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Fringe 2006 Reviews (68)
Geraldine Quinn: Bad Ambassador
Gilded Balloon Teviot
***(*)
Geraldine Quinn's rock cabaret bursts onto the Fringe straight from
a run at the Melbourne comedy festival. Covering everything from penis
envy to doomed pet rabbits, Quinn's intelligent, black-humoured brand
of comedy blows the cobwebs away and leaves you with a feel-good high
that long after the last chords of her big rock ballads. One of the
few comedians you can watch without a drink and who will make you feel
as though you've had several by the end of an hour in her sassy, sexy,
intoxicating company.
Louise Hill
Accidentally Waiting to Happen
The Paper Birds
Pleasance
*****
Three young women emerge from their entwined positions on the floor
to occupy separate spaces on the stage - one a pile of cardboard boxes
labelled "FRAGILE" and "HANDLE WITH CARE", another
a pretty pink bed she has taken to living underneath, and the third
a room buried in yellow post-it notes, upon which she has written detail
she can recall about the sister she has mysteriously lost. Through their
inter-twined monologues, they slowly reveal the single event which has
led them to the private hell from which they cannot, or will not, allow
themselves to escape.
Accidentally Waiting to Happen is an account of the aftermath
of an accident and its impact upon the lives of three women caught in
the wrong place at the wrong time. Its finely woven strands of narrative,
mirrored, dance-like movement and music - including searingly poignant
incidental music by Shane Durant - make it one of the finest, subtlest
and most moving theatrical performances you are ever likely to see.
The acting is uniformly excellent and the direction and design combine
just the right measures of subtlety and lightness of touch, no mean
feat given the complexity of the narrative and the originality of the
concept. The Paper Birds are exactly the kind of new, ambitious talent
British theatre needs - expect to hear much, much more from this Leeds-based
company.
Louise Hill
Bill Hicks: Slight Return
Festival Highlights
Pleasance Courtyard
****
What remains to be said about Bill Hicks? Eleven years after he succumbed
to pancreatic cancer, the world still looks to his musings and philosophising
with a wry smile.
This is the third year that Chas Early has taken the stage in the guise
of the late comedian, posing as his angelic form returned to earth for
a single hour to look at the world through his sarcastic eye.
To his credit, the material is as funny as it ever has been, with Early's
eerie ability to inhabit the voice, poise and mannerisms of Hicks become
more relaxed with each passing year. The topical observations have been
updated again, to include events only a few days old, and the recycled
material, still engaging enough to entertain, and the moments of sad
introspection come across as being utterly genuine.
Graeme Strachan
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