Exhilarating explosions of rage and emotion

Fringe Theatre

In what Taudevin describes as a piece of guerrilla-gig-theatre, she is accompanied onstage by musical director Kim Moore and Susan Bear and Julie Eisenstein – aka Glasgow alt-punk duo Tuff Love – for a rollercoaster glimpse from the frontline of one woman’s mind in a musicpunctured monologue that howls with barely suppressed rage.

In the current political climate, where responses to terrorist attacks have included policemen stripping a Muslim woman of her burkini on a French beach, Taudevin’s punk rock assault on patriarchy is as incendiary as it is necessary.

Taudevin’s delivery in a piece co-directed by her and Graham Eatough is a piece of eloquent rage that crafts the text’s internalised stream of consciousness into a piece of artful fury. Moore, Bear and Eisenstein’s presence are essential to this, their music a relentless pulse to Taudevin’s poetics.

In the spirit of a live fast, die young existence, Taudevin’s creation played for two shows only, but can be seen at Dundee Rep on September 20 before it returns to the Traverse on October 12 and 13. This is followed by Paisley Spree on October 22. Miss this music/ theatre timebomb at your peril. THE rise of revenge porn, as technology has become increasingly accessible to all, has made the headlines for all the wrong reasons of late.

In Blush, five increasingly dizzying intercut monologues lay bare a myriad of damaging possibilities that can result from such indulgences.

Written by Charlotte Josephine and presented by Snuff Box Theatre in association with Sphinx Theatre as part of the Underbelly Untapped season of new theatre, the show’s no-holdsbarred approach is both exhilarating and exhausting.

As the show flits between male and female perspectives on online etiquette and how lives can be destroyed by a private moment made public, it whirls and birls its way throughout with an intensity and passion that points its finger at those who make capital out of their predatory power games even as it lays bare the emotional fallout left behind. Runs until today DOMESTIC abuse comes in many forms. Just ask writer/ performer Katie Bonna in All The Things I Lied About ,a one-woman meditation on the effects everyday dishonesty can have on our relationships. It begins comically enough, as Bonna embarks on double bluff of a show that starts as a TED talk pastiche and ends up being an intimate insight into the sort of hand-me-down behavioural tics that can leave some pretty serious scars.

In the wrong hands, this sort of autobiographical confessional could be a painful experience for all the wrong reasons. In Bonna’s hands, however, its honesty is engaging and, as she gets the audience involved in her story, empathetic, so the seriousness of what comes late on in the show is never alienating in Joe Murphy’s production. Of course, as believable as all this is, Bonna could be lying through her teeth even as she charms us into submission in a show that gets to the truth regardless. Run ended Russell Leadbetter NOT for Joanne Harris the dusty life of an author chained to a cobwebbed attic desk and ancient Amstrad. “The thing about writing,” she said yesterday, “is that only a small percentage of it actually happens at the desk. Writing is really a kind of filtration system of experience.”

Doing book festivals is so important for her, but she repeated her dislike of those that charge the public for entry but do not pay ordinary fiction writers to take part, preferring to pay large premiums to celebrities who happen to have written books.

In an illuminating hour, Harris discussed her latest novel, Different Class. Asked whether we might see Vianne Rocher, heroine of her novel Chocolat, again, she said: “She won’t leave me alone. I’m sure she will have another outing, at least one.”

Miranda Sawyer spoke entertainingly about her latest book, Out of Time – a look at a mid-life crisis that hit her when she was 43, prompted by the birth ofhersecondchild–“Itwasa piddling little mid-life crisis. It was very undramatic. I didn’t run off with a builder.” There were cheerful quips throughout, and an interesting story about a lucrative book deal she was offered but turned down, about Madonna at 50. Fittingly, given the subject of Sawyer’s new book, there were poignant moments, too, such as the “sad little missives” posted by men on NHS