Katharine Gemmell isn’t a bad reviewer per se, but her impulse to be all over the shows she sees tends to result in her passing judgment on people rather than performance. This is something we’ve come to expect of younger reviewers (Fest is full of this sort of thing) and although we don’t know Gemmell’s […]
Lynne is the latest of the Geoff family, who are sort of like that family in The Hills Have Eyes, except these fun-loving maniacs are constantly craving some meaty human comedy to butcher. Lynne makes a decent fist of it, though, with Phil Ellis; at least ‘Phil Ellis is a stupidly funny man’ is a […]
I sometimes wonder what it is that draws reviewers to Edfringe Review: is it the dizzying, unwelcoming site navigation that makes you want to leave immediately, or is it the gaudy T-shirts that let everyone know there is a REVIEWER in the house? Or perhaps it’s their habit of reviewing everything twice to give a […]
Jonny Sweet describes Phil Nichol as “like a precocious schoolkid who’s guzzled too many Dip Dabs before the bell and is now showing off in front of his classmates”. It’s a charge that can be levelled at Sweet himself, for although his reviews bounce from point to point like a likeable swot reading his book […]
Craig Naples has this infuriating habit of trying to give a tantalising flavour of something but just being bloody annoying. When he tells us that Scott Gibson: Life After Death comes “…with one moment in particular (involving a matron and a pillow) … is swift yet chillingly clinical and grotesque”, he applies FOUR adjectives to […]
“There are a few lyrical clangers,” says Polly Glynn of Gareth Richards… and it’s a charge that might be made of her reviews too. There’s quite a lot that jars. She tells us that Michael Brunstrӧm’s The Hay Wain Reloaded is saved by “its clever and coherent structure”, but then immediately afterwards concludes that it’s […]
There’s something very amusing about Catriona Scott’s reviews. She writes in the style of a Victorian botanist describing something nobody has ever seen before. She describes the physicality of the scene, the species of jokes and the sequence of events as if she’s anxious that the police might want to know later. She doesn’t find […]
When you read Victoria Nangle’s reviews you find yourself muttering ‘Get on with it’ a lot. There’s a great deal of throat-clearing and pussyfooting, all of it taking up ink and paper that could have been used for poetry, or a treatise on human rights or something. Take her first paragraph on Candy Gigi: Looking […]
Molly Stewart has only reviewed two Fringe shows so far, and one of them during its preview, so apologies if we’re going off half-cock. But we are were very excited to have a Gigglebeater to reviewer-review; they don’t come around very often. Stewart is a generous reviewer, always ready to temper a comment that may […]
This tired old Fringepigger started out not liking Emma Newlands. But that’s largely because the term ‘self-deprecating’ winds me up for reasons I have explained to death. So: “Reviewers always describe me as self-deprecating, says Angela Barnes, just as this reviewer had written those very words down.” (WHY? WHY HAD YOU WRITTEN AN OVERUSED BIT […]
Marni Appleton isn’t a terrible reviewer – let’s be clear about that. She lays out very clearly what the viewer can expect in broad strokes, and her prose is clear and unjumbled. That may sound like faint praise, but we’re talking about Broadway Baby here, where every writer with basic literacy skills is like a […]
What would the Fringe be without Three Weeks waking up really late in the proceedings and sneezing embryonic reporters all over us? It simply wouldn’t be as much fun. Every year we at FringePig scan the wires for the pitter patter of moisture falling from the wet patches behind the ears of these delightful people. […]
I’m starting to lose my faith in One4Review. In a year when Steve Bennett and Julia Chamberlain seem to have decided to do all their own spelling mistakes, One4Review seems to have spawned a whole new clutch of single-named review monkeys (all of which we’ll surname ‘Geoff’, because that’s what we do). However, I’m half […]
Sometimes you just want to tell Dave House not to get so overexcited. Sophie Willian: Novice Detective is “about as good as you can reasonably expect”. And Jenan Younis will be glad to learn that “the short length of her show means it remains quite fun throughout and never drags”. This may, however, just be […]
Megan Dalton makes sense most of the time, but occasionally reveals her youthful inexperience by going off half-cocked at nothing very much. For example, her discussion of Baba Brinkman’s The Canterbury Tales Remixed has some lovely observations and deft turn of phrase, such as “the use of mediocre cartoons limits rather than expands the world […]
Jacqueline Thompson doesn’t like men being loud. And she doesn’t like them being all … you know… man-like. Time and again Thompson reacts with barely-concealed disgust to any whiff of volume or testosterone. Even so gentle a creature as Caimh McDonnell unnerves her: “His fast-paced, slightly shouty style can be witnessed on a number of […]
First, a confession: I do not always know what Maud Sampson is talking about. “Think less 50 Cent and his hoes, more Tupac in his 1995 police custody video talking about rap as poetry,” she advises as a way to understand Rubberbandits. Tupac? He was one of those rapper chaps, wasn’t he? Forgive me, I […]