Category Archives: Theatre

Reviews of theatre work.

EdFringe Talk: Perfect Pairing: A Wine Tasting Dancegustation

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“Adjusting my life and creativity around my neurodivergent brain, giving myself some grace and how to weaponise hyperfocus to make cool art.”

WHO: Xavier McGettigan

WHAT: “Enjoy four wines paired perfectly with four dance pieces in this original Australian wine-tasting-meets-dance-theatre production. Perfect Pairing invites the theatre-goer’s favourite interval treat into the spotlight and challenges the connoisseur to développé the sensory strength of their wine-tasting talent. In an age where pairing wine with food is reaching its very limits, why not pair the mambo with a merlot, a pop & lock with a prosecco, even chassé with a chardonnay? Don’t think about it too hard, drink some well-crafted wine alongside a showing of some delicious dancing! Assisted by Geelong Arts Centre.”

WHERE: Greenside @ Infirmary Street – Olive Studio (Venue 236) 

WHEN: VARIES (50 min)

MORE: Click Here!

Is this your first time to Edinburgh?

This is my first time in Scotland, in fact it’s my first time in the United Kingdom altogether! I’ve always heard how amazing Ed Fringe is, especially being a fan of quite a few UK comedians (even more now thanks to Taskmaster being my favourite TV show), so it’s pretty incredible to be a part of such a prestigious festival among over 3,000 other shows. Perfect Pairing is not only my international debut, but also the first international performance by Attitude Dance Company, we can’t wait!

What are the big things you’ve learned since 2022 and have you absorbed any of the lessons yet?

2022 was an exciting year, I got married to my Perfect Pairing Co-Producer husband Jayson Fry in April, and immediately went into rehearsals for our award-winning production of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (oh yes, another UK connection, I grew up on the original Hitchhiker’s radio play on cassette during family trips) and got my ADHD diagnosis later in the year. Adjusting my life and creativity around my neurodivergent brain, giving myself some grace and how to weaponise hyperfocus to make cool art.

Tell us about your show.

Perfect Pairing actually came to life when my husband and I were celebrating an anniversary at our favourite local restaurant, The Hot Chicken Project. After hearing Laura Viva, the THCP Wine Manager talk passionately with other patrons about wine, we asked her to take us through a bottle of her favourite wine. Not knowing much about wine ourselves, we were taken not only by her knowledge, but her passion and “no bullshit” approach to talking about wine. She often says, that it doesn’t matter what you know, if you drink a wine and you like it, it’s good wine. At ADC like to think about contemporary dance in the same way, avoiding elitism and taking the pressure off audiences from having to “get it” to enjoy it.

Attitude has been around for 14 years, starting as a dance school, then in 2014 focusing purely on creating original dance theatre, becoming Attitude Dance Company. A few of the Perfect Pairing cast have been around since the dance school days! We performed a preview performance in our home town of Geelong, but the Edinburgh Fringe season of Perfect Pairing is its world premiere! We hope to tour Australia over the next two years, and maybe beyond, who knows?

What should your audience see at the festivals after they’ve seen your show?

We’re traveling over to Edinburgh and are performing at Greenside alongside two other Geelong/Surf Coast companies, Project Connect who are presenting “a/lone”, an original physical theatre piece about loneliness and “Shadows of Angels” by Anglesea Performing Arts, a play about a true story of crime in 1920s Australia. Both shows feature live, orginal music by Kirstin Honey (she’s amazing), and I also happen to be one of the two performers in “a/lone”.

In the first week of Fringe you can watch “a/lone” and Perfect Pairing back to back in the Olive Studio and “Shadows of Angels” leads into Perfect Pairing in the second week of the Festival. Either way, we have an awesome double-bill of Aussie theatre with a wine tasting during the second show!

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EdFringe Talk: A Mirrored Monet

Posted in Theatre by

“I thought my show would be too big and too expensive to produce at the Fringe. But it’s coming together and it will give me a chance to see the audience reaction to it.”

