17 sounded interesting and it was.  A verbatim theatre piece using the recollections of people in later life of how life was when they were seventeen.

I had thought to hear from my contemporaries but most were that bit older, having been seventeen during the war or not long after.  Those who were from my era were socially or geographically distant so although I enjoyed hearing them it was not quite as immersive as I would have liked.

The young cast were enthusiastic and inventive but sometimes the desire to present a picture distracted from the words.  A piece made for radio really.

Murmel, murmel! was a skilfully executed and beautifully presented example of the silly walks and falling over school of comedy.

If your taste is anything like mine you should avoid it at all costs.  I wish I had.

If you've ever wondered Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner wonder no more.  Katrine Marçal tells us it was his mother.  Her book is not actually about the man himself but about economics, specifically economics from a feminist viewpoint and she wonders where the self-interest (a basic tenet of Smith's economics) lies in his mother's actions, albeit with tongue in cheek.

She suggests that while Christine Lagarde's remark "If Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters there would have been no crash" is too simplistic it contains a kernel of truth.  She's interested in both the differences and the similarities in the economic behaviour of men and women and in the value that society places on their work, paid and unpaid.  Sounds very worthy but she speaks, and I'm sure writes, with a light touch.

Darryl Cunningham says that he regards himself as a cartoonist and his book Supercrash is a comic book with a serious purpose.  Designed he says to explain the 2008 financial crash to people who have very little understanding of finance and economics.  Amongst whom he counted himself before doing the mountain of reading and learning needed to write the book.

Both books are something of an attack on capitalism as it currently exists but both authors think it can get better and maybe reading their books would enable us all to give a hand in that endeavour.

Promise and Promiscuity is a one woman musical parody of a Jane Austen novel.  All the essential characters are there; a poor widow with daughters to be married, a noble minded heroine and her slightly silly sister, a rich but unattractive male cousin with designs on our heroine, a wealthy and attractive young neighbour down from town, his disapproving mamma, his austere and somewhat arrogant friend and his pretty but vacuous childhood friend destined in the eyes of their families to be his wife.

The actress inhabits each of these characters superbly switching voice and bearing in a trice to move effortlessly between them -- pursed lips and fingers gripped across the waist for mama's snobbish drawl, tummy stuck out as cousin who lumbers about, his speech punctuated by little snorts.

She takes us briskly with abundant humour and jolly songs through the typical Austen tale of misunderstandings, unwanted declarations of love, antipathy that morphs into admiration and so forth to the ultimate happy ending.

No Austen novel is complete without a ball and for that I was chosen as dancing partner - the perils of sitting in the front row.  So I appeared on the Fringe this year after all.

Oran Mor is well known for its Play, Pie and Pint series of short plays.  It also produces a summer panto apparently so I went to see their 2015 offering The Pie Eyed Piper of Hamilton.

No cast of thousands with lavish sets and costumes here but a cast of four and some simple painted flats.   It's mildly satirical and not quite so mildly rude and one hundred percent cheerfully energetic.

City State is suffering a plague of rats.  The flaxen locked mayor and his side kick drive north to Hamilton and engage the eponymous piper who in return for a promise of Buckie for life comes south to clear the rats with his magic pipe, actually bagpipes are needed.  Unfortunately clearing the rats has made possible an invasion of jocks and we are treated to a speech from a blonde haired wee Glaswegian lassie sporting what look suspiciously like an SNP badge on her lapel.

All ends merrily with the unrolling of a blind bearing the words of the pantomime song that we are all then obliged to sing.  I can remember only the opening lines - "Pit some heather up yer kilt/stick some bracken doon yer breeks".

It was not awful but I won't be going to their next one.

That may have been crude but for some real filth, filth with literary merit you couldn't do better that Irvine Welsh at the Book Festival.  In the course of an entertaining hour long interview/chat he read a hilarious passage describing a funeral from his latest novel A Decent Ride.  I know his work only from films but after that feel encouraged to tackle a novel or two.

Lanark.  At one point in the play the cast come out of character and one girl is asked "Have you read the book?"

"The first two chapters" she replies, or maybe it was pages.

I'm sure that's many people's experience and may even have been mine when I tackled it in the 80s since my recollection of it is vague.  Maybe I just read the reviews.  But David Greig who adapted it for the stage obviously has read it intently.  He, director Graham Eatough and a wonderful technical and acting team have made a terrific piece of theatre that demands no knowledge of the novel on which it is based but succeeds, as was their stated intent, in conveying every bit of its spirit.

From the opening shimmering sea through which our eponymous hero descends to his patient wait for death on the mountaintop at the end the staging is endlessly inventive and effective.   Exploding salamanders, adolescent in love, obsessive artist, night club patrons, conference delegates, talking lift, nappy clad baby.  These are only a sample of the roles that the cast undertake with aplomb.

