Charlene Boyd
June Carter Cash: The Woman, Her Music and Me
★★★★☆ Exuberant
Intense emotion is combined with real intelligence in The National Theatre of Scotland and Grid Iron’s June Carter Cash: The Woman, Her Music and Me by Charlene Boyd, at Summerhall Dissection Room.
2:22 A Ghost Story
★★★☆☆ Spooky
On tour after an award-winning (and still-current) London run, Danny Robins’s 2:22 A Ghost Story at the Festival Theatre is an entertaining horror story. It largely justifies the confidence displayed in putting the word ‘ghost’ right up there in the title.
Listings: Mon 25 Sept – Sun 1 Oct 2023
What’s on Edinburgh’s stages this week…
It’s back to normal this week, with an almost full card of productions ranging from ghostly thrillers to autobiography and a celebratory music portmanteau to experimental dance.
The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart
★★★★★ Celebratory
The Royal Lyceum’s revival of the renowned The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, at the University of Edinburgh’s Playfair Library, keeps everything that has made the play such a success. And then adds more on top.
Playing With Books – Sea State
Theatre returns to the Book Festival
Playing With Books, the collaboration between the Book Festival and the Lyceum, has returned in the Book Festival’s new ‘hybrid’ format. This means a staging with both a limited, distanced, in-person audience at the College of Art, with online viewers, and which is later available on demand (albeit, in this case, for a very limited time).
The Macbeths
★★★★☆ Bloody good
The Macbeths, the Citizens’ concentrated revision of Macbeth, supplies a charge that is so often missing in versions of the play.
Bondagers
★★★★☆ Relevant revival
There is a poetic, spooky resonance to the Lyceum’s revival of Sue Glover’s Bondagers that makes the production compelling.
Letters Home
★★★★☆ Power of communication
Letters Home combines inventiveness, variety, sophisticated writing and sheer visual magnetism.
Review – Barflies
★★★★☆ Genuinely engaging
Having enthralled audiences and critics alike at the Fringe in 2009, Grid Iron’s Barflies, an adaptation of a clutch of Charles Bukowski’s writings, now sets out to prove its worth outside the rarified festival atmosphere.