WHO: Carmel Owen

WHAT: “In the dramatic musical A Mirrored Monet, it’s 1916 and the painter Claude Monet struggles to complete his government commission for the Water Lilies. Esteemed his greatest work, to him it meant regular deliveries of food, fuel, wine, and cigarettes – hard to find during the war. He is suffering a creative block as WWI advances and worrying that unless he can paint as before, the lifeline of deliveries will cease. He searches for answers, taking us back to his young-artist days in late 19th century Paris with Renoir, Manet and Camille, his first wife and model.”

WHERE: Greenside @ Nicolson Square – Emerald Theatre (Venue 209) 

WHEN: VARIES (60 min)

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Is this your first time to Edinburgh?

I was in Edinburgh as a visitor to the Fringe and Scotland last summer (2022) and fell in love with both Scotland and the Fringe. I liked the open and free feel of it, the crowds in the streets, the games and performances in the streets as well as in the make-shift theaters –it was a bit like a medieval fair with performers, street people and food of all sorts available as well as people of all ages, but particularly young people having a great time. Although I could see the challenges of putting up a musical in the environment of solo and smaller shows, I did see things that made me think it was possible and that there might be audiences for that too.

Although I’ve been involved in other festivals, nothing as big or engaging as the Fringe so have no comparison, there is nothing to compare it to that I know of.

What are the big things you’ve learned since 2022 and have you absorbed any of the lessons yet?

Attending a Fringe session in London in January 2023, I learned a great deal more about what it would take to put up a show. I was encouraged by the wonderful people presenting there and connected with a venue where there were experienced and connected people who helped me see that I could do it, put my musical on at the Fringe. I didn’t really believe that would be possible in 2022 summer. I thought my show would be too big and too expensive to produce at the Fringe. But it’s coming together and it will give me a chance to see the audience reaction to it.

Tell us about your show.

I am the author (music, lyrics and book) but many creative individuals have contributed to it over time. It started out as a story just about young Monet and his struggles –then with a previous book writer but I realized it had to be more and that Monet at 76 was far more interesting. I had to rewrite the book.

I have organized a few investors who support my work to join me in producing it this summer at the Fringe. My Director Fraser Grant and Music Director Neil Metcalfe are both Scots in Edinburgh who put together auditions in Edinburgh which I was able to participate in by zoom from my home in NYC. We hired all the actors except one (the young Monet) at those auditions in May this year—all Scots who live in either Edinburgh or Glasgow or nearby. The one actor from the US played the role of Young Monet for me in an initial reading and was truly irreplaceable so he is with us now too.

The musical will premiere at the Fringe on August 17th, having had its initial reading/developmental workshop in April 2022 at the Dramatists Guild Fund’s Music Hall in NYC.

We are hoping that this Fringe production is the beginning of a long life for A MIRRORED MONET and look forward to it touring and playing at major venues globally. It is an international musical and Claude Monet is a character known to people all over the world who love his work and will enjoy spending an evening or afternoon with him learning more about him as a person…his struggles as well as his successes.

What should your audience see at the festivals after they’ve seen your show?

I would encourage audiences to go see more musicals and to support them! Some new musicals I’ve spotted in the programme that I’m looking forward to seeing are Alan Turing – Guilty of Love, Café L’Arté, No Love Songs, and Woven.

It’s all out there to be experienced and the Fringe is just the place to see a lot of new and exciting work. Go for it!

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‘Al Murray: Gig For Victory’ (Assembly Square Gardens – Palais du Variete, until AUG 29)

Posted in 5*, Assembly Hall, Comedy, EdFestivals, EdFestivals 2022, Rated: Outstanding, Stand-Up, Theatre by

“It is a joy to watch and is even better in the flesh. Go if you have the chance”

Editorial Rating:  5 Stars (Outstanding)

Earlier in the week I’d attended a Fringe show. There were three of us in the audience. Two on stage. I felt for them. I’d guess they felt for me. Audience participation with three audience members his hard yakka for all concerned.

It did seem odd then that my next show was Al Murray, arguably the biggest name at this year’s Fringe. I got there half an hour early and the already the queue for the landlord snaked out of Assembly Gardens and down the roads towards Underbelly. That is the Fringe for you – in all its ridiculous sublimity. If you come to Edinburgh genuinely do try to see as much as you can – from the big names to the small, from the old to the new.