It's a great show, destined perhaps to be the Black Watch de nos jours.

Giving Richter's Four Seasons a second chance was just the ticket.  I enjoyed it so much more at Zurich Ballet.  Don't know why but I did.  That was the music for the first piece, Kairos, which started with the dancers buzzing away behind a gauze marked out in staves like moths on speed as the light strobed violently.

I enjoyed Kairos in a relaxed sort of way but was absolutely thrilled by Sonett in which to the menacing and insistent pulse of music by Glass a dwarf Shakespeare and a richly clad Dark Lady play out a tale of tragic love amidst a swirling horde of  vigorous dancers.

Contrast Claire's view (entertaining but...) with The Guardian's assessment (not so amusing but....). 

"New Country, New Life" was the heading for a session dealing with two books on immigrant experience.  Sunjeev Sahota's novel The Year of the Runaways is about young Indian men in Sheffield.  I've already read a large chunk and am finding the tales of their struggles in India and what so far are not substantially lesser struggles in the UK engrossing.

I haven't yet got Monica Canitieri's novel The Encyclopedia of Good Reasons but the description of how it treats the experience of coming to a new country, in this case Switzerland, from the viewpoint of a five year old girl and her attempts to understand and classify all the long words that the adults around her throw about was intriguing.  I look forward to reading it.

Liz Lochhead appeared in conversation with Ruth Wishart and had lots of interest to say about the Scots language, her own work and Scottish theatre.  The event was marked by the light-hearted banter between the pair of them but we were left in no doubt of how seriously Lochhead takes her work and the cultural scene in Scotland.

She ended by reciting what she called her theatrical credo.  It started and finished with the instruction "Tell the story".  That's my main complaint against En Avant, Marche! in the EIF.  There was no story.

The blurb says "...an amateur brass band in Flanders.  As the ties that hold local communities together begin to loosen, these amateur ensembles offer a civic and collective nucleus, teaching people of all ages and from different walks of life to play together and march in the same direction."

This led me to think that here we would have a warm human tale of how adversity had struck a town, say a factory closure, or of how youth were rejecting their parents' values and of how the fellowship of the band helped the community hold together etc etc.

No such thing.  We were treated, if that is the right word, to a series of clownish vignettes that would have been better placed in a circus or a Victorian music-hall and some sexually explicit badinage that would have been out of place even on a premium phone line.

I have no fault to find with the music produced by the cast and by the Dalkeith and Monktonhall brass band who took part in the show and it was with the band that there was one little nod in the direction implied by the blurb when the main man went round the band asking what the players did for a living.  Their jobs ranged from procurator fiscal to cafe counter assistant illustrating to a degree a community fellowship.

For the professional critics view you can choose between The Guardian's four stars or The Telegraph's two.

We've all got our limits when it comes to accepting that language is a living thing that we can no more prevent from changing than Canute could control the tides.  I have got used to "loan" having overtaken "lend" although I don't like it, but I doubt I will ever accept "loan" in place of "borrow" as in "Lingo also looks at the words English has loaned from across the continent....".

The Lingo in question is a fascinating and enjoyable little book that takes a look at the features, quirks and oddities of  a multitude of European languages and fully lives up to its subtitle, A language spotter's guide to Europe.

It was paired at the Book Festival with Reading The World in which the author recounts her project to read a book from every country in the world.  Deciding what was a country and which to include was her first problem.  She finally settled on a UN list of 196 but added one more in the course of the project.  Getting hold of the books and more especially English versions of them was no picnic and in the case of Sao Tome she resorted to recruiting volunteer translators over the internet who willingly lent a hand, or for speakers of current English, loaned one.

As I write this I am listening via Youtube to Memoryhouse by Max Richter, a super piece of orchestral music that incorporates poetry, voice and electronics to great effect.  I much preferred it to his recomposed Four Seasons that was played on the same programme in the Playhouse a couple of days ago.  I'm giving the latter a second chance to convince me though since it's the soundtrack to part of a ballet programme I'm going to tonight.

Anyone who has an interest in English is almost bound to have come across David Crystal.  He's an academic linguist but a great populariser and indeed having now seen him in the flesh I'd say he's a great showman.  It's not a surprise to learn that his son is an actor.

They were both there introducing two books; I Say Potato, a book about accents written in collaboration and The Disappearing Dictionary by David alone listing various dialect words that may no longer be in use but that he quite simply likes.

The talk was engaging and informative and the banter between the two lively and funny.  They demonstrated the reconstructed pronunciation of a Shakespeare sonnet and finished off with an impromptu bit of rap to illustrate changing patterns in the rhythm of English pronunciation.

On the way David dealt roundly with a question about the fears of parents at an unnamed Edinburgh nursery that their darlings were being soiled by the rough accents of their carers.

