IO’fiVII- OPM'IOPM theatre comedy dance music books.
MUSIC PREVIEW
Scottish International At
Dynamic Earth
Folk, traditional, acoustic round-
UP Dynamic Earth IS in full swing, with
the two concert spaces and vast open bar being the major focus for all things folk and traditional in Festival Edinburgh. Over the next eclectic week, Gaelic song is celebrated by Alyth McCormack (12 Aug) and the acoustic guitar is driven to the limit by Tony McManus (13—14 Aug) but three bands stand out as representative of Scottish music’s current renaissance. They may describe themselves as the 'best band in the world’ but the four top acoustic players in Keep It Up (14 Aug) have a sense of humour. Great music on fiddle, concertina, bouzouki and guitar plus the odd song. The 'new’ Old Blind Dogs (11 Aug) have honeyed vocals, propulsive percussion and brilliant bagpipe playing, all wrapped in an irreverent sense of their own Scottishness, while in Skyedance (12 Aug), virtuoso fiddler Alasdair Fraser leads his Californian clansmen in a so-smooth take on contemporary celtica. (Norman Chalmers) a Scottish International At Dynamic Earth (Fringe) Dynamic Earth (Venue 78) 530 3557, until 28 Aug, various times and prices.
COMEDY Jeff Green tint Gent/e social observation
He’s gentle on his audience, is Jeff Green. So gentle that when he starts
The cheeky Jeff Green
MUSIC PREVIEW Music Of The Millennium
Ten concerts from ten centuries
It may be a surprise to learn that the Music Of The Millennium series hit the drawing board back in 1995. Even then, Pierre Boulez, partly responsible for the idea, was thinking not only about music of the last millennium, but of creating music for this one. ’He also thought that it would be interesting to investigate music being performed in the space for which it was originally written, or spaces which are acoustically similar,’ explains EIF associate director, James Waters. ‘What we've done is taken a concert for each of the ten centuries and tried to find very characteristic
performance spaces.’
Matching music to the venues was easier said than done. 'T he spaces actually fell into two categories,’ says Waters. 'It was either a dead ringer for it, like St Giles' which hosts Machaut's 'Messe de Notre Dame’,
into a routine about the painful embarrassments of adolescent sex only to discover a mother has brought her teenage sibling to the show, he abandons it.
Jeff Green’s a nice guy; you hope he won't be heckled, because he looks like he'd crumble if he was. But, the audience is too busy laughing their way through an hour of very amusing, if unremarkable, observational comedy. His skit about being victimised by his big sisters is emblematic; Green on stage is like your cheeky, naughty but loveable little brother. (Miles Fielder)
Jeff Green (Fringe) Assembly Rooms (Venue 3) 226 2428, until 28 Aug (not 74) 9pm, {IO/£77 (f9/f70).
PHYSICAL THEATRE
One: the other *i* Multimedia ensemble piece
When the innocent and uncorrupted Waitik Tang sets off for an adventure and reaches the big smoke, he is unprepared for lurking oddness. The recognisable minutia that makes up the colourful but sometimes bleak fabric of city life is set against a backdrop of stunning visuals and a
Gothic Voices match their sound to the space
or somewhere with the right acoustic, but the wrong period, such as the McEwan Hall for the Monteverdi
‘Vespers'.’
The trawl for possible venues included St Margaret's Chapel at Edinburgh Castle (too small), the 12th century Duddingston Kirk (too modernised) and the splendidly rugged Blackness Castle (too dangerous). Fitting the bill for Gothic Voices' Hildegard von Bingen (1100—1200) is the gothic pastiche of St Mary's Cathedral, and the wonderful ambience of Rosslyn Chapel for Music of Bruno of Toul (1000—1100). At the contemporary end is the Scottish Widows building in Morrison Street. There, the BBC 550 performs music by Kurtég, Nono and Stuart Macrae, where sound and
space interact. (Carol Main)
banging soundtrack. We see an unnamed city through the eyes of the uninitiated.
Such is the impact of the projected images and music in this multimedia performance that when we are left with just the actors, the stage sometimes feels empty. Despite this, the ensemble’s energy never drops and there are moments of breathtaking physical beauty and pathos stroked with moments of comedy.
(Viv Franzmann)
in One: the other (Fringe) Perpetual Motion Theatre, Hill Street Theatre (Venue 4 7) until 28 Aug (not 76, 27) 8.05pm, £6 (£4).
COMEDY
Jason Byrne the
Manica/ly improvised nonsense The concept of a ’script‘ is utterly alien to Jason Byrne. Spending more time on stage doing slither-around than stand-up, there are roughly four jokes in his show. And they aren't bad, particularly some crisp advice on how to get out of a date. What makes a night with Jason Byrne complete are audience members who are either pissed-up, Irish or students. Any combination from those three and he
I Music Of The Millennium (International) various venues, 74, 76, 78, 20, 22, 25, 27, 30—37 Aug, 2 Sep, various times, prices. Talks to complement the series take place at The Hub on each performance day at 4pm, priced £2.
(and you) are laughing.
The phrase ’no two shows are the same' was invented for Byrne and while he has barely moved on from the days of sharing his Fringe bill with Tommy Tiernan, brainless mayhem still has its place. (Brian Donaldson)
I Jason Byrne (Fringe) Pleasance (Venue 33) 556 6550, until 28 Aug (not 75) 9.25pm, £9/f 70 (£8/f 9).
COMEDY
Simon Evans *t‘k Angry from Peckham
Avoid front row seats at this Assembly show. As well as paying for extra leg- room and the usual audience participation/humiliation, spectators also risk being showered in venomous bile by this demonic offspring of Sandi Toksvig and Leonard Rossiter.
Simon Evans' politically incorrect observational rantings are occasionally spot-on (witness his ideas on tiger conservation) but far too often target tired old pub chestnuts; haven’t we heard enough jokes about Geordie Iasses and The Spice Girls? lntermittently inspired, even if the comedian did occasionally plumb the depths of lowest common
' 80 THE UST FESTIVAL GUIDE 10—17 Aug 2000