I've seen several shows as a result of having a flyer thrust at me in the street.  It's as a good a method of random selection as any and none turned out to be turkeys.

My last was one of these, a musical with a simple story efficiently told and staged.  A young couple meet, discover they are both murderers, team up and dispatch a bunch of hitchhikers, find themselves falling in love, consider going straight, too late the law is close on their tail.  They commit suicide. The end.

Sounds a load of cobblers which I suppose it is but it was an entertaining hour and quite sweet.  It met with a rapturous reception from a full house of around 150 punters at this their last of 26 performances so they must have been doing something right.  It was called Buried by the way.

Adam is the exact opposite of Eve.  The gender change is female to male, the timescale is years not decades, the theatrical presentation is large and open not small and intimate, the acting is noisy and vigorous not quiet and reflective.  But the impact is the same.  You feel for them deeply and rejoice in their eventual liberation whilst quietly echoing Archie Rice's punchline "thank God I'm normal".  It's superb.  Too late now to see it in the Fringe but both Adam and Eve will be reprised at The Citizens in September.  Go west young man.

It's probably pointless talking about music and the hopes I had of learning much from the talk given by Sally Beamish and Evelyn Glennie at the Book Festival were unfulfilled, not to say dashed.

Another disappointment was Rain.  This was an object lesson, masterclass even in how many ways you can run about a stage for over an hour to very loud music without saying anything.  I couldn't even work out by the end why it was called Rain.

A much more jolly and rewarding hour was spent in the company of Nicolas Hytner former director of the National Theatre.  He's written a book about his twelve year tenure, some of which I'd heard read on Radio 4 so not all his anecdotes were new to me but even second time round they were fun.

Seagulls was also great fun but raised a question in my mind.  Was the intention to illuminate Chekhov's play The Seagull?  I hope not because it didn't.  But I suspect the play was just a hook to hang their anarchic and surreal vision on and in that it triumphantly succeeded.

The actress Harriet Walter has made something of a thing about performing male roles in Shakespeare's plays in recent years and shared her thoughts about that and other theatrical matters while promoting her book Brutus and other Heroines.  It was an interesting session though I can't say that I shared her enthusiasm for the all female Julius Caesar set in a female prison.

The Fringe is notorious nowadays for the number of stand-up comedy shows on offer, 144 pages in the programme against 106 for theatre.  I saw only one and even that was only half a comedy show.  The classicist, novelist and former comedian Natalie Haynes was at Blackwell's bookshop to publicise her rewriting of Oedipus the King as a novel and from Jocasta's point of view.  It was a mildly humorous presentation and I enjoyed her thesis equating Greek tragedy with soap opera.  I'd like to read Children of Jocasta but it will have to wait.

George Street's temporary installations were being torn down as I left Charlotte Square yesterday afternoon and scaffolding was being loaded onto trucks from a Bridges venue as I left Blackwell's in the evening.  That sad moment has arrived when it's all over till next year.  But not before I've seen my last show this afternoon.

There's a Turkish rug in my hall, a souvenir of my one and only visit to Istanbul nearly thirty years ago.  The fascination of that city came flooding back listening to Bethany Hughes race through several centuries of its history with a nod here and there to its present state.  She spoke solidly and enthusiastically for an hour without a note.

She's written a book which I'm sure I will read with interest and pleasure sometime but I have more than half a dozen to consume first so I didn't buy Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities.

Gruffdog Theatre gave an impressive performance of Peer Gynt.  It's not a tale nor a play that particularly attracts me.  It was seeing the company on the Royal Mile that persuaded me to give it a go and I was well rewarded.

This is very much an ensemble piece.  All cast members are in a basic costume of white top, grey knickerbockers and black pumps.  That uniformity extends even to eye make-up. They add odd bits and pieces as required to change character and a cap passed from one actor to another passes on the role of Peer.  Four actors in all play him.   They work on a bare stage with precise and atmospheric lighting.  Three triangular slabs on castors each bearing three eight foot high pieces of timber are manipulated to identify places now and then, for example a room in a house, a ship and a shipwreck.  Even simpler devices instantly set a scene.