The Animotion Show is not dissimilar to the Harlequin Project that opened the EIF in which images were projected onto a building while music played.  The critical difference is that the images are being created as the music is being played.

The artist, Maria Rud, painted on what looked like a glass panel and the results were being projected as she worked so you not only saw the painting but the moving hand of the painter.  Meanwhile Evelyn Glennie was banging away on her various percussive instruments.

As I understand the idea it is that the painter is reacting to the music and vice versa.  Quite entertaining though relatively pricey and there was no way to get away from the coolish wind that swept into every corner of George Heriot's quadrangle.

Maria at work with Evelyn drumming in the background

Here are some examples of the results of the collaboration. 

Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work, by David Lodge are comic novels that I thoroughly enjoyed though at thirty years distance I couldn't tell you much about them, nor could I name a single other novel by him.

Now he's written an autobiography so I thought it would be interesting to hear him and it was.  The event was in the form of an interview although he did read from the book, or as he explained an edited composite covering his relationship with Malcolm Bradbury and his fascination with America, these being two topics suggested by his interviewer.

It was a very enjoyable session and I'm now encouraged to add some of his other work to the big pile of books to be read that is building up on my shelves and in my head.

It was also a great relief after the well nigh unbearable session I went to yesterday.  I didn't bear it in fact, see later.

This was about The Wake, a novel set in the Fens in the years following the Battle of Hastings.  The author filled in historical detail in a jokey 1066 and All That manner - "William was a little put out so he had them boiled in oil and then went home for his tea" sort of thing, interspersed with readings from the book by the now renowned actor Mark Rylance and a related folky story told to the beat of his bodrum by a chap called Martin Shaw.

Rylance dressed in combat trousers and a funny hat intoned the cod Anglo-Saxon ( sorry the publicity calls it contemporary Anglo-Saxon whatever that means) tale of  guerrilla warfare against the Normans.  Shaw in another funny hat tells a story about a child, later man, with golden hair who is clearly Hereward The Wake.  The publicity tells us the story has not been told aloud for a thousand years and I can believe it.

The session was scheduled to last an hour and a half but as time wore on I thought how long that was and more and more about escape. Being in the middle of a row I was reluctant to make a move.  At the ninety minute mark there was no sign of our being near a conclusion and I grew even more restive.  Happily the lady next to me had also had enough, or maybe she just had to get somewhere, so I slipped or in fact clattered (the wooden stairs!) out under her cover.

But The Guardian, and no doubt others, loved the book, "A Literary Triumph".  Maybe it just suffered from its presentation and I should give it a try.  Maybe.

I thought Antigone, which I went to after that, also suffered from its presentation.  Not the staging and so forth.  That was fine although the upper level should have been higher or raked towards the back to minimise the masking that occurred.

No, it's the acting style that I didn't much care for.  Now this is not a wee domestic drama.  It's all about obedience to the law, the rights of rulers, loyalty to the state, a greater power than the king etc. etc. so a serious not to say grim approach to the representation of the characters caught up in the  situation is not surprising.  But at the same time these are people and it is their feelings as much as their ideas that should come over to the audience and for me at least that didn't happen.

In 1914 over 80% of the world was or had been under the control of European powers (many territories had subsequently wrestled free) despite the fact that a thousand years earlier China, Japan, and the Middle East were streets ahead of Europe by any measure of development or civilization.

How come?  Well says Philip T Hoffman, although the Chinese invented gunpowder the Europeans developed and improved the weapons that it fed and practiced using them by fighting amongst themselves, paying for their wars by levying large taxes on their populations.  As a result he says they were well equipped to set out to conquer the world while those other civilizations remained inward looking and left the citizenry with more of their own money.  Tory regimes surely.

The Telegraph's reviewer is not wholly convinced but gives Hoffman's book, Why Did Europe Conquer the World, four stars.  I enjoyed his talk but I doubt I'll ever get round to reading his book.

The packed Playhouse gave a rapturous reception to Seven last night but I found it an unsatisfactory watch and listen.  My fault I'm sure.  I should perhaps, as recommended in this review , have let it all wash over me instead of trying to fathom what it might have been telling me.

My sympathies were with the lady I overheard at the Book Festival this morning telling her friend that she would rather have heard the RSNO playing Mahler in the Usher Hall and complaining about low lighting and black costumes on a black set.

It was all bright colours at the talk about translating children's books into English from Farsi and Arabic.  One of the contributors spoke mostly in Farsi and as seems often to be the case said rather more than the poor chap interpreting had managed to retain when she paused for breath.

But the languages were not very important really.  It was a discussion that could have applied to any language pair and they talked about dealing with cultural differences and maintaining the essence of a story while expressing it in words far removed from a literal translation.

