A young  woman, Maia (Soraya Pouilly), awakens tied to a chair and blindfolded. She manages to struggle free, to rather unexpectedly find herself aboard a train, with three people observing her. Her newly acquired companions are a curiosity ; seemingly harmless but childlike. Their emotional detachment is an early tell as to the roots of this piece. She finds that she is at the rear of a train. Her new friends cannot offer any clues as to where she is or how she arrived here.

An Ivy league professor (Madeleine Potter) reveals herself to us in slices at Traverse Theatre. She is 53 years old, unmarried, no children. Sadly, suffering from stomach pains, she is diagnosed with stage 2 cancer, having malignant tumours. She describes watching her mother’s life ebb away at the age of 54 of neurofibromatosis. At the end, her mother did not even know her own name and was an unrecognisable shell of the woman she had known. Her own diagnosis would be devastat

World War I saw unimaginable devastation, the political and ideological scars of which were felt across the globe for much of the 20 th century. Around one in eight British serving men died during the conflict, significantly altering the balance of UK demographics, especially in urban areas. An inadvertent by-product was the nation’s new-found dependency on women, hitherto overlooked by patriarchy but now substituting men during and after the war, driven inexorably by the su

There's  a climate emergency. It seems like the human race, some of them, have woken up to this. It really shouldn’t be news though, as scientists made the causal link between fossil fuels and climate change around half a century ago. Planet Earth has been around, give or take, for 4.5 billion years. It seems to have taken us a couple of hundred to set it on the path to destruction. There is more jeopardy for young people, and in this new play a group of them have a birthday

A famous  quote coined as part of the US 1992 election campaign, and a stark reminder that when it comes to voting intentions, the public are prone to vote with their pockets. The phrase caught on: Gordon Brown had it on office screensavers during the 1997 campaign. And now it’s the title of a Fringe show. Ostensibly about economics, but not a lecture, there is a highly personal subtext for one of the performers, Joe Sellman-Leava, more of which anon. He delivers an entertain

A routine day at a rundown bookmakers on an Edinburgh high street. Two employees Pat (manager) and John (cashier) are chewing the fat, while Pat barely tries to disguise his contempt for bedraggled Harry, sadly, and with a tragic resignation, feeding money systematically into a roulette machine. Area manager Michelle breezes in. An awkward exchange ensues. John is dismissed to the back room, so that they eventually discuss a highly sensitive personnel and operational matter,

The stage is set at Pleasance Courtyard – a black box space, literally no props. But less is more here : two superb performers, a sharp script, with the most current of issues as a backdrop, deliver a funny, questioning performance. Rachel Thorn (Holly) is no stranger to Edinburgh Fringe, usually performing comedy and improv, but she takes the plunge here into drama, albeit with a comedic throughline. Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi appropriately sets the scene before Thorn

Shell shock was a term coined during World War I to describe the reaction to the intense warfare experienced by soldiers. It often had stigma attached, having connotations of cowardice. The brutality of World War II saw a new swathe of soldiers suffering its effects. Soldiers returning from WWII would be encouraged to man up and leave their experiences on the battlefields. Some 80 years on, we have gained a better insight into the condition, now more accurately described as p

Edgar Allen Poe was an acclaimed American writer from the first half of the 19 th century. He is probably best known for his Gothic Horror style of writing. Stephen Smith is performing four pieces of Poe works in pairs on alternate days. This show looks at his renditions of The Black Cat and The Raven . The Black Cat journals the demise of a man through alcoholism. Smith is already in situ upon entry, sat at a desk, attempting to write but in turmoil and apparently wracked

We meet the cricket obsessed schoolboy Ismail Akhtar (Qasim Mahmood). Except nobody calls him Ismail : at school he is ‘Smiley’. Even at home he has a variety of monikers, often his father settling on The Little Master , homage to probably the greatest cricketer of all time, Sachin Tendulkar. We enter the three-quarters rake Pleasance Beneath venue to be met with cricket stumps (although curiously no bails), a bat and a ball on a green wicket. There is a trace of cricket audi

