Hotshows

A guide to the best shows at the Festival by The Scotsman’s top team of reviewers

fantastic script,” she says. “I’d never heard anything like it, this story of a woman seeking the empowering gift of language, and taking it for herself. It was one of those occasions – like This Restless House and A Scots Quair – when all the ingredients come together, and it becomes greater than the sum of its parts.”

Knowles was encouraged to pursue acting by her drama teacher, Frances Paterson, at Edinburgh’s Holy Rood High School and went on to train at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire. Her first paid job was in John Brown’s Body, John Mcgrath’s epic staging of Scottish working-class history at Tramway, during Glasgow’s year as City of Culture.

Her ability as a singer as well as actress was used well in subsequent jobs with Wildcat, and also in productions such as The Garden, the opera created by John and Zinnie Harris, and in Pass the Spoon, the madcap opera by artist David Shrigley and composer David Fennessy. “Pass the Spoon!” she says, beaming at the memory. “It was just divine! It was incredibly difficult, because the whole thing was scored, so you had to learn every bar of the score in intimate detail. It was a huge learning curve, but I had such fun on it, and the audience reaction was incredible. We had people from kids up to octogenarians all laughing their heads off.”

It also allowed her to fulfil a life-long ambition. “I always wanted to sing with a live orchestra. Maybe not as June Spoon – but it was wonderful.”

When asked what she’d like to do in the future, she says: “I get excited by new work, stories I haven’t read before, plays that haven’t been seen before. I love new scripts, dissecting them, breaking them down and imagining them for the first time. And I guess if you’re doing something classical, what you want is a director who thinks about a classical script as if it is a new piece of writing, which is exactly how it’s been with This Restless House – it’s a completely new play.” Summerhall JJJJJ Dance Base JJJJ Summerhall JJJJ