There is music: guitar, violin, drum and voice.    They form and unform groups.  They dash or slide or crawl or jump.  They manipulate a giant troll king puppet à la warhorse and a smaller one for the result of Peer's dalliance with the troll king's daughter.

The acting is great.  What more can I say?  It's a masterly piece of work.

I soon identified the voice, indistinct and muffled as it was, as that of Cassius Clay (or Muhammad Ali as he later became) as I took my seat in front of a square platform on which stood a young woman.  I was at One Step Before the Fall, classified in the Fringe programme as dance/physical theatre.

It was very, very physical.  She expended tremendous energy bobbing and weaving her way around what became with the addition of ropes a boxing ring.  She propelled herself from the ropes on one side to the other with such force that one rope broke and the fixtures went whizzing off.  Fortunately they hit no-one.  This was more hunting like a tiger than floating like a butterfly but it was great stuff, a truly impressive show and I musn't forget the atmospheric and highly charged singing and playing of her off-stage partner nor the tubular bell clanging out the rounds.

The actress in The Last Queen of Scotland gave a less physical but equally intense emotional performance.  She was powerful, passionate and above all truthful.  Were it not that she was in her twenties and the events she was concerned with happened over forty years ago you could believe it was her personal story.

The expulsion of the Asians from Uganda by Idi Amin brought the subject of the story to a housing scheme in Dundee where she grew up and nursed an obsession with her past that a journey back to Jinja helped her become free from.

Having watched those events in the seventies from next door in Kenya and having shared digs at university ten years earlier with an Asian from Jinja (we often wondered what became of him) I felt almost part of the story.

Christine Bovill brought the golden age of French chanson to George Street with an hour long programme of songs by Ferre, Becaud, Trenet, Barbara, Aznavour, Brel and Piaf.  All my favourites were there plus a couple I didn't know.  She sang them like a native, despite being a Glaswegian, revealed considerable knowledge of the genre and entertained us with personal anecdotes in between numbers.

In Eve Jo Clifford presents a gentle and touching narrative charting her progress from a boy called John never comfortable in his own skin to her present contented middle-aged woman.  She has the advantage in telling her story of being an accomplished playwright and is supported by an excellent but simple staging.

In Douglas Maxwell's The Whiphand  a fiftieth birthday party disintegrates into a domestic squabble set against the moral case for making reparation for the family's apparent involvement in slave-owning several generations previously. Scars and hidden animosities surface and hypocrisy over modern misdeeds is uncovered as an excellent ensemble cast move surely through Maxwell's closely woven story.  Reparation may be on the cards but simple apologies for lesser evils are not forthcoming.

Not many world champions can have come out of Kirkcaldy and the least likely must surely be Jocky Wilson twice world darts champion.  Jocky Wilson Said has him reminiscing and hallucinating with only a cactus for company in the Nevada desert having lost touch thanks to the demon drink with the party he's travelling with to a tournament in Las Vegas.

Grant O'Rourke plays him as a warm, humorous and likeable man and also creates a wealth of characters from his cronies in the pub darts of Kirkcaldy where Wilson started to his rival and friend the Londoner Eric Bristow.  It's a lovely show full of fun but this is Jocky when he was doing well and says nothing of the downward slide in health and wealth that was to come.  Maybe that's material for a future work.

Though written in 1936 Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony was not performed until 1961 and made its first appearance outside the Soviet Union at the Edinburgh Festival the following year.  I spent that summer working in Edinburgh and remember standing in the Usher Hall (I assume a student concession in those days) listening to Shostakovich under the young Gennadi Rhozhdestvensky and falling in love with the music.  I think that was the Fifth rather than the Fourth however.  It remains one of my favourite pieces and I've heard it often since because it's quite popular.

The Fourth is not heard so often and given that it required the combined forces of the RSNO and the Mariinsky Orchestra of St Petersburg in the Usher Hall last night to provide sufficient players to satisfy the demands of the score I doubt if I will ever hear it again live in my lifetime.