But to our tale… how do you review Al Murray? In a way it is pointless. You don’t analyse our national treasures. You bask. You understand that he is a very British sort of genius – he couldn’t have come into existence anywhere else – and you enjoy.

The crowd was large and boisterous. The circus tent in the gardens crackling in anticipation. And then it began. He ambles in from the back of the venue, gently caressing the bald heads he passes by and bounds on stage. Beer covers the first few rows. Some are surprised. Really?

And there he is before us resplendent in that burgundy blazer, swinging a pint pot, gleaming, celebrating us those that bested Covid, happily throwing crisps at an overweight man that he admits he is surprised made it through the pandemic. The yeoman of all he surveys. A man sure of his opinions but confused with how the world is going: the character is eternal.

The pandemic has been good for the landlord. He has waited all his life for this moment. Covid was as he says ‘’our blitz’’. The moment we stood as one and did our bit for Queen and Country. For the first time we join the ranks of British heroes. We, he tells us, are the survivors and he wants to learn who is in the lifeboat with him: who made it through? So much of Murray’s show is unique to the night itself.

There’s little point telling you what happened or highlight particular gags because there’s just so much audience work. There’s no one better at it. Many try. Many manage for five minutes or so… but for the majority of the show. That isn’t high-wire stuff. How anyone can elicit so many laughs from two questions: ‘’what’s your name? What do you do?’’ I’ll never know. Flitting back and forward, weaving their lives together, Ollie in the corner must know Evelyn the gynaecologist and the jaeger bomb Durham boys. The strokers who go for a wee within ten minutes. None of these people will be there tonight. They won’t happen tonight. Something though will.

Throughout the course of the evening we meet Rod in finance, Dim Dave who ‘works for a solicitor’, a sheep farmer, a slow brick maker, a family lawyer (‘and a cold wind whips through the hall”) and many more. At one point he speaks to Deborah who has a play on at the fringe about WWII. The landlord lets loose a stunning two minute summary of the relatively obscure war story the play is about and then back to the important things of talking to the audience.

Of course, the badinage ends up back to the themes of the pandemic, our leaders, our survival against the odds of Covid and in the end he moves from the audience to the central theme that the last the two years we have had to endure.

Al’s theory of how each generation is perfect for the challenges the world throws at it. Our grandparents fought Nazism singlehandedly without help whilst we rose to the challenge we faced, a challenge only our generation could face: staying in the house watching TV for four months.

Twice.

Whilst being paid by the government.

Tonight’s show will be similar yet entirely different. Where he goes is entirely dependent on who shows up. Only a handful of comics could pull this sort of show off and fewer still relentlessly hit such heights.

There’s little point dwelling on the technicalities. Murray is one of the cleverest, quickest-witted comics out there. You know that. Everyone knows that. It is like explaining Monty Python or David Attenborough or David Gower’s cover drive. His character allows him to explore areas of life that others shy away from or – if they do – tend to veer to shock or righteousness.

One minor point: for an act so on the button of current affairs and with such an intuitive understanding of what the British public thinks… I was a little surprised that there was no mention (in the show I attended) of that other comedian who plays a character that happens to use the actor’s real name: Jerry Sadowitz. I’d have thought that was ripe material for the landlord particularly given some of the gags early on about the various genders of grandchildren that we might boast about our Covid heroism too.

But let’s not dwell too much on this. That is a throwaway thought rather than a criticism.

His character is timeless and needs no introduction: the garrulous British blowhard who almost knows what he is talking about and has a view about everything. It is a joy to watch and is even better in the flesh. Go if you have the chance. Just make sure you know your job and don’t try to claim you are an acrobat.

Come for the crisps being flung at you. Stay for the white wine for the lady. Get your red blazers on and join him in his lifeboat.

 

‘Bee Story’ (Underbelly Bristo Square Cowbarn, until AUG 28)

Posted in 5*, Comedy, EdFestivals 2022, Rated: Outstanding, Theatre, Underbelly by

“Bee Story is everything you would want in a children’s show. It is charming. It is lovely. It is magical”.

