Hot Off the Press – from Edinburgh Fringe Festival

There’s nothing like the Edinburgh Festival for a mix of shows, and a mixture of reactions.

A South African inspired version of Miss Julie – now MIES JULIE – is one at the top of the list according to Fiona Mountford in the Evening Standard

A primal scream of a reworking of the Strindberg staple set in modern South Africa’s Eastern Cape Karoo. It’s a pitch-perfect repositioning of the action from adaptor/director Yael Farber, who brings to visceral life the complex, simmering racial and linguistic mix in this far-flung corner of an immensely uneasy “rainbow nation”.

And the pyrotechnic show spectacular that is 2008 MACBETH has caused quite a stir, though Anna Burnside in The Independent hints that perhaps Shakespeare could do without it.

As a spectacle, this a whooping success: guns, explosions, fire, water, a soundscape which whooshes from techno to creepy white noise via cheesy lounge music, the soldier guiding a helicopter to land with flaming sparklers, the clever use of video cameras to take us into every corner of the set, the lighting which uses neon tubes, torches, spotlights and everything in between. All great. Shakespeare, however, should not need pyrotechnics to keep an audience going for two hours without an interval. 

Dominic Cavendish in the Daily Telegraph thought that Simon Stephen’s MORNING has an important missing dimension.

In plumbing the depths of adolescent insecurity and modern amorality, giving it a controversial feminine slant, [Stephens] makes you sit up and watch. But absorbed though I was by his portrait of a possessive 17-year-old suffering from a deadly lack of empathy, and undisguised ego-centrism, I felt he had produced an interesting experimental piece that conveniently and cleverly saves itself the bother of trying to make you care about the characters.

And in reviewing AND NO MORE SHALL WE PART Lyn Gardner in The Guardian thinks

there is something inert about this calculated weepie.

Find out what’s on at the Fringe.

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