From the opening bars which burst out in wave after wave of shattering sound to the final single note from the celesta with which the symphony ends I was transfixed.  A glorious piece of music.

Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham is not a household name in Scotland today but it should be.  Nicknamed Don Roberto from his years in Argentina he was adventurer, writer, politician, friend of both the great and the humble men of his day and well ahead of his time.  His great nephew Jamie Jauncey gave a sparkling talk about him at the Book Festival.  To everyone present's regret he hasn't yet written a biography but surely he will.

Former drama critic Robert Dawson Scott has written a most entertaining play.  The programme warns that Assessment is set in the future, but only just.  A pilot scheme called Pension Exchange is being run by a private company on behalf of the government.  This offers selected individuals the opportunity of commuting future pension payments into a large capital sum.  Alan McDonald, a man in his late seventies, is eligible because he has made a living will and declared that he would not wish to be resuscitated in the event of severe trauma.  The snag is that in return for the money he has to make a dignified exit and that he can't use the money himself only determine who gets it.

How did the company know about his living will?  Is that not a private matter?  His daughter, struggling to bring up two boys without a husband around and with grandad sharing their small flat has let the company know.

Very funny, with great characters and not without a thought provoking streak this has to be a popular choice for Scottish drama groups in future.  I've got my eye on the old man's part.

Another excellent show that combines fun and games with serious matters is Amy Conway's Super Awesome World.  Amy get the show rolling by telling us, quoting various research findings, that playing video games is good for us and describing her own back story of starting with a second hand Nintendo.  Then she gets the audience active.  She moves them about a bit, gets them flicking balloons towards her, reading cue cards in response to numbers appearing on a TV screen while she frantically performs some associated task dictated by a squeaky female voice coming from the TV.

She introduces the idea of the Samaritans for whom she says she is a volunteer and we become overhearers of telephone calls from those in need of listeners in between game playing episodes.  Subtly she turns into both caller and listener and finally poses enough questions to the audience about their experiences of feelings of inadequacy or depression or worse to end with everyone on their feet.

I finished the day in the Usher Hall with an orchestra and choir from Turin belting out Verdi's Requiem.  Very loud, very raw, very enjoyable.  I don't want to give the wrong impression.  They were belting it out, not me though I'd have liked to.

With some erstwhile clarinet class chums I went to a lovely concert in the oh so beautiful St Andrew's and St George's West by the Scottish Clarinet Quartet.  The music ranged from Indian raga to a Hebridean wauking melody and we encountered an Australian cartoon character with the delightful name of Vasco Pyjama on the way.

I ran from there to Charlotte Square to hear Michael Luders talk about Blowback.  In this book he argues that the roots of the current calamitous situation in the Middle East lie in past western interference. I'm 100% with him on that analysis but it's solutions we need and he offered none other than the passage of time.

Before our last performance of Outside Mullingar (received rapturously to exaggerate only a little) the cast watched Arkle's other show The Fair Intellectual Club.  This is a cheerful little comedy written by a twentieth century comedian Lucy Porter (who came along on her night off from stand-up) about an eighteenth century club for ladies who aspired to more than needlework.  Both shows played to good houses and were favourably reviewed here and here.

Sunday lunch to mellow jazz with friends was followed by The Fall from the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town.  The cast come on tightly bunched together and move around the stage swaying and chanting like a Zulu impi.  One after another they break off from the group and introduce themselves.  The group breaks up and we find ourselves in a student meeting discussing the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes from the campus of the University of Cape Town.

The play like the Rhodes Must Fall student movement expands into discussion of the decolonialisation (as they term it) of tertiary education in South Africa and charts much of the student protest there in 2015 and 2016.  The view is put forward that white privilege persists well into post apartheid education and a few swipes are taken along the way at well off blacks and coloureds (represented in the cast).

It's an enormous task to bring education to all in South Africa on an equal basis and this play does well to examine the issue in a vigorous, powerful and entertaining format albeit with little in the way of light and shade.

