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Optical Identity ***
THERE was one point in Friday's European premiere of Optical Identity - an intruiging multi-sensory collaboration between Cathie Boyd's Theatre Cryptic and the T'ang Quartet - when technology got the better of it.
Strong acting give heart to haunting tale ***
WITH minimal set and strong attention to atmosphere, Theatre Alba give a very welcome production of Peter Pan creator JM Barrie's little-performed ghost play, Mary Rose.
Charmless cod rock opera fails to deliver ideas **
DULL and overblown, although beautifully staged, the American Repertory Company crash into the Orpheus myth with all the subtlety of a joyrider in a stolen Ford Capri.
Lady Boys toppled by brute force as Fringe ticket sales smash record
THE Edinburgh Festival Fringe sold a record 1,697,293 tickets this year, it announced yesterday, a rise of 10.8 per cent on last year's figure.
High concept play with accent on little details ****
HIGH concepts run right through this American adaptation of Ibsen's great play. Yet, for all that it appears to be a succession of gimmicks, it remains remarkably true to the original.
Mabou Mines Dollhouse ****
TAKE a few images that you might always have associated with the idea of Ibsen's Doll's House, the story of Nora Helmer and the dramatic end of her bourgeois 19th-century marriage.
Orpheus X ***
THERE'S no denying the strength of the idea at the heart of Rinde Eckert's 21st-century version of the myth of Orpheus, staged for the American Repertory Theatre as a 95-minute modern opera for three singers and a four-piece band.
La Didone ***
THERE is something implicitly funny about the Wooster Group's latest foray into cross-cultural postmodernism.
String quartet reveal naked ambition
HOW often do we get to see musicians naked as they play their instruments?
Top 5 - International Festival
Ibsen's 19th-century classic as you've never seen it, with men under five feet tall and women who tower over them, all squeezed into a doll's house.
Arnold Wesker's The Mistress ****
Martha Lott is powerfully alluring, and painfully tragic and torn in this one-woman performance
Mabou Mines Dollhouse ****
TAKE a few images that you might always have associated with the idea of Ibsen's Doll's House, the story of Nora Helmer and the dramatic end of her bourgeois 19th-century marriage, which she sees to have been a humiliating sham.
Ritter, Dene, Voss ****
THE first UK performance of this little-known 1984 work by the Austrian playwright Thomas Bernhard, Ritter, Dene, Voss is staged here with no small amount of elegance, precision and humour.
Simple girl ****
MELANIE WILSON'S one-woman show is a quirky gem. Standing at a vintage microphone, one finger pressing a key on a sampler packed full of kooky sounds and Hitchockian pulsing strings, Wilson weaves a fantastical tale of derring-do
Theatre reviews ****
IN another classic modern fairytale from Vanishing Point, Sandy Grierson plays a young man from Leith but now based in Hull who returns home to find things have changed starkly.
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