The chat strayed from time to time into the realms of adult literature, Fitzgerald and the Rubaiyat being an obvious reference.  I could have piped up then about my Scots version but instead asked about the availability of western children's literature in Iran.

There is quite a lot of it apparently but it's all bootleg translations because Iran doesn't observe international rules on copyright.  So thing haven't improved since I picked up a pirate cassette of Glen Campbell in Tehran in 1978 just a year before the revolution. 

Ferdinand Mount, one-time policy chief in Mrs Thatcher's Downing St., like many a posh sounding Eton and Oxford Englishman turns out to have some good Scotch blood running through his veins and has written a book about the people who put it there.

His great-great-grandfather (whom he shares with David Cameron) was John Low of Clatto in Fife who at the age of 16 went off to join the East India Company and retired after a lifetime of service to the Empire as General Sir John Low, earning in his later years the privilege of going round the Old Course on the back of a pony. The earliest golf buggy known I imagine.

The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India 1805-1905 tells the fascinating story of the Low family's lives both personal and political over that century.  It's a story that is both romantic and brutal and Mount's talk had me gripped from start to finish.

There were stacks of copies of the book in Charlotte Square at £25 a pop but happily it's also available on-line in a substantially cheaper paperback edition provided you don't mind waiting till February.  I don't.

The novel Nora Webster that Colm Toibin was in Edinburgh to talk about is already out in paperback and most of the people in the audience had probably read it.  Those who asked questions certainly had.  According to The Guardian "This personal portrait of grief and politics in 1960s County Wexford does everything a great novel should".  I expect that is something along the Reithian lines of inform, educate, entertain.  I bought a copy so I'll let you know in due course.

Macbeth opens with the line "When shall we three meet again".  Youth Music Theatre UK keep the line but multiply the number of witches by three and not content with that have the whole company  of around fifty rush on-stage in the opening scene from behind the fences from where they have stared at us as we entered.

This is a very physical, fast-paced and inventive production.  The witches are wonderful, all nine of them, like rag dolls with jerky movements of heads and limbs.  They wield entangling ropes that suck in other characters.  There's a beautiful scene when Macbeth is trying to make up his mind to murder Duncan.  The witches swarm around him carrying shards of glass and shining torches on his face as he paces back and forth and as the scene ends he is left alone on-stage a shard having magically appeared in each hand.  Super stuff.

Every scene is well handled.  Inevitably with a large company of youngsters like this there are some weaker players but the overall achievement is high.  I found some of the music irritatingly over amplified for the strength of the actors' voices and the flute being played acoustically in one scene had no chance of being heard.  But that's to cavil.  

 At the end of the show they retreat to behind the fences and take up their initial positions.  We've just seen Malcolm make his final speech to the audience with Hecate at his shoulder as she was at Macbeth's when his tragic history started leaving us with the impression that history is about to repeat itself.

Arkle's  Much Ado About Nothing is a gender reversed production, except, confusingly, for the part of one member of the town watch.

The women are much more successful in playing men than the men are in playing women and nowhere is this better illustrated than in the case of Beatrice and Benedict.  If you were to design the perfect principal boy you'd come up with Bronagh Finlay and she has no trouble playing the military man.  Paul Beeson on the other hand is a perfectly decent actor but he's a big strapping chap and despite headscarf, long skirt and false boobs and excellent delivery of the lines he just fails to convince.

Maybe he's not meant to.  Maybe that's the point.  Maybe it's not some subtle comment on gender stereotyping.  Maybe it's just a joke at the expense of the lads that isn't quite as funny as Charley's Aunt.

Their other show, Bakersfield Mist, is much more straightforward.  An art expert, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been called in to assess whether a painting owned by a loud talking, hard drinking, trailer living, country music loving, husband free all American woman is or is not by Jackson Pollock.

She's convinced it is.  He says it's not. The stage is set for some entertaining and humorous conflict with here and there bouts of poignant mutual revelation.  It's not Shakespeare but it's fun. 

I was in a very clever sketch once that was a take off of the American series Dynasty about the affairs, business and personal and many of them nasty, of an oil rich family.  Tom Holland uses the same title for a book about the line of rulers of Rome founded by Julius Caesar's adopted son Octavius, all of whom earned a reputation for extreme nastiness and more than a touch of depravity far in excess of the peccadillos of the Americans.

He seeks to separate fact from rumour and to uncover what may be the kernel of truth at the bottom of some of the stories that have come down to us.  He sees these often as resulting from power struggles of one sort or another.

For instance the famous story of how Caligula wanted to make his horse a consul is generally seen to be a sign that he was not all there.  Holland argues that it was an elaborate joke at the expense of the senators illustrating just how much more power Caligula had than they did.

I'm sure the book is worth reading but at £25 a copy I shall wait till the library has a copy.

