Points of view: theatre, comedy and news
Apart from Will Robbins’ penchant for the odd pun or one-liner, the majority of the muted humour in With the Best Will in the World lends itself to a rather stilted hour where we constantly fight to stop our thoughts from wandering elsewhere.Â
The tenement walls of Edinburgh are full of ghost stories, multiples of haunted houses in the one city. In Haunted House, Eleanor Morton talks about just the one - the city at large- and the spirits that flock to its streets every August.
Tarot: Shuffle is a sketch comedy show that uses the mystical power of tarot and fate to pull the hour together.
All that glisters is not gold in Bebe Cave’s The Screen Test, as she peels back the curtain on the mirage created by history and myth surrounding the film industry in the mid-1900s.
Written by Nadia Fortini and directed by Catrin Ody, this particular play is set over the course of an all-nighter, as interns Lola (Natasha Vincent), Penelope (Maya Moravec) and Chad (Anzi DeBennedetto) clean out the physical office space and position that they’re competing for. The relationships between these characters are very quickly and deeply established, and over the course of the show, they constantly shift and develope, to the point where the subtext of interactions between characters pretty much screams at us. There are quite lengthy periods where we are lulled into a kind of rhythm by the repetitive tasks - it suits the show well in creating a kind of realism in terms of establishing setting and context within a limited space and time, but these moments perhaps go on for longer than necessary and quickly move from novel.Â
Aunty Ginger knows how to make an entrance, and the energy of Finding Splashman certainly starts at an electric place. The atmosphere then settles quite significantly as we’re then treated to a large portion of audience interaction, stand-up and the occasional satire, a very varied and occasionally muddled set.
They say that there’s no genius without a touch of madness and Alexander Bennett’s Emotional Daredevil has both in barrels.
Teresa Livingstone’s Delighted is such a playfully sarcastic show where she seems to find new levels of social observationism to share with us.Â
Edy Hurst’s Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Himself is proof that you can really tie anything together to form a conspiracy theory and make it mean anything. This is just a very fun show, where exaggeration and irony pervade the humour and create this comically spooky, mad-cap adventure.Â
Improv is always a huge risk to go to as an audience member, just because there’s such a wild and fluctuating difference in quality that can occur. That being said, Holy Shit Improv is pretty much as safe a bet as you can make with this genre. I have never laughed as hard or for as long as I did during this show, there’s just no way to stop laughing at what occurs onstage.Â
Pepper & Salt 