Summerhall can be relied upon to produce interesting if often baffling theatre.  A good half dozen audience members failed to last the distance at Ivona, Princess of Burgundia and slipped out more or less quietly as the show wore on.  Written by Witold Gombrowicz in 1938, Wikipedia tells me "it describes what the enslavement of form, custom and ceremony brings."

It's set in a royal court where a bored young prince decides for a joke of sorts that he will marry a lumpen, tomgue-tied young woman (played intensely by a strapping six foot lad with unruly locks in shorts and tee shirt).  This is met with severe disapproval by king and queen but they are persuaded to go along with it by their chamberlain on the grounds that it shows the prince as generous and noble-hearted.

That makes the play seem almost rational but it's an absurdist piece so the ebb and flow of the action, the incarnation of the characters, the language and dialogue, the bits and pieces of the in the round staging; all of it, is basically nuts.

I have to say I really enjoyed it though I'd recommend cutting a good thirty minutes.  And what does the aforesaid enslavement bring?  Death by choking on a pike bone in this instance.

Immediately before that I saw Black Mountain which has some affinities with Pinter in its disjointed, or rather uncompleted, dialogues and its sense of unexplained mystery and a growing feeling of menace.

It's superbly presented by Paines Plough in their Roundabout season at Summerhall.  The audience enter a tent full of swirling mists and the show literally cracks into action with a blackout that erupts with a flash and a bang.  The excellent light and sound plot adds great atmosphere throughout.

Rebecca and Philip are a couple who prowl uncomfortably around one another in a remote country retreat avoiding being explicit about their back story but damage has been done somewhere.  A third character, Helen, or is she Heather, appears to Philip and they too have some mutual mystery.

The three characters come together in a triangular confrontation, mist swirls, lights dim, the actors vanish, blackout, lights up to reveal an axe centre stage.

Loved it.

Jogging, part of the Arab season at Summerhall seems pretty straightforward in comparison.  It's a one woman show performed in Arabic with occasional bursts of English and French and projected subtitles clearly visible to all.  The audience are occasionally drawn into the action to read introductory pieces (in English) and in one case a man goes on stage to hold the actress's ankles while she performs some fairly orgasmic sit-ups.

It's quite a physical show because the format is explained as a woman in her fifties jogging around Beirut musing and we share her thoughts. She does run about and she does exercises but in the main storytelling sections she is less active.

She launches into the story of Medea and her murder of her children and segues into the murder (real event?) by a Lebanese woman of her children and her subsequent suicide.  Effected by rat poison in fruit salad and cream, three dishes of which she provides for the audience enjoining them to tuck in after the show.

With references to her sex life with her husband and her erotic dreams about the Lebanese Boris Johnson she gets to the penultimate story about a woman who lost two sons in war with Israel in 2006 and her third son in Syria in recent years. 

That takes us to the boats crossing the Mediterranean in which many sons are lost.

It's an absorbing show if a tad discursive, well performed by someone who in real life I'm sure we'd find feisty.

Nederlands Dans Theater in the EIF are quite simply wonderful.  Three diverse and beautiful, beautiful pieces performed by dancers with bodies so flexible their bones must be made of elastic.  Lovely music, light and sound.  Perfection all round.  But strictly non-narrative.  Make what meaning you will out of them.  Here's a taste.

The Queen's Hall morning concerts are a popular strand of the EIF music offering and generally a delight to the ear whether you get there in person or listen to them on the radio.  There has only been space for one in my diary this year.  It was an oboe and piano recital.  Apart from the occasional solo within it I've mostly heard the instrument as part of the blend of sound produced by an orchestra.

I know nothing about the oboe repertoire but the lovely music came from composers we hear less frequently than Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart and the like.  They played Hindemith, Poulence, Dorati and others,  Some pieces were delicate, some vigorous, some fast, some slow, all beautiful.

I'd positioned myself near the exit after the interval for a quick getaway and a bit of luck with the buses got me down to the Royal Scots in good time for the one woman Richard III that was my next treat. It's a clever show.