The Jennifer Tremblay Trilogy is a set of three monologues which although linked in the person of the narrator are each sufficiently self-contained to be enjoyed as separate plays. 

They tell the story of a woman, her family, her friends, her experience of life in the remoteness of small town Quebec province.  There is very little joy in the episodes of this story.  There is rather an intensity, a truthfulness, an insight that moves and bonds audience and actress.  Maureen Beattie as The Woman is magnificent and the supporting technical skills of set design, light and sound could hardly be bettered.

All three plays are wonderful but if you have time for only one go see The Deliverance.

My second visit to the Book Festival was even more fun that the first.  Irving Finkel with his long white beard and his unruly hair tied back in a pigtail of sorts looks every bit the curator of cunieform tablets at the British Museum that he is.  Apparently he made that career choice at the age of eight.

So he knows a lot about the subject and gave a very interesting and amusing talk.  So engaging was he that I not only bought the book he was promoting but a previous one he wrote about deciphering tablets describing The Flood.

I held back from buying the newly republished translation of Cyrano de Bergerac by Edwin Morgan which provided excellent entertainment in a rehearsed reading but I may relapse because it's very good.  This Book Festival event was my second encounter with his version of the play which I saw on the stage in my one and only visit to Cumbernauld Theatre way back in 1992.  I had to go there because I couldn't get in in Edinburgh.

It was a super show and it was lovely just to hear the words again.

The Book Festival started yesterday and was absolutely overrun with punters queuing up for the event I was going to at 2pm.  Who knew so many people were interested in mathematics?  Or was it rather the dandyish figure of Cédric Villani with his long hair, fob watch, large floppy necktie and charming French accent that had drawn them?

Whatever it was they got a treat. He was an engaging and brilliant speaker whose purpose in writing Birth of a Theorem was not to explain mathematics, nor even his own work, but to give the layman a glimpse into the process of mathematical invention.  Indeed in answer to a question he said that only a very few people would understand the maths in the book and this is borne out by the review that I've linked to above.  But everyone should understand the joys and despairs that accompanied the process.

There was barely a trace of despair in Nell Gwyn: An Epilogue but plenty of joy. It's a one woman romp in the round around Nell and her relationships with King Charles II, the actor Charles Hart and others, told vividly by an excellent actress in a room that holds hardly more than a score.  She engages a number of the men in the audience in the tale, somewhat to their embarrassment but it's all great fun. 

The venue in which Future Honey was played could have held several score but only half a dozen people turned up and gallantly they all stayed till the end.  Not that it was bad.  Indeed the opening video sequence extolling the virtues of a "mood repair" software product was a superb parody of  advertising videos.

But the rest of the show was, to me at least, barely comprehensible.  Three girls dressed in Startrek like outfits did various things.  For instance mimed what I took to be their daily routines and while teeth cleaning and door opening were easy to spot I'm afraid 90% of it passed my understanding even although it was repeated ad infinitum or at least until the power in the golden armbands they wore went wonky and there was a lot of thrashing about followed by some sort of gameshow compered by an offstage amplified voice.

Two of the girls were eliminated somehow from the game leaving one alone but they came back in dark glasses gibbering somewhat and held a picnic and tried to get the third girl to choose between the foods (represented by squares of paper) that they held out to her.  She resisted and tore some bits of paper to shreds.

Well this sort of thing went on for close to an hour and then it stopped.  We were invited to join the cast off-stage for a discussion on the piece but I scarpered and suspect that the rest of the small audience did likewise.  Need I add that it was devised?  Nuff said.

Willie and Sebastian had a sell out audience who were sensibly not allowed to drift in and choose their seats at random but were herded by stern young shepherdesses filling each row in turn. And there were a lot of rows.  I got quite an advantageous end seat so could stretch my legs rather than crush them against the row in front.

Why such a large and tightly packed crowd?  The play was written by Rab C. Nesbitt's creator Ian Pattison and stars two widely regarded comic actors Andy Gray and Grant Stott.

Willie (Andy Gray) spends the early moments with his figure hugging Y-fronts inches away from the front row punters, leaning on the shoulders of one as he recovers a gobstopper sized lump of drug from somewhere deep in the rear recesses of those Y-fronts.

That rather sets the tone and provided you don't mind full frontal effing and blinding it's very funny as the rivalry of the two men over the affections of the one woman ( Michelle Gallagher) leads to comic confrontations.  There are some very clever lines but I can't for the moment remember a single one.

At the end of the show Thom Dibdin was ushered onstage and presented Andy Gray, to his obvious surprise and pleasure, with The Stage's award for acting excellence.  

I was at one of the Queen's Hall morning concerts yesterday and very much enjoyed the chamber pieces by Prokoviev, Poulenc, Brahms and Bartok (especially the Bartok Piano Quintet) provided by soloists from the Budapest Festival Orchestra. This was originally intended to be another clarinet class outing but organisational difficulties intervened and in the end it was only me.

