tapestry of wisdom and experience set in a world where the decisions you make can change things forever. Harbourne and fellow actor/musician Kirsty Ella McIntyre are the only people on a stage cluttered with a pile of musical instruments, a couple of chairs and a sparkly rucksack. The initial folksy air conjured up by harmonium and guitar patterns soon becomes the soundtrack to a profound hour-long meditation...

What I Know (About What My Grandfather Didn’t Know)

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Four stars Revolution is a family affair in Sonia Gardes’ very personal solo piece, in which she excavates her own ancestry to discover the umbilical links that stem from the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s to her own Occupy-inspired activism. Under the banner of her Objectora company, Gardes does this using a mixture of story-telling, puppetry and projections of old photographs. Despite the title, the focus of this is actually Gardes’ great grand-father, whose runaway adventures inside the anarchist movement in Spain left its mark on the family he left behind to the extent that even talking about him was considered taboo. Several generations on, Gardes is squaring up to the uncomfortable truths of the void her great-grandfather left, along with the accidental influences on her own righteous anger. As she embodies the spirit of him through a puppet which looms large even when not being operated, Gardes has fun with her family tree, despite the long-te...

Colin MacIntyre – The Origins of Ivor Punch

Colin MacIntyre was standing in the doorway outside Oran Mor when he came up with the idea of calling himself The Mull Historical Society, the name he has gone under for all musical ventures bar two albums over the last two decades. Since reclaiming himself as Mull Historical Society once more, there have been three new records, including last year’s Bernard Butler-produced Wakelines album. For MacIntyre to have his first stage play, The Origins of Ivor Punch, on at the venue where he made such a momentous decision feels poetically fitting. Presented as part of A Play, A Pie and A Pint, the phenomenally successful lunchtime theatre strand which has become a Glasgow West End fixture, the play is inspired by the Mull-born writer’s fantastical debut novel, The Letters of Ivor Punch, which won the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award in 2015. All of which makes it something of a homecoming of sorts. “I’d sent out all my demos under my own name, but then I wrote...