As the audience enter they are greeted by Richard as though they were characters in the play.  I was welcomed as His Majesty King Edward IV, given a nameplate to wear round my neck and a little paper crown then escorted to a seat of honour.

The various principal characters were seated in a square of chairs encircling a small table and a swivel chair.  As the actor goes through the play as well as dragging her withered leg about she whizzes around on the chair.  The audience is enlisted from time to time.  We stand for the coronation for example.  She despatches two audience members to kill the princes in the tower.  Their killing and all the others are effected by clapping a sticky label onto the victim.

Here's mine, kept as a souvenir.  An excellent show.

Next stop the Book Festival for a talk by James Fergusson about his book Al-Britannia in which he describes his exploration of Britain's Muslim communities in an effort to uncover the truth behind the more lurid press stories we read.  He attends a Sharia council, takes part in the Ramadan fast, talks to various feared preachers and so on.  It's a fascinating insight and his conclusions are largely optimistic about the ultimate melding of Muslim and non Muslim into one British community.

I couldn't resist a Book Festival event called A Fifer Worth Following and it was well worth attending.  The story of the life of Lady Anne Barnard, born Anne Lindsay at Balcarres is fascinating.  She refused to follow the pre-ordained path of a Georgian lady of aristocratic but pecunious status.  Instead she became an avid and lively "eccentric aristocrat" in London society spurning proposals of marriage until at 42 she fell in love and married a man without money and 12 years her junior.  She travelled with him to Cape Colony and wrote extensively of their experiences there.

Indeed she wrote extensively about all aspects of her life and as well as correspondence and so on  left six volumes of memoir hitherto unexplored by historians.  These Stephen Taylor, who has written about her, would need a deal of editing if they were to be published but in the meantime we have his book Defiance which I am eager to get started on.

Half a dozen poets read work from both within and without a new anthology of poems about Edinburgh, Umbrellas of Edinburgh.  I particularly enjoyed the work of Harry Giles and a Glasgow lady whose name I have forgotten but will find out.

A Stool Against the Printed Rule is a two-hander about an imagined meeting on death row in the Tower of London between Archbishop Laud and Jenny Geddes.  The least said about this show the better.  You'd think they'd at least have given Jenny a Scottish accent!

Drainage Alley - a rehearsed reading from the Royal Court, plus our own Jimmy Chisholm, of a Cuban play about life in a less than prestigious Havana street in the uneasy borderland created by the Cuban/USA rapprochement.  Very worth seeing but it's gone now.  However the BBC were filming so maybe it will appear on the box.

What can I say about The Divide?   Well it's big.  So big that it's divided into two three hour sessions.  I very much enjoyed the first half when the situation was being set up and we met the various characters.  Great stuff I thought.  Coming back at 7.30 for the second half it took a while for me to recover my enthusiasm.  I began to lose it again as the play went past several jolly good points at which it could (even should) have drawn to a close.

The acting is super.  The girl who holds the whole show together telling the story in which she is a principal character is outstanding. I didn't lash out four quid on a programme so I don't know her name.

Outside Mullingar opened this evening.  We got a great reception.  The audience obviously enjoyed it.  They even applauded at the end of scenes. Could the Irish Times have got it wrong?

I went to a couple of things this afternoon.  In Praise of Useless Languages was an hour long conversation between an academic and a very large audience which could be summarised succinctly as "being in command even partially of more than one language is good for the brain".  No facts and figures were presented in support of this proposition and no voices demurred.  Boring.

The Quito Papers in the Book Festival was a touch on the boring side also.  Let's not have multinational franchise coffee shops but local establishments.  Hear, hear say I, thinking of my regret at seeing an independent cafe turning into a Pret a Manger in Lothian Road this week.  Strong on the problems of the modern city.  Strong on what we'd rather see.  Weak on how to get there.