From the sublime to the ridiculous I went on to see The Hideout which is a great  little show.  To save myself the effort of trying to describe it let me reprint here a review by Sara Jackson from the website The Public Reviews which captures it beautifully.  I agree with every word.

"If you had to answer the question “What is ‘fringe’ theatre?”, you could do a lot of worse than simply pointing to this wonderful hour and replying “that”. We join Haste Theatre – a collective of half-a-dozen women – in one of C’s endless tiny rooms, as the gods Aphrodite, Dionysus, and Hades welcome us to a skewed re-telling of the tale of Theseus (sorry, “Thetheus” as his lisp would have it) and the Minotaur.
How to describe this? The show contains, in no particular order, live music, singing, dance, physical theatre, shadow puppetry, cabaret-style repartee, and a host of other skills that this hugely talented group fling themselves into with ceaseless energy and charm. Characters are slipped into and out of at a moment’s notice, audience members are shamelessly put-upon to universal good humour, and bickering gods toy with mortals’ lives and our expectations. Perhaps it could be said that the company is a little too eager to show off all their abilities, at the cost of narrative focus, but then this is as much variety as storytelling.
In truth, this is a show which defies easy explanation – shall we pinpoint the tap-dance Minotaur battle, the nightshirt-clad Hades welcoming us and asking our preferred manner of dying, or the (frankly jarringly) downbeat ending out of nowhere? No, because this is fringe theatre at its finest – hugely talented actors pouring heart and soul into a show, not because it’s expected or because the figures suggest it’ll make money, but because they love what they have made. Their joy is infectious, their abilities undeniable. This is exactly why I love the Fringe. If you want to see real theatre – intimate, original, vital – this is a show not to be missed.
 The Hideout runs at C Nova until August 31th (not 18^th)"

Full marks as usual to The Grads for tackling difficult and challenging plays.  Their offerings in the Fringe this year are The Witch of Edmonton and Death and the Maiden.

The Witch requires the director to guide a sixteen strong cast through the tangled undergrowth of a 400 year-old tale that's he's already had to cut to fit a time slot.  It's a tale of witchcraft, belief in the devil, bigamy and murder with a daft laddie sub-plot thrown in.

Despite some excellent characterisations and imaginative staging it didn't quite come off for me, failing to generate the atmosphere of tension and fear that I think it needs.  With its awkward doors and undisguised function room appearance the venue doesn't help take us back to the world of seventeenth century life and beliefs either.

The action of Death and the Maiden on the other hand takes place in a modern domestic interior for which the venue is fine.

Patricia believes that a chance visitor to the isolated house by the sea that she shares with her husband Gerardo is the doctor who participated in the torture to which she was subjected fifteen years earlier during a period of dictatorship.  She determines to take the law into her own hands and wrest a confession from him.  Gerardo is appalled.  Not only is he a lawyer but has just been appointed to a commission established by the new democratic government to look into the misdeeds of the old regime. 

So the stage is set for a debate about justice and revenge, do two wrongs make a right, what value has a forced confession and so on.  It's very well done and the question of whether or not he is the man she thinks he is is never resolved.  You have to make up your own mind.

No programme was available at Attempts on Her Life so I googled the company to see what I could learn about them.  Nothing apart from the fact that they had another production in the Fringe - The River by Jez Butterworth.  I enjoyed The Grads production of his Jerusalem a couple of years ago so I thought I'd give this one a whirl.

The play is set inside a fishing shack near a river somewhere.  It's a simple stylised set.  Doorways are indicated by uprights of unplaned 2x2 timber.  A sideboard and cupboard are skeletons only. There are a couple of chairs and a table of the same material with untreated plywood for seats and tabletop.

The two girls who were in Attempts are also in The River but not the men.  (Trouble with multi-tasking perhaps.)   

When the action starts we see a man and a woman in conversation.  They are having a teensy weensy argument.  He wants her to go with him out in the moonless night to catch fish.  She wants him to admire the sunset with her and then leave her to read her book.  He waxes lyrical about fishing and he also tells her he loves her and that she is the only woman he has ever brought to share the tranquility of this spot and its joys.  Maybe the love bit wasn't in the first scene but you'll see it was something of a theme.

In the next scene the man is on the phone reporting agitatedly that the woman he's been out fishing with has disappeared when there's a "yoohoo!" from outside and in comes a woman.  But it's not the same one.

He tells the cops all is well, tells her that he loves her and that she is the only woman he has ever brought to share the tranquility of this spot and its joys.

She in turn goes out, to have a pee as I remember, and the first one comes back.  This sequence is repeated several times but both women ultimately leave him and as the play ends, spoiler alert, a third woman comes in.

