There’s Barry with his chamois who loves to buff, and Brian in a chicken mask going to the dungeon room. Brenda roams the corridors holding her dead husband’s skull and Gary, a newly-wed petrol-head, keeps saying ‘oil.’ They, together with Barbara Backhander from Uganda (that’ll be me), comprise the guests at Hotel Yes Please, the […]

‘There are three people on stage. Don’t tell the Beckett Estate. Shit!’ Turns out that Edward Beckett sees the benefit in making uncle Samuel’s work more accessible. Eureka! He allows Jess Thoms, aka Touretteshero, to adapt the work to suit her particular physical and neurological requirements. Many of Beckett’s characters are disabled. Think of Endgame: […]

In a festival renewed for the speed of its turnarounds, to arrive in a space that resembles the scrappier back end of a charity shop, where the hard-to-categorise items – an ironing board, a scruffy giant teddy – are piled unceremoniously, is immediately intriguing. It’s a charity shop with a difference, however, as the staff […]

There is a man is an oversized, cartoonish lion costume centrestage. He introduces himself in cod-Scots: he is Lionel McLion. Just glimpsed in the darkness of his mouth is a second mouth, human: this is performance-maker Mamoru Iriguchi. But it’s no naive design flaw that discloses his presence, we can see Mamoru because he’s just […]

There is a heading used in the programme accompanying NDT’s current run at the Edinburgh International Festival: From rebellion to eminence. The words draw reference to the 1959 origins for the company when 21 members of the Nederlands Ballet became positively charged by the potential and promise of experimentalism over classicism and so tore themselves […]