Rhinoceros in the EIF is a cracking good production. The staging is superb, so imaginative in how the set mirrors the reduction of the human population to one solitary figure as more and more people gradually succumb to the epidemic and become rhinoceroses.  It's performed with panache and viewed simply as an entertainment on absurdist lines it's great fun.

That's how I enjoyed it, but I know the author's ideas and intentions were more profound.  There are many analyses available that bring those depths to the surface.  Here's a good one.

Ben Jonson's Volpone is revitalised and made palatable to a modern audience in Martin Foreman's production for The Grads.  The twists and turns of the plot in which various greedy Venetians try to outdo one another in currying favour with the allegedly dying Volpone, each having been assured by his tricksy servant Mosca that they will be the sole heir to his fortune, are ably directed and performed assuredly by a strong cast.

Everyone gets his comeuppance in the end of course, including Mosca and Volpone.

In beauty, the Grads other show, the protagonist, famous photographer Ty Jackson, doesn't.  But maybe there's no comeuppance to be had.  He's taking pictures of young girls but are the accusations of paedophilia warranted?

Claire Wood has written a believable story with well drawn characters and tight dialogue.  The show looks good.  The direction is sure-footed.  The cast are excellent.

It well deserves the three and four star reviews that have appeared on the web and in the press.

I was offered earplugs on my way into the Cantonese Opera Workshop's Macbeth with the advice that there was some loud drumming.  Maybe that came in the second half which I didn't stay to see.  The first half wasn't too noisy though I was using the earplugs.

It was similar to The Boor in style but not at all as well done in my opinion.  They'd changed the story significantly.  Macbeth is off fighting the King's enemies at the start.  He's not doing too well so Mrs. M sets off and rescues him.  On their return Macbeth expresses some degree of anger that an underling has received more praise from the king than he has.  I was a bit puzzled by that since he's awarded a golden sword for valour by the king shortly afterwards.  Anyway Mrs. M looks up the magic books and works out that they are destined to be king and queen.  She can't persuade Macbeth to kill the king so she does it herself with the golden sword.

The curtain then fell on the first act.  Metaphorically since it's an open stage, so open that the black drapes at the back don't stretch all the way across.  Left and right of the action you are treated to actors wandering about throughout.  There are longish, dark gaps between some scenes adding to that village hall feel and such furniture as is brought on for one scene is absolutely out of kilter with the luscious traditional Chinese costumes worn by the cast.

Like The Boor the acting is very exaggerated.  I don't object to that in its context but when a chap comes on and spends a good while alone twirling a couple of swords about I'm searching for how that is advancing the plot. The constant drumming and banging of cymbals to accompany the actors' gyrations were a bit of a strain too.  Overall I found it boring.

I couldn't see the second half being any more exciting so I left.

I was back next day to St Giles for another recital by the same pianist but this time as accompanist in a programme of songs called From Havana to BA.  Enjoyable, though I preferred the previous day.

The Free Fringe promised a programme of songs under the title Nostalgie taking us back to the cafes of Paris, to Piaf and Greco, very much a genre close to my heart.  When I got to the pub basement venue a magic show for kids had replaced the chansons.  Softening my disappointment with a G&T I watched.  The kids' reactions were more magic than the tricks but I didn't stay long.

Chechov's The Bear is re-titled The Boor in the Shanghai Theatre Academy's version but sticks faithfully to the story of a man demanding payment from a young widow of her late husband's debt to him, their arguments, their duel, the growth of mutual affection and the eventual happy ending.  It's done in what I'm told is Peking Opera style which fits very well since the play is essentially a farce and demands broad comedic playing.

It gets that in spades from the melodramatic fluttering of the heroine to the swaggering bravado of the hero and the athletic backflip of the servant.  He spends most of his time running around in a crouched position which I couldn't keep up for thirty seconds but he's clearly a fit young chap behind the white beard and oversized paunch of his costume.  Costumes and makeup are gorgeous.

There are a couple of puppeteers as well who provide a preface and epilogue as well as saying something at another point or two in the action.  The sub-titles were awkwardly placed so I'm not at all sure what they were telling us.