Will she be told that he loves her and that she is the only woman he has ever brought to share the tranquility of this spot and its joys?  I think so but that's a supposition since fortunately we are allowed to leave the theatre at this point.

It was well enough done but I call that pretty thin material.  The rave reviews of other productions of the play in London and New York talk about mystery and ambiguity.  Granted we never know whether he's just a serial shagger or a sincere seeker after a perfect soulmate to whom he will be faithful for ever after but I didn't care either way.  Maybe the problem is that the actor (no programmes this time either so nameless) isn't the mega man needed for the part.

Always something different on the Fringe.  Can you imagine enjoying a show where seven people stand in a line having had their footwear nailed to the floor and sway about very athletically, indeed dance, while four clarinetists play behind them?

No?  Well it's surprisingly entertaining.  I went with some of my clarinet class to see Correction last night and enjoyed it though not quite as much as the hollering, whooping crowd of supporters behind us did. 

 

Sue McKenzie and Ingrid Sawers drew a big crowd to the very beautiful St Andrews and St Georges West at lunchtime yesterday for a saxophone and piano recital from Bizet to Nyman and beyond.  As you would expect the playing was perfect and all four of the main members of the saxophone family; soprano, alto, tenor and baritone were deployed for our delight.

Like Sara Kane's 4.48 Psychosis, which the Grads produced very successfully a few years ago, Martin Crimp's Attempts on her Life does not allocate dialogue to specific characters nor even define what or how many characters there may be.  So it's a wonderful vehicle for a theatre company to let their imagination loose on.

This company uses two men and two women dressed in black business wear but barefoot in a black draped set containing only four chairs.  Their footwear stands in a neat row at the side.  They appear in various combinations and guises in the seventeen scenes of the play, each of which is an attempt to define Anne or Annie or Anya, the name varies.  We are led to believe at the start of the play that she has committed suicide.  Was she an artist?  Was she a porno star?  Was she a terrorist? Was she in fact a luxury motor car swishing elegantly along winding Mediterranean roads?

Crimp himself said " Attempts is not political ....but each scene, or attempt, is really an attempt to grab capitalism and really grapple it to the ground, but then it gets up again and it presents another form. So I think the play is a kind of wrestling with the joys and the horrors of capitalism."

That's not a thought that struck me as I watched though I can see what he means.  But never mind that.  It's a joy to listen to the text and the actors are terrific.  Go.

Attempts was in Adam House and I then slipped next door to the Jazz Bar in my more usual role  there of punter to hear a dozen Kurt Weill songs sung by an American called Bremner.  He seems to have dispensed with a first name, at least professionally.  Mack the Knife was there of course but so were songs with lyrics by Ira Gershwin and Ogden Nash to name but two.  He was ably supported by piano, double bass and multiple reeds.  The latter all being played by the very able Dick Lee going by his Sunday name of Richard.  An enjoyable show for cabaret fans with CDs for sale to remember it by.  I resisted temptation.

If Attempts on her Life has a meaning under its surface, The Last Hotel, a brand new opera in the EIF,  is content to just tell a story. The music is intense, urgent, expectant and the singing matches it.  A man, his wife and the other woman meet in a rundown empty hotel.  There's a suitably manic hotel porter, silent throughout bar a scream or two, who cleans up, serves food and drink and handily doubles as stage crew while the protagonists twist and turn in their dance of duty, guilt, dreams, life and death advancing via karaoke and buffet to the other woman's suicide.

Sounds pretty grim and it's certainly not a comedy but it's a gripping and exciting ninety minutes proving that contemporary opera is not all bad.

My qualifications for reviewing a dance programme wouldn't stand up under scrutiny so let me just say that I enjoyed Sylvie Guillem's Life In Progress which she has brought to the EIF in the course of signing off her career with a farewell world tour, and leave it to The Guardian to expose the programme's limitations.

Chicken according to its full colour, glossy and expensive looking A3 sized poster cum programme is a dark and intruiging (sic) new play.  One of the things that intrigues me is how in this age of word processors and desk-top publishing software a spelling mistake like that can see the light of day.

The story revolves around East Anglia having separated itself from the UK.  Second homes are being reclaimed by the locals, East Anglians are leaving London's concrete jungle to seek the greenness of their native heath and agreement has been reached with the North and Scotland that they will provide steel and sheep, leaving chicken production to East Anglia.  Intriguing.

Most of the action takes place in a chicken processing plant, built where in days gone by witches were put to the ducking stool.  The process is described in lurid detail by the chicken processing supervisor who has taken a returning girl and a flask of intoxicating liquor into the plant at night where despite her obvious willingness he avoids having his evil way with her.  Intriguing.

His teenage daughter refuses to speak to her parents but regales us with stories of happenings that lead us to suppose her to be a witch.  Intriguing.

The chickens escape from their cages and a Hitchcock like Birds situation starts to develop.  Intriguing.