Editorial Rating: 5 Stars (Outstanding)

All good things come to an end and my Edinburgh Fringe 2022 finished with Bee Story. This is an Australian non-verbal circus show… there seems to be a lot of them about this year. Have they given up on beating us at sport? Is there something different in the Vegemite? Who knows? This trend is very welcome.

So yes, I have seen a few similar shows this year. I haven’t though seen a better one. Bee Story is everything you would want in a children’s show. It is charming. It is lovely. It is magical.

I doubt there is a better opening to any Fringe show than that of Bee Story. They may return – or you may see it elsewhere – so mum is the word but the first time you see Queen Bee was a moment of stunned delight. Neither I nor my youngest could believe it nor did we guess immediately how they did it.

It doesn’t stop from there. Over the course of the next hour there are unicycles, clowning (the facial expressions are simply wonderful), juggling, juggling with knives, some astonishing floor work, ballet, physical comedy (there’s a great scene with a snake and another with a net), acrobatics, gymnastic, and buckets of fun. Neither I nor the youngster could take our eyes off it. It was as if a mini-Cirque du Soleil had landed in Bristo Square. We were far from alone: there were spontaneous rounds of applause and whooping and hollering throughout.

The team at Arc Circus – Robbie Curtis and Lizzie McRae are seriously talented. Where else will you see a woman dressed as a Queen Bee being held in a series of bizarre positions whilst playing pop songs on a flute? You know, and I know, the answer is nowhere.

We meet Queen Bee and Worker Bee. Her Royal Highness – usually accompanied by God Save The Queen – wants more honey and poor old Worker Bee is doing his darnedest to get it but can’t quite. Then, from nowhere, the hive is hit by a bushfire.

Queen Bee has to lose her heirs and graces whilst Worker Bee enjoys a new friend as they work together to build a new hive. Of course, that is harder than it looks.

A magical hour with important messages. Teamwork and collaboration matters, friendship is key, that we need to care for our environment and that bees really do matter.

There’s probably some important British-Australian analysis on overcoming class divisions too but leave that to the grown-up reviewers.

The important part was my daughter and I loved this show and she said it was her favourite of the Fringe. She particularly loved it when Queen Bee poked her toy bee with her flute. I mean, that’s the sort of wonder you only get at the Fringe… and the sort of thing that makes children fall in love with theatre. A genuinely lovely little thing that I’d recommend to anyone.

Come for the buzz. Stay for the seizing of the means of production. Get your yellow/black coats on and go see this.

‘The Elephant in the Room’ (Assembly Rooms, Powder Room, until AUG 27)

Posted in 5*, EdFestivals, EdFestivals 2022, Rated: Outstanding, Theatre by

“Shetty’s vigorous physical style, expressive face, and radioactive eyes draw the audience into the action as she regularly makes direct eye-contact with everyone in the auditorium.”

Editorial Rating: 5 Stars (Outstanding)

After a very successful tour of the USA including the prestigious Kennedy Centre in Washington DC, this is the Fringe debut for a lively and engaging one-woman play, written and performed by Priyanka Shetty. Here for just the one week in a smallish studio auditorium in a marquee on George Street, be prepared for the driving force of Ms Shetty’s electrifyingly physical performance.

The seemingly autobiographical story tells of what it’s like to grow up in India as a young girl and then defy your family to try and make it as an actress as “a brown girl in Trump’s America”. Shetty’s vigorous physical style, expressive face, and radioactive eyes draw the audience into the action as she regularly makes direct eye-contact with everyone in the auditorium. There is much humour at the expense of the stereotypical features of a female south Asian upbringing: aggressively aspirational parents, judgemental aunts, religion (sometimes in the shape of the elephant-god Ganesha), and Bollywood movies.

Shetty makes full use of the small stage and basic set to vividly re-enact her story in a number of physical styles, including everything from yoga to Bollywood dance and song. As the show progresses, the emotional tone gradually changes from one of youthful optimism underscored by the heartaches of family life and romance, to the stark realities of the American theatre audition circuit. Shetty’s wry depiction of the serial rejections that can be experienced will raise a rueful smile to any fellow Fringe actors seeing this show. As an Asian woman, she often refers to her “otherness”, sometimes self-deprecatingly, sometimes not. This aspect of her life doubles as a significant factor in her own life story and a revealing perspective on everyone else from the perspective of an outsider.

