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 […]
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 […]
Sharon Geoff is not really called Sharon Geoff but, since we’ve long since given up trying to suss out the surnames of anyone at One4Review we’ve decided to denome everyone as an adoptive child of Geoff (just Geoff) the Editor. Come to think of it we should have called Geoff ‘Geoff Geoff’ for consistency, but […]
Full marks to Graeme Morrice for being rambling, irrelevant and slightly offensive in the opening paragraph of his Lucy Beaumont review. “It’s a balmy Thursday night and there’s a mixed crowd packed into one of the smaller Pleasance Courtyard venues. Something’s needed to take our minds off the heat and luckily there’s a slightly ditzy […]
Sadly for David O’Connor, clicking on his name takes you to the Three Weeks theatre critic Dave Fargnoli. It’s almost as if Three Weeks is losing track of its million pickpocket street children. When you’ve read more than a hundred Three Weeks reviews you start to wonder why they even bother recruiting these youngsters anymore. […]
Fringe veterans – particularly antipodeans – probably remember Barrie Morgan – he was the hero of Barrie Morgan’s World of Organs, the Australian sitcom and Fringe show. True, we have no evidence that it’s the same Barrie Morgan. In fact we desperately hope it isn’t. Just imagine being in something that creatively bonkers and then […]
There comes a point in every Ben Venables review that you realise he’s gone off on one and left you scratching your head. His musings reach their most quixotic when he’s trying to describe what people look like: “His slight frame and birdie innocence recall the infant heron gulls that have divebombed Edinburgh gardens these […]
My colleague Mr Rumania has always been rather dismissive of Fest reviewers, saying that they have a policy of under-rating good shows and judging everything from behind a barricade of preconceptions. Even the balanced Mr Kipper calls them “haughty”. I wondered whether it was just that Fest tries to be more honest, and sets realistic […]