The dialogue is mostly sung in somewhat unattractively shrill tones matched by accompanying live music from strings and percussion.  All a bit loud for my taste.  I liked what I saw more than what I heard but the audience (at least 90% Chinese) loved it all.

One of the projections near the end of the Festival's opening light show Bloom. The display starts with war-torn Europe and celebrates how the small seedling that was planted in 1947 has become the gorgeously overflowing garden of art, culture and entertainment that we have today.  It's a lovely show.  I watched it through three times and believe me that's high commendation.

Earlier in the day I enjoyed a recital of Latin American music by a Cuban pianist in St Giles.  It was associated in some way with a campaign that's devoted to sending a decent grand piano to Cuba.  If you'd like to help here's their fundraising page. 

Speaking in Tongues at the Pleasance is two plays, one called The Lies, the other The Truths.  I had mistakenly got the impression that they were two looks at the same events.  They are not but they are linked a little narratively and strongly emotionally.  They both deal with pretence, with love and rejection, with shame.  They are both performed by the same four actors who are magnificent in imparting that truth that came up in a previous post.

They do so at very close quarters.  Their stage is an igloo like inflated tent holding maybe two dozen spectotaors seated on swivel chairs.  The action takes place in and around the audience supplemented from time to time with projections on the side of the igloo.

It's a very good piece of work, surely destined for a four star review in the broadsheets.

The festivals are up and running.  Choosing How to Act as my first show had nothing to do with the fact that I'll be on stage myself in ten days time.  But maybe some tips were to be gleaned from a show that starts off as an acting masterclass.

The intense, absorbed, mildly poncy luminary carefully prowling barefoot round the stage dispensing wise thoughts to the slightly nervous and unsure but promising actress, encouraging her to present are beautifully observed characters beautifully performed.

The show rolls along like this for a while but gradually morphs into something else.  The story becomes darker, roles are reversed and the relationship between the two protagonists becomes both more personal and more political.  The denouement is maybe a teensy weensy bit unsurprising but I shan't spoil it here because while not wonderful the production is worth seeing.

As is Flesh and Bone, a vigorously performed set of episodes in the lives of a group of London tower block dwellers.  Rough, tough and generally short of the readies they have much in common with Falstaff's chums in the taverns of Shakespeare's London.  And the text, as vigorous as the performances, has a real Shakespearian flavour.  It's excellent writing.  The acting is great. The stories are fun.  A bit of trimming needed here and there but a good show.

At the end of Rupture the five actors left the stage and the four spectators left the auditorium.  No show really deserves that but on the other hand I wouldn't encourage you to choose this show out of the three thousand odd on offer.  But then science fiction doesn't often hit my spot whilst it might make you quiver with joy. 

After some sort of apocalypse (the rupture of the title) a government organisation, the bureau, controls the population to help eke out the planet's meagre resources.  They are charged with arranging for people to shuffle off their mortal coils when they no longer make a contribution to society.

A new employee comes along,  Keen as mustard to make his mark he's not been there five minutes before he's employee of the month but crunch time comes hard behind.  He has to arrange his mum's departure (as the jargon puts it).

He doesn't want to snuff out his mum (the nasty deed is actually done by non human agents, his role is merely administrative but still).  The play then is all about the working out of this dilemma.  It's not a bad story with twists and turns here and there to keep you guessing but something doesn't work, or to be fair didn't work for me.

Harking back to How to Act, one of the mantras of the acting game as expounded there is that to connect with the audience the actor has to find the truth.  The truth of his character, of his situation.  That's what the cast of Rupture failed to do though they got close now and then.

The economics of the Fringe mean that there are an awful lot of one person shows on offer.  I tend to avoid them.  It is after all a big ask to keep an audience attentive and entertained for an hour or more all on your lonesome.

The actress in The Portable Dorothy Parker did her best, and her best was very good but despite considering myself to be something of a Dorothy Parker fan her bons mots just didn't seem so bons any more.  Does this mean I've grown up or grown old?