Single-actor shows are quite common at the Fringe, but this one stuck in the mind for me due to Shetty’s often almost conversational delivery. At no time did it seem like a stagey dramatic monologue; rather someone I’d just met showing me the story of their life. Use of props and time-consuming costume changes are sensibly kept to a minimum to maintain pace and story development.

The phrase from which the show takes its title is a common metaphor for embarrassing problems which everyone knows exist, but are scared to mention. After one or two red herrings along the way, we’re left in no doubt at the end by Shetty’s now angry tone what the identity is of this particularly problematic pachyderm – I won’t spoil things for you by giving it a name. This show is only on until the end of this week, so:

Come for the elephant. Stay for a whirlwind performance. Leave having seen a great Fringe debut. So get your coats on and go see this!

 

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‘Earwig’ (Assembly Rooms, Front Room, until AUG 27)

Posted in 5*, EdFestivals, EdFestivals 2022, Rated: Outstanding, Theatre by

“The three energetic performers beetle away to pack a lot of fun into an hour’s traffic on the stage.”

Editorial Rating:  Stars (Outstanding)

Whilst perhaps not the most attractive of titles, this is one of the most unusual and interesting pieces of theatre I’ve seen at this year’s Fringe. After successfully touring throughout the UK, Manchester-based theatre company Time and Again bring us the quirky story of entomologist Marigold Webb, whose deafness excludes her from conversations not directly before her face.

Laura Crow’s script makes much use of insect life as metaphor, with characters being likened to wasps, hornets, golden tiger beetles, and the like. The production by directors Catherine Cowdrey and Samantha Vaughan offers an hour that is both entertaining and informative without taking itself too seriously. Robyn Greeves anchors the show as the protagonist, calmly and wryly narrating the difficulties faced in the 1920s by a woman who is not only deaf, but trying to make her way in the male-dominated scientific world. Adam Martin-Brooks first comes across as a Bertie Woosterish toff, but as the play progresses he mutates into Marigold’s domineering and abusive husband. Beth Nolan gives eye-catching performances as both Marigold’s down-to-earth mother and as Bryony Varden, the very personification of a flighty jazz-age flapper. A projection screen at the back of the set is used very much as if it were another character, with its captions often interacting with both the cast and the audience.

This is also a very visual and physical piece of theatre. One of the high points was a vividly choreographed set piece between Marigold and Bryony supposedly reading quietly in a library. Their exchanged looks, messages, and attempts to ignore each other and do some studying are expressed with increasingly terpsichorean verve and at one stage even break into a Charleston. Along with the screen captions, the pacy action often has the feel of a silent movie of the era in which the play is set. Throughout the action, we are subtly reminded of Marigold’s deafness and the problems it causes in a number of inventive and dramatically effective ways.

Performed in a smallish black-box auditorium in George Street, this is a little gem of a play, with the three energetic performers beetling away to pack a lot of fun into an hour’s traffic on the stage. Come for the entomology. Stay for the Charleston. Leave with ants in your pants and a spring in your step. Get your coats on and beetle along to see this!

 

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‘Cecil Beaton’s Diaries’ (Greenside at Nicolson Square – Lime Studio, until AUG 27)

Posted in EdFestivals 2022, Rated: Nae Bad, Theatre by

“As we romp through the highlights and lowlights of a lively and eventful career, there is much Wodehousian whimsy and theatrical high camp to raise many a smile.”

Editorial Rating: 4 Stars (Nae Bad )

Society and celebrity photographer Sir Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) was something of a legend in his own lifetime. Also an award-winning designer in the world of fashion, theatre, and film, he was a lifelong diarist, and his journals read like a Who’s Who of the great and the good of the 20th century. His picture portraits of queens and commoners flattered his subjects, but after his death, the pen-pictures revealed in his unexpurgated diaries most certainly did not. These documents are very entertainingly adapted for the stage and performed in this one-man show by Richard Stirling (Bridgerton, The Crown, Jeeves and Wooster).

