It's a long way by tram but as you've no doubt guessed this is commerce not transport.

It's advertising the opening of an Edinburgh branch of the Japanese clothing company Uniqlo. It makes a change to see a shop opening in Princes Street rather than closing these days and this is a good brand of clothing (I bought a nice shirt from them in Tokyo) but hundreds have been queuing to get in.  I passed it on the bus the evening before the opening and people were queuing then and being admitted, just to have a look around and perhaps by invitation but all the same what a fuss.

Now that the successful run of Cyrano de Bergerac has finished I can focus on being theatre audience rather than participant though in truth I have managed to see a couple of good shows quite recently.

I nearly missed James V : Katherine which seemed to have crept into being a sell-out tour of Scotland with no publicity at all.  It was written by Rona Munro who gave us the excellent "James" plays.  It's not a continuation of that sequence, moving us on from James IV.  More's the pity you might say but perhaps such a sequel will come in time and maybe even a move into British history with James VI and I.

During James V's reign one Patrick Hamilton was burnt at the stake in St Andrews for heresy.   He's generally accepted as being the first martyr of the Scottish Reformation.  I learnt about him and other martyrs such as George Wishart at school, but not about Patrick's sister Katherine.  It's her this play is about.

She was also tried for heresy but less publicly than her brother, was persuaded to recant by the King and went off to exile in Berwick on Tweed.  That much history tells us but the drama that Munro invents pits Katherine's determination to uphold her protestant faith as her brother did his against the mutual love between Katherine and her sister-in-law.  

Reviews have been mixed. The FT was enthusiastic, Clare Brennan disappointed and Mark Fisher middle of the road. I liked it.

The Girls of Slender Means at The Lyceum I liked a lot.  In short I thought it was terrific.  The material to start with is intriguing, a female only boarding house in London just after the war peopled by young women of different characters and ambitions.  Described in the novel thus "Few people alive at the time were more delightful, more ingenuous, more movingly lovely, and as it might happen, more savage than the girls of slender means."  The cast are first class, the staging is poetry in motion and the audience were moved as well.

Mark Fisher liked this one rather better but the review that attunes best with my reactions is from The Stage.

Socially I had a good evening at a surprise birthday party for Ross's 50th following hard on a non surprise one a week earlier.  I played my part by stumping up for two birthday cards.  The surprise one was held at the Raeburn in Stockbridge.  It was the first time I'd crossed their threshold and I was favourably impressed by venue, drinks and snacks.

There's been a lot written about Emma Raducanu since her meteoric rise to fame when she won the US Open in 2021.  Many like Jawad Iqbal in a recent piece in The Spectator entitled "The Tragedy of Emma Raducanu" have rightly pointed out that her rise was very quickly followed by a fall and not only has she seemed to be dogged by ill-health or injury but that every recovery therefrom has failed to be sustained.

He opines in his conclusion that "No one will ever be able to take away from her the glory of her US Open triumph, even though the chances of her becoming a tennis great in the mould of Serena Williams appear far-fetched. For now. Being a multimillionaire may prove compensation of sorts."

He may be right but when she plays well as she did in the Billie Jean King Cup Qualifier earlier this month she displays all the determination and guts that we associated with Serena Williams.

Now it's time for snooker.

The EIF programme was released a couple of weeks ago and they organised a few taster events around town to whet our appetites.  Here we are waiting for the rain to go off so that some young dancers from Scottish Ballet can strut their stuff in St Andrew Square.  They eventually did so to the severe detriment of the grass.  Had it been football the pitch would have been declared unplayable. 

I've booked only half a dozen EIF shows.  I'm sure there are more that are worth seeing but I'm holding my fire for now.

It's taken a while but Hamilton, which premiered in 2015, has now made it to Edinburgh.  It's garnered five stars reviews everywhere it's been and the Edinburgh run has sold out.  It's undeniably a magnificent spectacle but, leaving aside George III whose cameo was great, it wasn't until the second half that I began to enjoy the show.  Prior to that it was all too loud and my brain found it hard to pick out the rapped lyrics from the frenetic kerfuffle so that following the story wasn't that easy.  They appeared to repeat the wedding scene for instance and I suppose that was explained but I didn't make out why.

Now there was still loud stuff after the interval but not all the time.  It was much less shouty.  And there was more variety of pace, more of a tale to follow and emotions to feel.  So I left the theatre feeling that my money had not altogether been wasted.

I've seen Bartok's opera described as a gripping psychological drama.  It may well be although I think the stony-hearted cynic in me might find it, as I found Emma Rice's Bluebeard at The Lyceum, a not very engaging melodrama.  

The Motive and the Cue on the other hand whilst it leant towards caricature was a more polished melodrama with some fine acting particularly I felt from Tuppence Middleton as Elizabeth Taylor.

I'm a longtime Shostakovich fan and his Fifth Symphony has always been a favourite so I knew I'd enjoy an evening at the Usher Hall in which it featured.  And so I did but it was paired with a piece I'd never heard before and which I'm keen to hear again.  This was the Scottish premiere of Mark Simpson's Violin Concerto and fittingly it was played by Nicola Benedetti for whom it was written.  Tremendous stuff.

I had the opportunity to hear another favourite, Maxwell Davies' Orkney Wedding  with Sunrise also at the Usher Hall. It's ending with a fully kitted out pipe major parading through the hall and onto the stage is a surefire crowd pleaser.  On that evening there was also a new short choral piece by James Macmillan, a setting of a Burns poem, that was very sweetly sung.

Socially I celebrated Ross's 50th birthday at a pleasant dinner party and tried to have a chocolate drink with Siobhan at a new place called Knoops.  It was however stowed out so we settled for a coffee over the road at Victor Hugo until they threw us out as they drew the blinds down at 4pm when we repaired to Contini's.

Rehearsals for Arkle's Cyrano de Bergerac are keeping me busy.  Opening on April 24th get your tickets here.