Articles by Jim Ralley

Woke

After a superb sold-out run in 2017, Apphia Campbell returned to this year's Edinburgh Fringe for one week only. Woke is her powerful show portraying parallel narratives of two womens' civil rights awakenings...

John-Luke Roberts: Terrible Wonderful Adaptations

As a reviewer I'm fortunate enough to get free tickets to many shows. As it was the last Friday night of the Fringe I thought I'd invite some friends along to see John-Luke Roberts: Terrible Wonderful Adaptations...

Paul Williams: Santa Fe

The jig is up! Paul Williams is a quadruple threat – song, dance, comedy and opinion. The self proclaimed “most opinionated comedian in New Zealand” does it all in his show Santa Fe...

Stuart Bowden: Our Molecules

Stuart Bowden has been doing this for a long time. Since his 2011 breakout collaboration with the now-legendary Doctor Brown, Dr Brown Brown Brown Brown Brown and His Singing Tiger, he has consistently produced odd little pieces of theatre that combine comedy, music, storytelling and clowning...

Robin Clyfan: The Sea Is Big Enough to Take It

At the centre of its big, warm heart, The Sea Is Big Enough to Take It is a story about a non-activist boy and his activist mother, and by extension a story about all of us and our relationships with our parents...

A Hero of Our Time

Pechorin is a superfluous man. He has it all, yet seemingly has nothing. He's witty, smart and sensitive, yet also utterly manipulative and verging on sociopathic. He's the selfish, bored protagonist of Mikhail Lermontov's Russian classic A Hero Of Our Time, played with ferocity and bravery by the endlessly watchable Oliver Bennett...

Johannes Dullin: Come Along and Bring a Friend!

The back room at Dragonfly is unassuming. Rows of chairs extend backwards from an archway through which the performers do their thing. Yesterday I saw a man transform that room into a magical, ridiculous, confusing, joyful space...

Jamali Maddix: Vape Lord

"If there are any reviewers in tonight, gimme four stars. Nah I'm only joking, it's a three star show." To be honest that's what I thought for much of the hour...

Barry Ferns: Barry Loves You

Barry promised he would "share [his] soul with you" at the start of the show, and golly, he really does. In an hour that takes us from South African robots to family revelations, via flapping meat bags and biscuit addiction, Ferns presents an always engaging, sometimes profound stand-up show...

Róisín and Chiara: Back to Back

Our eyes locked. I opened my mouth in anticipation. A pink shrimp sweet came sailing through the air and bounced off my lip. "My fault, totally my fault!" said Chiara Goldsmith, as she scurried cheekily off in her white boiler suit and oversized sunglasses...

Luke Rollason's Planet Earth

Luke Rollason is a silly man who made me cry with laughter today. From the opening angler fish routine to the closing end-of-the-world sequence, I was grinning with joy throughout his Planet Earth...

Void

Void is really intense, in the best possible way. If you're looking for a break from the stand-up comedy and the wordy theatre then get down to The Old Lab in Summerhall, and strap in for 45 minutes of 'experimental dance and abstract glitch-video landscapes...

Dangerous Giant Animals

Dangerous Giant Animals is a one-person show about growing up with a disabled sibling, based on writer/performer Christina Murdock's real life experiences. As she says at the end of the show, this kind of 'everyday tragedy' is rare to see portrayed on the stage or screen...

Queens of Sheba

Great theatre often takes deeply personal experiences and weaves them together into stories and sequences that tap into a universality and profundity that the experiences alone wouldn't have been able to...

Dan Simpson: Worried Face Emoji

It's what Dan Simpson would want. The complexity and nuance of a finely wrought review, reduced to a few simple emojis. I'm going for: 'thumbs up' + 'slightly smiling face'...

Century Song

A woman stands downstage right, a spotlight illuminating her from one side. She starts playing with her voice. No actual words come out but there is beauty and pain, and there are jazz phrases and buzzing lips...

Paul Foot: Image Conscious

There are going to be two kinds of people who read this review: fans of Paul Foot, and people who are curious about Paul Foot. If you're a fan of Paul Foot then you can stop reading after the next paragraph...

Mistero Buffo

Go and see this show right now. I just wanted to get that out before wasting any more time. Now to the review.As we walked up the winding staircase to Underbelly's Big Belly space the walls were dripping with what felt like the sweat of a thousand performers and audience members...

Electrolyte

I was transfixed. Before this theatre, music and spoken word mashup had even started the actors were milling around, testing the monitors, sound checking, chatting with people they recognised in the audience...

Flies

I was excited about Flies. An award-winning theatre company. A sold-out show. An eager looking crowd. A delicious cheese toastie in preparation. I was ready to be swept away on an absurdist wave...

IRL

I was curious about IRL. A dance piece billed as a 'thought-provoking performance about navigating life in an increasingly intrusive and connected world'. It could have gone either way...

Infinita

Familie Flöz are back with another beautiful, gentle and poignant piece of physical theatre. It's a delightful way to spend 90 mins. From the gorgeous opening image of a masked woman playing cello alone on a bench, to the final scene where a quartet of cheeky old men tap, slap and backflip their way into the afterlife...

Create Account

Username or Password Reminder