Coffee-Table Notes

Scary monsters and super creeps may have been in abundance on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe over the last month, but few looked like Sasquatch, the mythical man-beast brought to life as part of Summerhall's programme by Faith No More keyboardist Roddy Bottum in Sasquatch, The Opera. In what looked like a scaled down hour-long chamber version of Bottum's vision, the now completed run of Ahmed Ibrahim's production cast the forest-dwelling creature as a would-be tourist attraction exploited by a family of drug-addicted hillbillies who dress up their son as a cut-price version who never quite cuts it. When the family fall out and go their separate ways, the daughter of the family encounters the real thing, only for their budding amour to be nipped in the bud by a crazed pack of meth lab workers. While the daughter is reinstated into the so-called normal world once more, Sasquatch is left to run wild, free and ever so slightly sad. If the narrative sounds crazed, be sure tha

Now that everyone with a laptop is a critic just as professional reviewing is under threat, it's all too timely for the critics themselves to be critiqued. This is the rude intention of Wild Bore , a manic hatchet job by Zoe Coombs Marr, Ursula Martinez and Adrienne Truscott. These three (dis) graces of comic performance take a very public revenge on those who dissed them and their wares in print and online with a hammed up creative fury not seen since Theatre of Blood hacked off the Critics' Circle. A trio of bare backsides line up like maids in a row, spouting forth verbatim quotes from real reviews of the performers' own back catalogue. Out of this develops a series of knowing routines that morph into a deliberately outrageous and ever so slightly self-obsessed caper. It's a wheeze, a dare and a giant theatrical raspberry as the trio effectively put two fingers up to critics and audience alike. It's also a meticulously planned assault that reinvents the early

Royal Lyceum Theatre Five stars When Zinnie Harris's three part reimagining of Aeschyus' epochal family tragedy first appeared in Dominic Hill's production at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow in 2016, its scale in terms of staging and imaginative breadth was stunning. More than a year on, this Edinburgh International Festival revival of the Citz's production in association with the National Theatre of Scotland is an even more expansive experience. This may be partly to do with its condensing of the three plays into one four and a half hour sitting. Largely, however, it is to do with the sheer bravura of the exercise, which sees generations of damaged goods wrestle with the hand-me-down baggage they've slaughtered their way into. From the moment Pauline Knowles' vivacious Clytemnestra vamps her way into the crumbling working men's club that passes for a palace where a Last of the Summer Wine style chorus holds court, the tone is set for a discordant psy

Dancing can save your life. Just ask The Letter Room, the loose-knit collective of all singing, all dancing twenty-somethings behind No Miracles Here, which kick-starts the day in a show that takes in the highs of Northern Soul nights and the lows of 1930s dance marathons in a musical that squares up to the ultimate downer of depression. “At it's heart it's a story about endurance,” says The Letter Room's Alice Blundell, one of five actor-musicians who appear in a show that began with the discovery that the suicide rate for men in the UK is highest in the north east of England. “It's about how even though life can set you back quite a lot sometimes, you've got to keep on keeping on. ” This is done through the figure of Ray, a man at the end of his tether who struggles to keep faith with himself, but eventually manages to step onto the floor and back into life. “We become his band,” says Blundell. “We're called Ray and the Raylettes, and we play this mix

The Studio Four stars “Sometimes the answer to your problem is right in front of you,” says one of the three performers in Forced Entertainment's black humoured study of being trapped in a hell of one's own making. By this time, Jerry Killick, Richard Lowden and Claire Marshall have spent the best part of an hour jumping in and out of dancing chicken costumes as each takes it in turn to try and guess the word one or the other is thinking. With canned laughter and taped applause under-scoring their efforts, at first it looks like classic prime time showbiz fodder for the masses, who might go willing to hail any act that's thrown in front of them, no matter how rubbish they might be. As they attempt to bludgeon their shtick into submission ad nauseum, the trio's efforts become louder, more frantic and increasingly desperate, even as the solution to all their problems is staring them in the face. Like Samuel Beckett's assorted double acts, they only have their

Summerhall, August 20th “So that was our warm up,” says Norwegian polymath Jenny Hval following the electronically pulsed opening number for her show as part of Summerhall's Nothing Ever Happens Here programme. Throughout the song, Dutch dancer/choreographer and cover co-star of Hval's 2016 female vampire concept album, Blood Bitch, Orfee Schuijt, has been putting herself through an aerobics workout. Hval gamely joins in with this when not breathing her spectral and funereally paced vocals into the microphone. To one side at the back of the stage is a big leather sofa, on which she and Schuijt intermittently sit or sprawl when Hval is not at a flower-strewn keyboard. On the other side, and at a more functional level, a black cloth covered table is loaded with assorted electronic kit from where most of the music emanates from as operated by Harvard Volden. “We tried to make the stage very cosy,” says Hval, “like an old theatre or play, because we lost all our costumes and an i

When Tim Etchells and the Forced Entertainment company began to make their most recent show, Real Magic, they didn't know what they would end up with. This is par for the course for the Sheffield-based company, and has been since they first got together in the mid 1980s to produce a very English form of avant-garde performance that bridged live art and theatre. As Real Magic took on a life of its own during a painful devising process, it looked to the cheesy schmaltz of TV game shows, complete with looped applause, canned laughter and a botched mind reading game that looks like it might never end. “It's about people who are trapped in something,” says Etchells, as he reflects on the show prior to its EIF dates, “and whether they can change that structure that they're trapped in. It's also one of those shows from us where we take something very frothy and light and sort of trash in a way. We work it and work it, and make cracks in it, and try and turn it into somethi