Category Edinburgh Festival Fringe

REVIEW: Pecking Order @ Big Belly, Underbelly Cowgate

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Reading Time: 2 minutesPecking Order is a one-of-a-kind show, something found only at the Fringe. It describes itself as absurdist, which still fails to prepare an audience for the sheer bizarre nature of the show — in the best way imaginable. Five men — or are they one man? — wearing a bowler hat circulate the setting of a waiting room, which also serves as an interrogation chamber, a surgical suite, a care home, and a dozen other places. Each of them are out of place and out of the scene presented. As the play progresses, they begin to remember fragments of their previous encounters, but to no avail.

REVIEW: unexplained: Live @ TheSpace

Reading Time: 2 minutesRichard MacLean Smith brings his podcast Unexplained to the Edinburgh Fringe in a live demonstration of his considerable storytelling prowess. Turning his attention to the enduring mystery of the Flannan Isles, Smith meticulously revisits the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers whose fate has perplexed generations. When the men vanished one night in December 1900, they left behind little evidence and an abundance of questions. Was it a rogue wave? An accident? Foul play? Something altogether stranger? More than a century later, we may never know.

REVIEW: Between Strands @ Laughing Horse, Counting House

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Reading Time: 2 minutesBetween Strands starts with a striking question: Have you ever thought about what your hair holds? Performance company Pebble Theatre certainly has. Aiming, much like a pebble, to show how ordinary objects or things can create ripples through the world, Pebble Theatre’s Between Strands explores one woman’s attempt to deal with the death of her grandmother in Taiwan whilst living in the UK. Drawing on East Asian traditions, Taiwanese rituals, and the universal experiences of grief and loss, Between Strands honours the dead through the living, both connected in this unique, beautiful piece.

REVIEW: What Happens in the Dark @ TheSpace

Reading Time: 2 minutesAn ordinary couple return home from a work dinner and begin the familiar rituals of settling in for the evening. Their shoes come off, their belongings are put away, and the night appears unremarkable if tense. An intruder is lurking in the darkness. When a sudden power outage plunges the characters into total darkness, the things they have been concealing begin to surface. The irony, of course, is that while everyone is unable to see, the intruder can hear everything discussed and knows considerably more than either of them.