Suddenly an actor shouts something which I didn't catch, the lights go out and the audience claps deliriously.  Intriguing.

The production values are excellent.  The actors are excellent.  The performance space is excellent.  Any one of the hares started by the script could have been developed to a satisfying conclusion but the play went nowhere.  Intriguing.

I went on to the next one, The Bastard Queens.  It didn't go anywhere either but that was rather the point.

Four characters are living in a makeshift hovel.  We see them pick through a supermarket trolley full of junk, pressing some of it into service, an old umbrella for example or a broken carriage clock that serves as a make believe television set which the two male characters spend a lot of time watching, reliving in their imagination favourite programmes of the past.

We see them ritually distribute unlabelled cans that they have scavenged from somewhere, pull them open and eat the contents with their fingers be they baked beans, peach slices or dog food.  

They are it seems survivors of some catastrophe that has wiped out mankind.  They argue a lot.  They make up.  It rains heavily.  The sun shines.  They argue a lot.  They make up.  It rains heavily.  The sun shines.  You get the idea.  I forgot.  Every so often there is loud music, too loud and then feedback, or maybe it's the rain effect again.

Then a fifth character, a pregnant woman, appears.  They are not happy.  She will want some of their food.  Mutterings.  But a child.  Could that herald a rebuilding of civilisation?  The decision is to look after the woman till the child arrives then.......

Alas after a can full of we must suppose tainted grub there is retching and belly clutching by the mum to be.  Our four stick balloons up their jumpers, prance about laughing and joking, prick their balloons and bother the newcomer who dashes off to remove her pregnancy discreetly offstage.  I must congratulate costumes.  It was very realistic.

It goes on.  Fags are found making everyone terribly happy.  They fall out over the fags.  The stranger is raped - to replace the lost child we assume.  There's a general melee at one point with fists flying and falling bodies.  It goes on and eventually it stops where it started.

Are there positives?  Well it is played throughout with energy, enthusiasm and commitment and it is ten minutes shorter than advertised.

After that the opening flourish of the International Festival was a blessed relief.  I stood in the middle of Lothian Road with thousands of others watching colourful projections onto the Usher Hall while the band played.  This was The Harmonium Project.  I took some pictures but The Guardian's are a million times better.

Weren't we lucky it didn't rain.
 

My Festival going has got going.

First up was an excellent one man show.  Out of the hundreds of shows on offer I would never have chosen A Life with the Beatles but thanks to some minor involvement in getting it on the road I had a free ticket so I went.

Lucky me, for it's a production that sparkles.  Any monologue is hard to invest with sufficient life to hold your attention for an hour but director and actor between them, not to mention clever and attractive staging, lighting that overcomes the limitations of a poky hotel room and well chosen and precisely placed sound triumph against the odds.

If you are a Beatles fan you'll love it.  If like me you are indifferent you'll find it's a fascinating story told with verve and skill well worth an hour of your time.

One thing I did have arranged was a visit to Glasgow, one of my irregular lunches with Andrew.  Not that there is anything untoward or reprehensible about the lunches, it's the frequency that is irregular.

In fact they could be considered praiseworthy since they are preceded or followed by a cultural activity.  On this occasion we visited the Science Centre, the adjacent Glasgow Tower and the not very far away Tall Ship.

Of these the Tall Ship has the great merit of being free although they twist your arm for a donation in the guise of an unnecessary guidebook.  My advice is to allow your arm to be twisted because you'll enjoy the visit.  When you study the panels detailing the work of restoration that re-turned it from a hulk into the noble three-masted beauty that it was when built in 1896 you have to admire the skills, energy and dedication of the team that did it.

If you want to slip into the skin of a sailor of the times you can have a go at swabbing the deck, or twirl the wheel or like me gaze upwards and thank your lucky stars you never were called upon to shimmy up the rigging to frig about with the top gallants in a howling gale.

The ship is mostly about looking but the Science Centre is much more hands on.  There is a multitude of buttons to press, handles to turn, touchscreens to prod, peepholes to squint through and the like.  If you are ten years old and your parents are prepared to fork out £8.50 for your pleasure you will have a lovely time.  I enjoyed the fish and chips for that is where we had lunch.

The Glasgow Tower is adjacent to the Science Centre and indeed joined to it but entry will cost the parents of that ten year old another few quid.  Mind you it will take a lot of ten year olds to recover the costs of a building that's been closed for most of its life.  Its troubled history is described in this 2013 BBC report where someone calls it an albatross round Glasgow's neck.  But only a year later the BBC were reporting that everything was now hunky dory and that's how we found it.

It's a beautiful looking object, an architectural and engineering triumph. There are great views from the top and through the glass walls of the lift as you are beamed up.  What's more you get a neat certificate as a souvenir when you come down.