The Yellow Wallpaper was a short story written in the nineteenth century, whose underlying themes continue to resonate 130 years later. A couple have rented a mansion for the summer, with Jane having recently given birth. Her husband John - a doctor – diagnoses her with depression and prescribes a ‘rest cure’. She takes up enforced residence in the attic room, and has various drugs administered to her. She is not permitted reading or writing materials. Stripped of her voice,

A circus tent is an interesting place to stage a clown show of such theological proportions but it does seem to completely transform into a more cryptic space for an hour of strangely subconscious shenanigans. Sam Fishman, Corey Podell and John Norris seem to have struck gold here, and it is a remarkably accessible hour of clowning. I coincidentally caught Podell's direction of a far more out there late night slot at Banshees. It was fantastic. The material here is definitely

Heavily drawing from a very Brechtian sort of clowning, Diagnostic Trouble Code's debut play is a fantastic romp through an imagined event. It is stylistically compelling, performed with some panache and despite not having the most biting of politics it focuses on interesting intersections between agriculture, speech and the climate crisis. The play deals with a fictional rural town Cropshire, the banning of vegetables there by a bureaucratic government, and how this decision

Morten Grove Frandsen is thrilling in this espresso shot of a new Opera, part of the enormously successful #DANISH showcase. Drawn from posts by young people on social media, it is a surprisingly harrowing text that moves as Frandsen moves through the strangely backroom space constructed beautifully in Louise Beck's immersive, immediate production. The audience is sat on yellow crates in a dimly lit space. Frandsen among us, his singing is immediate and moving. It's difficul

Butoh, says performer Joanna Rosenfeld, is somewhere in between dance and physical theatre. The dance it practices is a dance of darkness, a dance of death. Integral to the post-war Japanese artistic conversation, Butoh emerged from the pain of a traumatised society, yet it is far more than simply harrowing. It is a medium that can be equally sublime and grotesque, sometimes flitting between these two poles in the same sequence. Joanna Rosenfeld's Resonant VOID is a Butoh pe

The work of Scottish company Without Compromise Theatre is, simply put, essential. Their theatre is a brutal, unapologetic look into the conditions of life in Scottish working class communities. Often, and sometimes even to some aesthetic success, this section of society is presented in a stylised manner. However, what we have in Without Compromise's latest proposition Collateral Damage is a truthful presentation of a family in crisis, written with great care, and performed w

Gabi Flares is touching in this experimental one-woman show Deluge. It boasts a myriad of ideas, and there are some lovely passages in this one, but it never quite coheres for me. Flares is acrobatic, athletic and always compelling. She begins the play with her head poking through a ladder, a sort of Beckettian restriction. She is astonishing here; the ladder is almost an extension of her body as she begins to think about the end. She asks the audience to say something we w

It’s an intimate environment: a comfy chair, standard lamp, books, drinks. It feels safe. We have stepped into psychotherapist Adam’s domain. Adam tells us about his sessions with Isabel. Her issues, while important to her, should be meat and drink to a man with his training, qualifications, experience and empathy. But he’s distracted: he’s wistfully thinking about another client, Bill. Isabel is clearly nobody’s fool and calls him out on his failure to listen, especially whe

As the name might suggest, Jules Verne’s classic Around the World in 80 Days is one of the inspirations for this production. The other is the somewhat less well-known Georges Méliès. While also a magician and actor, Méliès was a pioneer of film making, being particularly renowned for science fiction and special effects. He made his first film in 1896, with a further 500 to follow. The advent of the First World War brought this prolific work to a shuddering halt, though, with

Statistics vary, but it’s believed that only 2% of actors manage to make a sustainable living from the profession. While talent will be one factor, it is not necessarily the defining one. The resilience and courage to endure humiliation, rejection and financial hardship will be required. Yet still, high hopes are in abundance. How Not To Make It In America follows a young Australian actor, Matt, who ventures to New York in the summer of 2001 in search of his big break. He’s o

A large stage awaits, with wooden boarding as a partial backdrop, a couple of crates and large yellow balls. Intriguing. After a hiatus of ten years, DON GNU returns to Edinburgh with M.I.S All Night Long. Two men appear, suited almost identically, with similar moustaches and slicked back hair: men in sandals. They are carrying a large piece of boarding – seemingly the missing segment to the stage backdrop – through the audience, clambering over and around them to the stage.

