How well can you ever really know anyone? How much do we fundamentally understand about someone, and what are the masks and defences we all employ? A stage solely occupied by a keyboard and microphone greets us at the BN1 Arts Centre. But the Dubious Company’s eclectic cast - Emily Hawkins, Jasper Price, Lex Bluecairn, Aoife Pallister Begadon, Annalena Lipinski, Amber Williams and Aisling Hanrahan - soon fill the space, singing and playing, leaning into the style of the moder

Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet that the function of art is to hold up a mirror to nature. Alter_Azione is a piece of performance art created and directed by Gaia Gemelli, staged in the lovely Zo theatre, as part of the Catania Fringe. While perhaps predominantly a piece of dance, the production also comprises components of physical theatre and ballet; it is an impressive fusion by danzarte . Ovid’s Metamorphoses is one of the drivers of this show. The theme centres around

There is a plethora of influences and pressures on the modern-day woman. She will be bombarded by advertising, which can be subtly and iteratively undermining. Pretty much any website she uses, either through necessity or choice, demands acceptance of terms and conditions. There is societal conformity with its myriad of forms: education, housing, religion etc. We especially encounter gender expectations, against the prevalent backdrop of patriarchal dominance. Women are still

Playfight is a visceral, fast-moving production from Theatre Uncut , that relentlessly demands your attention from the first moment to the last. It is performed in Summerhall’s Roundabout arena in the round, a slick choice. The set consists mainly of a ladder, representing a tree, perhaps the only constant in the lives of our three protagonists. The play charts the adolescent development of three friends. They are at first glance ordinary teenagers, with aspirations, hang-up

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 more or less brought to an end a dark period of contemporary UK history. "The Troubles" was the term given to what was regarded by many people as a three decades long, low level, civil war, the status of Northern Ireland being at stake. Opposite factions held that it should revert to Irish rule or continue as part of the UK. The highest profile act as part of The Troubles was the attempt to assassinate the then British Prime Minister Marga

How far can you run in five minutes ? If you are an Olympic champion, primed, fit, alert, with spikes on a professionally prepared track, you could cover in excess of two kilometres. A woman in her 20’s, in average physical condition, awakening from yet another interrupted slumber in a war zone, grabbing her six year old boy together with a prepared backpack, hurtling down several flights of apartment block, in the dark, with panicking people flying out of other doorways, avo

A waiter pours a glass of wine for a restaurant customer. It hardly seems like a philosophical matter, but not everything is as it seems here. The set is simple: a table, arranged with cutlery on a pristine white tablecloth, with a solitary chair. There is a waiter’s station stage left and two spare chairs. Our two performers, Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas, wander on to the stage at Summerhall. This seems unusual, as if they are about to issue a banal health and safety ann

A palliative ward in a hospice is hardly a cheery portent for an afternoon at the Fringe. This was a charming piece, however, Two men are approaching the end of their days. Henry’s son, Justin, visits him frequently, dealing with a myriad of emotions. There is the obvious pain of watching his father slip away, but he is also wounded that his father kept details from him for so long. This triggers a memory muscle from his childhood. He has also recently split from his wife. H

There's a band set up on stage, but this is no ordinary music show. It’s snazzy cardigan time! Steve Coogan’s comic creation Alan Partridge had various outings on radio and television, but Partridge’s post-BBC era saw the addition of his downtrodden personal assistant, Lynn Benfield. Lynn is at Partridge’s beck and call, underpaid and under-appreciated, despite substantial calls upon her time domestically. His boorish and dismissive attitude to her is tantamount to abuse a

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