1930s Rolleiflex camera in hand, the Panama-hatted, linen-suited Stirling looks every inch the suave Beaton, his note-perfect dialogue engagingly capturing the aristocratic hauteur with which his subject viewed the world. As we romp through the highlights and lowlights of a lively and eventful career, there is much Wodehousian whimsy and theatrical high camp to raise many a smile. But in stark counterpoint, the less genial side of Beaton’s character often pokes through. His private thoughts about even royal clients could be mercilessly cruel: one laugh-out-loud moment came when Princess Margaret was referred to as looking like “a wealthy seaside landlady”. No punches are pulled here when it is also revealed that at one point in the 1930s, Beaton was suspected of holding – in common with many of his class at that time – anti-semitic views. He strenuously denied this, but for some time as a result he was blacklisted by several Hollywood studios. It is perhaps revealing that when Beaton himself became the subject of a portrait in oils by the artist Francis Bacon, he loathed the nightmarish Dorian Gray-like vision that Bacon created.

Whilst Beaton may not remain a household name these days, this mid-day show nonetheless attracted a quite sizeable and receptive audience who shared the roomy black-box auditorium with me. Stirling’s fine performance is well supported by a generous selection of Beaton’s most famous images, which are back-projected onto a large screen at the back of the sparsely-furnished set. But perhaps a little more in the way of scenery and a few smart decorative touches might visually improve this show about a man to whom style and appearances were everything? Nonetheless, the sustained applause at the end confirmed my impression of a worthwhile and entertaining piece of theatre.

So come for the photos. Stay for the pithy dialogue. Leave with a smile on your face. Get your smartest coats on and go see this.

 

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‘Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man’ (Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose, until AUG 28)

Posted in 5*, EdFestivals 2022, Gilded Balloon, Theatre by

“The flamboyant style and innuendo-laden patter had the audience shrieking with laughter from the outset. “

Editorial Rating: 5 Stars (Outstanding)

The programme note “Includes scenes of a sexual nature” is putting it mildly for this hilariously raucous and bawdy romp. Based on a book of the same name by Dan Anderson and Maggie Berman, it comes to the Edinburgh Fringe after productions in Las Vegas and Off-Broadway New York. Not for the shy or straight-laced, the tips of the title are presented as a step-by-step guide to sex in the format of a scholarly presentation that quickly escalates into something like Love Island-style reality TV or an X-rated late-night quiz show.

At the centre of the action is Dan, the “Gay man” of the show’s title, played by Adam Fane, who hosts the evening like Graham Norton on acid and is camper than a field full of tents. His flamboyant style and innuendo-laden patter had the audience shrieking with laughter from the outset. His foil is Robyn, a bookish ingenue who vainly tries to sustain the pretence of an academic seminar amidst an onslaught of dick jokes and phallic symbols. While we’re on the subject of the penis, come prepared to volunteer a nickname for the male pudendum to be used for the rest of the show. I heard the audience propose everything from the workaday “knob” to the exotically suggestive “beef whistle”, but the one we ended up with was “Ever-Ready”. The third cast member is Bradley Allen Meyer, who plays Stefan the stage manager. Something of a stud who clearly excites the interest of Robyn. Stefan is used as a life model and stripper for some of the tips demonstrated.

Things were cranked up another notch when a little more audience participation saw three brave ladies take the stage to mime various arousal techniques under Dan’s instruction. This greatly excited the other women in the audience including my wife – normally a presbyterian sort of lady – who started fondling me in a way she hasn’t for a wee while. Dan whipped things up even further to whooping hysteria when we were invited to mime something – modesty forbids me from saying what – using our rolled-up programmes. At this stage my wife giggled: “This is like a Hen night in Blackpool!” (And she told me she was going to a conference…)

This ribald laugh-out-loud show is an absolute hoot. The large auditorium was nearly full when I was there and I can only imagine things getting even busier as word gets around. So come for the Sex Tips, stay for the laughs, and leave with a few nifty ideas to buck up your love life. Get your sexiest coats on and go see this!

