Edinburgh Young Critics Scheme

Are you an aspiring arts journalist or critic? Would you like the chance to go to one of the biggest arts festivals in the world, to be mentored by an experienced journalist and to be paid for your time? Enter the Edinburgh Young Critics Brief!

A Younger Theatre have teamed up with IdeasTap to offer four young people the chance to attend this year’s Edinburgh Festival. Winners will receive free accommodation, travel to and from the festival, professional mentoring and a small writing fee. Continuing from the 2012 Edinburgh Critics Scheme, A Younger Theatre are proud to present this year’s scheme with IdeasTap who currently support AYT in the provision of office space through their Creative Space scheme.

Winners of the scheme will be part of AYT’s reviewing team for two weeks and will work closely with the editorial team to review shows across the Edinburgh Fringe and International Festival. With mentoring from professional journalists (see below for the mentors), the  winners will develop their writing and critiquing skills, publish reviews and features on A Younger Theatre, and receive a fee for further reporting from IdeasTap for submission to IdeasMag.

The mentors for the Edinburgh Young Critics Scheme will be:
Lyn Gardner, The Guardian
Thom Dibdin, The Stage
Jake Orr and Eleanor Turney, A Younger Theatre

This is a great opportunity for aspiring arts journalists and critics to build up their portfolio whilst writing for an established publication and receiving professional mentoring. There will be opportunities to write features and conduct interviews, as well as reviewing.

APPLY TO THE EDINBURGH YOUNG CRITICS SCHEME

To apply for the Edinburgh Young Critics Scheme head over to the IdeasTap Brief on the IdeasTap website.

You need to sign up with IdeasTap and apply with a 500 word review of a recent arts event you’ve attended. The Edinburgh Young Critics Scheme is open to young people aged 18-26 who live in the UK. Deadline for applications is May 31st, with winners will be announced the following week.

Image by Laura Saurez.

Luke Barne’s play Bottleneck took last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival by storm, picking up rave reviews and earning itself a transfer to Soho Theatre. Bottleneck sounds simple enough: “it’s a right of passage play set in Liverpool, about a boy becoming a man”. It centres around a specific event which Barnes can’t revel without ruining the story, but I think his summary sufficiently reflects that he’s a playwright who believes in the purity of honest storytelling.

“If it’s not honest then what’s the point in writing it, if it’s not coming from something you believe in?” asks Barnes. His advice to budding playwrights is simple: “I think being honest is the important thing, and know what excites you. What excites me about theatre is I love the simplicity of it, people saying what they want to say in a way they can say it.” His ‘honesty is the best policy’ attitude reflects the influence of his other discipline, acting, too. However, Barnes tells me that he tries “to separate the two. Acting’s great, I enjoy it – and it’s not that writing’s not unstable work – but with the acting you’re not creating something, you’re just waiting for the phone to ring. I think for me it’s important to have a wide spectrum… when I wrote Bottleneck it was my own thing, I just did it in my own time… Bottleneck was just on my laptop and what happened was they dropped me a line and said there’s a gap in the programme for Edinburgh – it was three days before the deadline. So I sent that over. I was lucky; it came about at the right place at the right time.”

You could say 2012 was Barnes’s breakthrough year with two successful plays at the Edinburgh Fringe (Bottleneck and Chapel Street), yet he remains adamant that everything was “absolute luck, I nearly didn’t win that prize [Chapel Street was produced by Old Vic New Voices for an IdeasTap brief, but was initially turned down], and Bottleneck was last minute… Last year I had nothing planned really until about May when these two things came up; it got me a good set of reviews.” The two plays were not life-changing, but they did open doors: “My first play was on in 2011, it was literally the first thing I’d ever done, nobody had ever heard of me… Now I can talk to people about stuff and that excites me because if I tell somebody about an idea, they may be able to do something about it.”

Hightide not only produced Bottleneck but also commissioned another play, Eisteddfod, for Latitude Festival. “I think they’ve got a good gap in the market because there’s not many companies like them that will take risks on new writing.” And considering the Soho Theatre’s reputation for nurturing and producing new writing, I couldn’t think of a better home for Bottleneck: ”Hightide have got a strong relationship with the Soho Theatre anyway because they produced Ella Hickson’s Boys last year. It’s exciting because I did a play there years ago with the National Youth Theatre so it’s good to go back. And they’ve got the best bar.”

What I love about Barnes is his sense of the writer’s role: “I think when it comes to drafting you’ve got to be really conscious that you’re creating something that everyone’s a part of and has invested in emotionally and intellectually to create something we’re proud of altogether. If everyone’s not proud, then it’s a failure in my eyes… What I enjoy about working in theatre is being a part of it in every capacity. It’s not ‘I’m the star of the show, I wrote this, I’m the director’ – no. We’re each contributing to produce something we’re excited about together.” Barnes’s thoughts behind the positive response that Bottleneck has received are that “it’s because when people go and see it, it’s not quite what you think it’s going to be. The play’s really humane, energetic, light-hearted, and then something happens that you don’t expect to see. Something happens… and it’s about how that thing shines a light on our own lives. God, that’s so wanky! I just wrote it as an honest story and luckily people responded well; all you can do is be honest about what you write and see what people think.”