Does everything have to have a reason ? A woman is on a park bench, legs tucked beneath her body, dressed in white as a ballerina. She is obsessively making paper swans and letting them fall to the ground, unaware of anything else around her. A security guard approaches. Actually, let’s re-examine that. While he ostensibly is a security guard and eventually states that this is his role, his attire in fact appears to be more akin to a pilot. And approaches is a stretch – he r

Hitler’s Third Reich lasted a dozen or so of their projected thousand years in the 1930’s and 40’s, but managed in that time to inflict catastrophic misery on millions of people. They systematically murdered peoples not deemed worthy of the gift of life within their new order. Many groups suffered terrible losses, including gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals – but the term Holocaust itself usually refers to the murder of millions of people of Jewish ethnic origin in de

Kate Bush is a musical phenomenon. She began writing her own songs as a child and such was her precocious talent that she caught the attention of David Gilmour, from Pink Floyd. Refusing to bow to studio pressure, her first single was the avant-garde  Wuthering Heights  and went to number one in the U.K., making her the first female artist to reach the top spot with a self written song. While still a teenager. Her career saw 25 top 40 singles, 9 top 10 albums and a plethora o

Brett Epstein is alone on stage. Or is he? We enter Surgeons’ Hall venue to find a table on stage. We are asked to submit a question to Brett, anything at all. He takes the stage - a bundle of nervous, but charming, energy. A 30-something LGBTQ+ New Yorker, he presents to a sizeable audience a cross-section of his life. He shares aspects of his romantic life, his acting achievements and aspirations. He has had co-starring television roles many times, but, such is human nature

We enter the lovely Bedlam Theatre to find four actors, seated on chairs stage left and right facing each other. There are intriguingly two paint pots on the floor. The play begins, stylistically, with all four now standing downstage. We learn that a couple is visiting another couple’s house. The power couple, Colin and Charlotte, are trying for a baby. Their house appears to be something of a showhome and the visiting couple’s curiosity is further piqued by a strange circle.

This is a fictional account of a Scottish women’s football team playing at the Homeless World Cup in Italy. However, at its core is a depiction of a real event. Homeless Football World Cups were established towards the end of the last century and now take place annually, with worldwide participation. There are two main aims : to transform the lives of participants and to change attitudes to homelessness. There are a myriad of factors that give rise to homelessness including (

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, better known as North Korea, is generally considered to be a pariah state. Amnesty International regard it as having the poorest record on the planet for human rights. Its nuclear testing gives widespread consternation to USA and Japan in particular. It is a totalitarian dictatorship, a one-party military state with dissent not tolerated. It has a cult of personality around the ruling Kim family, even with its own philosophy,  Juche

Kicking back with old friends. What could be better ? Milo is having a couple (Liane and Davie) over to his place for drinks and a take-away, in an archetypal middle-class setting in Glasgow. Now in their forties, they are very old friends. They usually have a familiarity, ease and comfort together that are commensurate with the passing of time and shared experiences. After a comically rapid coital act, Davie and Liane are getting ready for the evening out when Davie drops in

We are about a quarter of the way through the 21st century, allegedly enlightened times. And yet, homosexuality remains banned in more than 60 countries. In many cases it can attract the ultimate sanction of the death sentence. In previous centuries of course, the world was even more unforgiving and  Ascension  relates the tale of an 18 th  century Dutch sailor left on uninhabited Ascension Island as punishment for sodomy. It is always a moment of joy to return to Bedlam Thea

The Great Depression really started with the  Wall Street Crash  of 1929. More than merely a recession, it hit everybody in the USA and its contagion spread across the globe (akin to Metternich’s famous “When France sneezes, Europe catches cold”). Its socio-economic effects were devastating. It was a contributory factor in Hitler’s rise to power, though that’s another story. It’s thought that the USA only really emerged from this by setting its economy onto a war footing duri