 

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‘Bird with Kylie Vincent’ (Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose, until AUG 28)

Posted in 4*, Comedy, EdFestivals 2022, Gilded Balloon, Rated: Nae Bad, Stand-Up, Theatre by

“This is edgy and very funny stuff, delivered with self-deprecating wit that invites much laughter”

Editorial Rating: 4 Stars (Nae Bad)

There is no shortage of stand-up comedy at the Fringe these days, which is rather taking over from theatre. This production (and I think that’s the right word for it) comes somewhere between the two. Kylie Vincent takes the stage as a feisty in-your-face young comedian, opening with some funny if fairly conventional observation about being an American in Edinburgh.

But we quickly realise there’s going to be more to this act than meets the eye. The traditional relationship trope of performer and audience is exploded by her analysis of a heckle she received at a gig in New York – to which we listen on audiotape – before this leads her off into a revealing and confessional exploration of her self-image and personal life. The usual idea of a comic making wry observations about the world we all share is abandoned as we are drawn into the sometimes dysfunctional and abusive world of her “white trash” family upbringing. This is edgy and very funny stuff, delivered with self-deprecating wit that invites much laughter – but I noticed there were several highly introspective episodes when there was scarcely a giggle for some minutes as the audience were raptly absorbed in listening to stories that were a little too painful for amusement. Jerry Sadowitz this ain’t – and I mean that as a compliment.

The eponymous “Bird” is Kylie’s name for herself. She sees herself and others as metaphorical animals, with other friends and family referred to by names such as “the deer” or “the gazelle”. Tellingly, all of the males in her life are monkeys or apes, with her father being “the gorilla”. Although a fine emotional rollercoaster of a show, I felt that overall it fell a little too far down between the two stools of dramatic monologue and stand-up comedy to be an out-and-out success in its current form. But Kylie Vincent is someone to watch: this combination of misery memoir and wryly observational humour felt like a work in progress that has much potential and I suspect we’ll be hearing more from Ms Vincent in years to come.

So come for the laughs, stay for the heartbreak, and leave thinking a little more about the ups and downs of your own family life. Get your coats on and go see this emerging new genre of tragicomedy.

 

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‘Les Dawson: Flying High’ (Assembly George Square, Gordon Aikman Theatre, until AUG 25)

Posted in Comedy, EdFestivals 2022, Rated: Outstanding, Theatre by

“Tim Withnall’s script perfectly captures Dawson’s often poetic turns of phrase, with Culshaw’s note-perfect delivery setting up pirouetting metaphors to be brought crashing to earth with hob-nailed one-liners.”

Editorial Rating: 5 Stars (Outstanding)

The huge queue outside the venue before the show bore witness to the enduring popularity of both John Culshaw (BBC R4 Dead Ringers) and the comedian to whom this one-man show is a tribute. The 450-seat theatre was packed – I’d book early if you haven’t already got one of the hottest tickets in town. Those familiar with his work will know Culshaw is a master impressionist, but he has a head start here in bearing a more than passing resemblance to the lugubrious Les, his elastic face cheerfully twisting into that familiar expression akin to a bulldog chewing a humbug.

We first meet Les at the peak of his career, crossing the Atlantic on Concorde, looking back over his rags-to-riches life story, delivered in Dawson’s trademark deadpan style. We’re taken from his childhood on the streets of Manchester to his days as a pianist in a Parisian brothel and the TV stardom that lay beyond. Tim Withnall’s script perfectly captures Dawson’s often poetic turns of phrase, with Culshaw’s note-perfect delivery setting up pirouetting metaphors to be brought crashing to earth with hob-nailed one-liners.

Dominating the set upstage is a huge TV screen, on which we regularly see re-enacted episodes from the comedian’s life and career. All parts are superbly played by Culshaw, ranging from Dawson’s Cissie and Ada double act with Roy Barraclough, BBC newsreader John Humphreys, to Opportunity Knocks compere Hughie Green. An upright piano enables singalong audience participation as Les murders two or three songs in his laugh-out-loud tone-deaf style.

A show about a comedian who’s been dead for 30 years and whose heyday was half a century ago inevitably draws an audience with an older age profile. But the laughter of a few young people around me suggested that, while some mother-in-law jokes might be showing their age a bit, there’s still some mileage left in Dawson’s curmudgeonly wry take on life.

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