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

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,

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

Alma is enjoying her thirtieth birthday dinner with her sister Billie, who is together with her relatively new boyfriend, James. It’s been a nice evening and now the sisters revel in the ‘sobremesa’. This is a Spanish term, meaning to linger, chat and drink after a meal has concluded. This represents generational inheritance for the sisters, having a grandmother from Madrid. Billie and James’s relationship has blossomed rapidly. They have not known each other long, but alread

What would you rather see? Sh!t Theatre explaining their (to be fair fascinating) moral processes through their research of the now forgotten Isabel Peron — historiographies, methodologies, all neatly made in PowerPoints and flowcharts. Or: would you rather see a projection of Andrew Lloyd Webber DJ–ing and Sh!t Theatre rollerskating around Zoo Southside's main space naked? The choice is left up to us — a sort of exploration or maybe validation of concept around populism. You

Persona is set in a remote country house: a will is to be read, invitations have arrived in somewhat mysterious circumstances, communication with the outside world is impossible, and the host is unpredictable. It all seems to echo Agatha Christie. The host is James (Max Allen). He is fussing over a dining table, yet many of the expected accoutrements are conspicuously absent. Perhaps he’s an inexperienced host. When Geoffrey (Elliott Diner) and Rupert (Cameron Forrest) arrive

Writer-Director Emma Howlett writes a portrait of a family in The Plot – a razor-sharp dissection of power and its execution. Following two real-life conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot, Robert and Thomas, the play is a wordy, austere examination of this event. It takes place in a time when a king's power was exercised in the mutilation of a criminal's body — to commit a crime was to injure the body of the state, to 'shed its blood', so to speak. Thus, the state's reaction wa

There’s a table-tennis table set up at Space 45 venue. Even for the Fringe that’s left field. Chip enters, all nervous energy and a drink in hand. He sets about removing the jetsam that is strewn across the table. He’s alone and conducts a hushed tone conversation, indicating drama in his personal life. When Gus enters, there is the first of what ought to be a simple question about whose round it is, which instead becomes a pseudo-philosophical question. An early tell as to t