We’re still lining up to go into the venue and the shenanigans begin – audience members interviewed by a television reporter and filmed by a cardboard box camera. The antics won’t let up at any point during Don Toberman: Ping-Pong Champ. The premise is that the undefeated champion Toberman is taking on the entire audience simultaneously at table-tennis. The audience pick a team name and encouraged to use its self-appointed celebration chant whenever they win a point, or rauco

“Everyone has a story”, notes Keith Alessi, as he takes to the stage. Alessi was a successful corporate CEO – so what’s he doing here with banjos and what’s with the homicidal tomatoes? Growing up in a modest-income household, times were often hard for the Alessi family. Meat was a rarity and tomatoes became a staple of the family diet. Alessi was a compulsive worker, though, saving enough money to put himself through university by taking on as many odd jobs as he could find.

T’was the night before Christmas – well, almost, the night before anyway. Not a creature was stirring, except for the family robbing the butchers in Stockbridge, Edinburgh. Archie is a serial low-level robber and he is a little down on his luck. He has hatched a plan to rob Smedley’s butchers in the small hours of Christmas Eve, selling the meat shortly after that morning and trousering whatever cash he stumbles across. But this is not simply criminal opportunism. Archie used

Nike Redding delivers a slick, stylish performance in this monologue, the fourth in Teatro Fisico's five show fringe day. It is the best constructed character of Fisico's five plays. It is also the one with the most obvious pacing issues. But ultimately, this show bowls you over as a miming, moving depiction of gambling addiction. Mister Jackpot's surfing on buses, perhaps the play's most compelling sequence, and the one that kicks it off. He's singing Sinatra crooners and i

This one proved a strange but popular way to start your Fringe day, and was the most packed-out house I saw at Teatro Fisico. Tom Corradini's Shaolin Clown is a light 50-minute show that fronts itself as a 'comedy' but not one necessarily made to make people laugh. It might sound puzzling, but in his assertion, Corradini seems to be referring to the older definition of 'comedia' where 'comedia' is the resolution of conflicts, rather than a thing necessarily meant to make peop

Tom Corradini excels in his satirical Hamlet: Prince of Sweden — oddly archaic and beautifully physical. It is the second of a five show day at Teatro Fisico, a new Fringe venue in a small space upstairs at the Fruitmarket Gallery, just by Waverley. This is probably the Fringiest Fringe experience I've had and Tom Corradini’s theatre feels anachronistic in the best way. It is a reminder of techniques lost, of a theatre of good form and physical shape. A theatre to be sipped m

“Last night wasn’t my finest hour”, Eliana acknowledges, reflecting upon her latest faux pas. She is a 30-year-old, self-declared sociopath, living in her father and stepmother’s attic room. She had smuggled a recording device into her neighbour’s home, but when listening in, she realises that Tabatha has rumbled her. A restraining order duly follows and Eliana is forced to move out until a court hearing determines whether it should be made permanent. The court case represent

An electronic clock sits above the stage, initially displaying 00:45:00. It’s the name of the production, of course, but shortly will also become a dramaturgical device, relentlessly counting down towards a yet to be determined outcome. Dr Wilison (Mary Kathryn Brown) is a scientist about to conduct a social experiment. The goal is to investigate how far human self-preservation and self-interest will stretch the boundaries of behaviour and morality in a life-or-death situatio

Voloz Collective return to Edinburgh with REDACTED: The Cover-Up of a Cover-Up of a Cover-Up. The show is, in fact, even more convoluted than its title… A drummer provides a percussive backdrop as the audience files in – creating an urgency before the action even begins. It’s 1973 and journalist Marnie Makowski has gone to Roswell, hoping to find that the truth is out there. There’s a Government conspiracy, family stuff, a one-eyed assassin, murders, cops, FBI agents, and ali