The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Edinburgh Festival: Theatre highlights
Various venues, throughout August
Technically Edinburgh International Festival is the “original” Edinburgh festival.
Although, to be more precise, it was the first official version – inaugurated in 1947, in the wake of the Second World War, as an invite-only celebration of the best artists in the world.
The event was quickly accompanied the same year by a “Fringe” of independent theatre companies trying to democratise the elite outlook of the new event.
A similar relationship exists to this day, although, of course, the entirely open-access Fringe is now a commercial beast of a very different kind, and is increasingly dominated by comedians.
The Edinburgh International Festival still offers a more elite form of entertainment which focuses on opera and dance as much as theatre.
Yet, as this year’s programme of live music in the newly rediscovered Leith Theatre suggests, it has done a lot of good work in widening the scope of its programme as much as possible.
Without doubt, this year’s flagship theatrical show is a new version of Midsummer (A Play with Songs) (The Hub, August 2 to 26), playwright David Greig and Edinburgh musician Gordon Mcintyre’s gig theatre romantic comedy which also doubles as a love letter to the city of Edinburgh.
Originally staged at the Traverse Theatre in 2008, the former cast of two has been expanded to seven actors and musicians this time.
An adaptation of Edouard Louis’ novel En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, The End of Eddy (The Studio, August 21 -26) is the story of a young man growing up poor and gay in rural France, which reunites director Stewart Laing and writer Pamela Carter of past EIF hit Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
Directed by the Tony Award-winning artistic director of Ireland’s Druid theatre company, Garry Hynes, a new version of Waiting for Godot (Royal Lyceum Theatre, August 3-12) comes to Edinburgh with plenty of acclaim behind it already, while The Prisoner (Royal Lyceum Theatre, August 22-26) is an exploration of justice and punishment featuring a cast from Sri Lanka, Rwanda, India and the UK, directed by Peter Brook of Paris’ Theatre des Bouffes du Nord.
Devised by Geoff Sobelle – who is intriguingly billed as “actor, creator, magician and illusionist” – and with live music by Elvis Perkins, HOME (King’s Theatre, August 22-26) promises the construction of a house and the people within it while we watch, while Theatre des Bouffes du Nord also present director Katie Mitchell’s adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ sexual psychological thriller La Maladie de La Mort (Royal Lyceum Theatre, August 16-19).