Interviewing Barnes is less like an interview and more like a friendly chat at the pub. He’s the sort of man you’d like to have a pint with, not only because he’s extremely likeable but also because he’s obviously so creatively engaged in his work and theatre. Creative – but dangerous. Maybe it’s something threatening about his beard, but the way he dances around the fringes of Bottleneck’s plot makes me think that he could tell me the story, but then he’d have to kill me – so it might be a better idea to just go buy a ticket. And in Barnes’s ever humble words: “Why should people come see Bottleneck? Something happens. It’s funny. Well, in parts.” I’m sold.

Bottleneck plays at the Soho Theatre until the 9 March. For tickets and more information, visit the Soho Theatre website.

Bottleneck tours to Watford Palace Theatre on 14th March for more details visit the Watford Palace Theatre website.

If you like your sight gags simple and stunning, your laughs loud and your submarines, well, essentially non-existent, then The Submarine Show is one to watch. Slick and often surprisingly subversive visual comedy abounds in this silly and entirely loveable piece from American duo Slater Penney and Jaron Hollander. A deceptively simple premise allows for the reign of utter chaos as two rather useless but nevertheless hilarious mariners crash their submarine and are let loose in an unknown territory, dragging the audience along with them on a fast and frantic journey from ocean bed to rainforest floor with plenty of madcap stop-offs in between.

Penney and Hollander’s proficiency at producing a startlingly diverse range of sound effects, from the particular pop of a pen-lid to the dull thunk of an axe blade in wood, is more than enough of an incentive to see this piece. To help us along, there is some quick and clever character development with Hollander as the miniature macho-man and Penney as the cowardly first mate with some curiously defective waterworks.

Stretching the limits of believability is central to The Submarine Show and the results are admirable – with no set, almost no recorded sound and despite some utterly fantastical goings on, the pair manage to keep us involved in even the most minute of their actions, ensuring the detail and accuracy of their work gets the laughs it deserves. A generous measure of audience participation ensures our investment – Hollander hacks through the auditorium as if we’re a forest, uses the hands of front row to stopper leaks and encourages us at various points, when things get almost too wild, to put on our oxygen masks and calm down.

What makes The Submarine Show so endearing is that daring physical feats and fiercely impressive clowning routines are played out without a touch of overdone showmanship. Penney and Hollander are as keen to send themselves up as anyone else, often creating entirely new jokes from the very absurdity of their own set-up. There is sardonic subtlety as well as slapstick, and whilst it was lovely to hear the gurgle of children’s laughter, there are plenty of jokes for adults too. At times, Slater and Penney probably have a bit too much fun with their own material, resulting in dips in attention as some gags amble on towards self-indulgence and the audience loses track, but there is an unrelenting enthusiasm and sheer love of laughter here that renders The Submarine Show, in the end, almost impossible to resist.

**** – 4/5 stars

The Submarine Show played at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

There is something beautifully and simply tragic about the regal wave, the Duke of Windsor notes, and he demonstrates with a slow and serene wave farewell, the last meaningful gesture of a hand no longer able to “waive the axe or wield the sword”.

Born third in line to the throne, only to die in all but exile, Prince Edward VIII (Bob Kingdom) makes for deeply engaging company. It seems the playboy prince and momentary king occupies a very particular place in our national consciousness – between noble birth right and the right to marry the woman you love, his story dwells in the painful and exposing overlap of the public and private realms. “A king has no voice…” declares the inimitable Kingdom, but in this involving and intimate encounter with perhaps our monarchy’s most marginalised figure, the rich and rhythmic language that often approaches poetry cannot help but suggest otherwise.

Of course, there is something inexcusably voyeuristic about the entire affair and the immediate immersive-ness might be put down to our ongoing fascination with the ever-unrevealing monarchy. The 75-minute monologue functions as a privileged glimpse into a bygone world that is difficult to understand even by those inhabiting it, as it seems loneliness and lordliness go inextricably hand in hand. When Edward abandons ceremony and talks in earnest about love, it becomes apparent that the Wills-and-Kate phenomenon is nothing new  – we are still endlessly enthralled by the possibly that the “ice blue” blood of the seemingly untouchable royals might be stirred by the ‘common’ touch, so to speak.

The masterful Kingdom perfectly embodies the noticeably wearied but nonetheless charismatic cad, “now at the receiving end of devilish charm,” he laments, rather than the propagator of it. With growing sadness, we witness him rather too figuratively singing for his supper, sitting down to gather his memoirs for a $1 million dollar deal he hopes will put an end to the couple’s reliance on the wealthy sycophants who just want to the chance to say they bought dinner for an ex-king.

Kingdom demonstrates a propensity for bittersweet and wry comedy, his often absolutely deadpan delivery well-befitting the regal stoicism that only occasionally thins to reveal a man disappointed by life. Relegated from royal highness to nomad, gypsy, wanderer, the Duke is a gracious but somewhat disheartened host. His glorious impression of his father, the deep-voiced and sombre George V, is rendered all the more poignant by the knowledge that it is the closest that he will ever come to imitating him and the upsetting fact that his long-sought approval never arrived.

Thanks to a varied cast of subtle and detailed characters, such as George V, the show is taut and well-paced – the only thing that grates is the jarring use of recorded audio to represent Wallace.  Intentionally or not, though it’s not difficult to see how much the self-titled ‘puppy’ Edward adores her, it is less clear why. Nevertheless, An Audience with the Duke of Windsor remains a masterclass in the one-man show, a touching and accomplished portrait of the king we could have had.

**** – 4/5 stars

An Audience with the Duke of Windsor played at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. For more information see the Edinburgh Fringe website.