CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Devastating theatre offers a totalised view of humanity
ANGUS REID recommends a production that explores the urgent need to be reacquainted with the dangers of repression and the difficult path to selfhood
CONSUMMATE: Lorn MacDonald as Sigismundo
[Ryan Buchanan]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Life Is A Dream
Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh
THREE centuries before psychoanalysis, Spanish playwright Pedro Calderon proposed his own “interpretation of dreams.”
After a trauma that has disposed of the father and left the mother in charge, the thing she most fears has been locked away. This is the price of courtly stability and a fragile peace in the realm.
Life Is A Dream opens when the trapdoor is flung back and the unconscious emerges to take revenge in the form of a snarling humanoid, a bundle of primitive drives supercharged by sex and aggression.
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ANGUS REID applauds the potential of an ambitious show about Gaza, and encourages it to keep its nerve
MARY CONWAY is spellbound by superb performances in Arthur Miller’s study of the social and personal stress brought about by Nazi Germany’s Kristallnacht
GORDON PARSONS is blown away by a superb production of Rostand’s comedy of verbal panache and swordmanship
WILL STONE applauds a fine production that endures because its ever-relevant portrait of persecution