‘Ariane Branigan is a prospective student living in Edinburgh’ says her potted Wee Review biography. Yes. She hasn’t EVEN managed to be a student yet. She’s a PROSPECTIVE one. So… You know those woke little squits wriggling about in a sea of deactivated culture semen? She hasn’t YET MANAGED to become one of them. Fucking […]
Stephanie Withers gives the impression of being scared of running over the word limit. Her reviews release their information in staccato squirts of data. Occasionally she’ll pair two sentences with a comma. But mostly it reads like this. However, her reviews are better than this makes them sound. They’re perfectly clear and she always takes […]
Dave Coates is one of those reviewers who, like a teacher at a long-established school, wants everyone to try their best. And he wants them to be cheerful about it.Jack Barry, for example, “seems self-aware enough that his mis-steps suggest a performer in the middle of a promising learning process”. Coates could have added “Will […]
Nick Awde has been around since gaslighting, writing about theatre and working on a string of large stage productions, some of them at the Fringe. This pedigree may explain the aloofness with which he told Phil Ellis’s Funz and Gamez Tooz to fuck off: “Guys, you got last year’s award because you were an in-joke […]
First the good news: Tamarin Fountain has an excellent name. Well, that’s not the good news. But she does, though. The good news is that Tamarin Fountain writes very clearly in plain English. Her style is friendly in a sub Marge-Proops way, and she lets you know what’s going on without getting too deconstructive: “This […]
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 […]
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 […]
Vyvyan Almond’s sentences are quite over-constructed. They sometimes take so long to reach their point that reading his reviews puts you in mind of a Dickensian preamble. And Dickens, as we know, was paid by the word. That’s not to say that Almond writes with the wit or pathos of Dickens, of course. In fact […]
If all reviewers wrote like James McColl, Fringepig would be out of business. Not that Fringepig IS a business, obviously. Not until someone has the guts to take out an advert with us, anyway. No, if they all wrote as matter-of-factly as this chap there wouldn’t be much to moan about. “Laurence Clark is a […]
Well, you wait 67 years for an Edinburgh Fringe parody to happen, and then two come along at once. This one is very wet-nosed and friendly and is called Edimbrugh Fringe Dog. Fringe dog spells everything wrong and gives everyone five stars. As you know, we at Fringepig get quite cross with reviewers who use […]
To be honest, I’ve never much cared for the way The Telegraph denomes Mark Monahan “joint dance critic … and also writes about film and stand-up comedy”. It’s almost as bad as his colleague Dominic Cavendish, stand-up comedy critic AND deputy theatre luvvie. What do these disciplines have to do with each other? Nothing, that’s […]
Justin McCarthy doesn’t so much write reviews as retch words from every orifice. Like someone with lexical norovirus the deluge flows from both ends of his points of view, creating a big mess all over the page. “Simply the most bizarre show you will ever have the unfortunate and detrimental privilege to watch” he writes […]
I’m going to ignore the fact that Peter Dorman uses phrases such as “strap yourselves in” and “not one for the easily offended” and even – EVEN! – “a must see”… because, for the greater part, Peter Dorman is a capable reviewer. His reviews get to the point and express his opinion in plain English […]
Nanna Gunnars doesn’t want to be misunderstood. Perish the thought. Her reviews have a fussy preciousness to them that’s as clumsy as it is amusing. Her description of Lost Voice Guy was both informative and reasonable, for example, concluding “His banter with the audience is one of the best I have witnessed, not just on […]
“I went into the theatre thinking that assisted suicide was a sad but sometimes necessary thing, and I left thinking just that, having learnt very little”. Thus Tom Moyser admonishes Chris Larner, explaining that he had to remove a star from the true monodrama of his terminally ill wife, because he didn’t learn that lethal […]
Hawkins is a great fan of the words ‘hackneyed’, ‘indulgent’, ‘boring’ and the phrases ‘goes on too long’ and ‘this is hardly new’. Do people not realise that he has somewhere important to be, like another show he can’t be arsed to sit through? His prose is noisy with the sound of eyeballs being rolled […]
I’m not sure I believe anything that Rory Mackenzie writes. Not because I think he’s lying, but because I’m not convinced he knows what he’s looking at. His reviews seem to be rooted in the soil of deep ignorance, fertilised by sublimated pain and anxiety. Reading one of his reviews is like trying to get […]
Victoria Beardwood is very good. In fact, so good is she that I scoured every single one of her reviews looking for something to moan about and I pretty much came up empty. They’re concise, enthusiastic, witty without being condescending, and they fit perfectly into the Three Weeks slug format. If there’s one little quibble […]
Well, thank fuck that Lottie Ormerod took time out from her busy schedule of reviewing things like Princess Pumpalot: The Farting Princess to go and see one comedy show in 2014. Please don’t think, however, that Ormerod is unschooled in the ways of comedy: on the contrary she knows exactly what it’s like to be […]