ED2014 Theatre ED2014 Three To See ED2014 Week0 Edition

Three To See 2014: Shakespearean Twists

By | Published on Tuesday 22 July 2014

MacBheatha

Every year the Fringe boasts a large number of Shakespeare-related plays. Some are your standard stagings, others are adaptations, others still are inspired by rather than based on one of the Bard’s greatest works. ThreeWeeks Co-Editor Caro especially likes the ones that shake things up a bit, and here she recommends three that she thinks sound a bit all right.

Seussification Of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Well, I wasn’t going to see a title like that in the Fringe Programme and breezily thumb past it, was I? I have a child who loves Dr Seuss, after all. And I love it when people irreverently muck around with things that everyone considers sacrosanct… so over to the show’s Fringe blurb, which I really can’t improve on: “As comedies go, Midsummer’s the greatest! Except that the language Will used ain’t the latest. Shaky used old words like: Thee, Thou and Thine. It’s hard to process that much old at one time. So we ran the script through the Script Squash Two-Fifty. It’s a machine that makes old scripts more nifty. It tightens the plot, which is kinda gigantic. The whole play rhymes now and is much less iambic!” Suitable for you and your kids. If they are 6 or above.
TheSpace on North Bridge, from 1 Aug until 9 Aug. Tickets here.

MacBheatha (pictured)
This sounds like it will be brilliant, and it’s such an apt way to adapt this particular work; what better way to add a dimension to The Scottish Play than to translate it into Gaelic? It’s a two hander, focusing on the tense relationship between MacBheatha and his wife, and won praise from Scotsman critic Joyce McMillan when it was performed at Glasgow’s Citizen’s theatre late last year.  “It offers a fierce insight into the relationship at the centre of one of the world’s greatest plays”, she wrote,  “as well as a reminder that like any other language charged with history and poetry, Gaelic brings its own energy to this great text, along with a profound and thrilling sense of connection to the mediaeval Scotland in which this most famous of stories is set”.  Sounds good, huh? And it’s suitable for non-Gaelic speakers too, so don’t be put off, Sassenachs.
Summerhall, from 11 Aug until 24 Aug. Tickets here.

Hamlet Private Eye
Every year at the Fringe there’s one particular Shakespeare play that has an especially high profile and this year it appears to be ‘Hamlet’; there are loads of productions of it, and shows based on it. I’ve seen quite a lot of Hamlets this lifetime, though, so I thought I’d go for something completely different, this one, which appears to take the concept and make it into an apparently humorous piece combining the trappings of film noir with, er, slapstick comedy. Looking forward to seeing if the concept works…
theSpace on North Bridge, from 4 Aug until 9 Aug. Tickets here.



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