Good week for the Edinburgh Fringe. Ticket sales were up 5% on 2009.

Bad week for companies performing at the Edinburgh Fringe: ticket sales lagged capacity increases. Average houses were down 10%.

Good week for Russell Kane, who won the Perrier (or whatever they call it now).

Bad week for Edinburgh comedy judges, who were widely judged to have got it wrong by not giving the award to Bo Burnham.

Good week for Simon Russell Beale, Jonathan Groff and Claire Skinner. Previews of the West End production of Deathtrap continued to garner much affection and enthusiasm from the bloggers. Critics get their say next week, ahead of its open on 7 September.

Bad week for the National Theatre’s twitter feed, which returned to more mundane topics following the excitement of last week.

Good week for Tony Kushner. A series of his short plays, entitled Tiny Kushner (geddit?) opened at the Tricycle and The Guardian reported he’s much happier with life nowadays.

Bad week for Pete Wyer. The composer was “dismayed” that his latest ballet would not be performed in China. He can’t have been all that surprised, however, seeing as how it’s dedicated to the people of Tibet which, I don’t know if you’ve heard Pete, is a bit of a hot button issue over there.

Good week for the RSC, which announced it would open its shiny new theatres in Stratford after a £113m refurbishment in November.

Bad week for the much loved Courtyard Theatre (aka the iron shed, aka the little eyesore that could), which now faces the bulldozers, despite the affection it has earned from theatregoers over its brief and always-temporary life.

Good week for The Royal Court who have a hit on their hands with Clybourne Park. They even got the Whingers on side. Of course, the world will await the Sans Taste view (aka The Official Verdict) on Tuesday before jumping to any conclusions…

Bad news for humankind as the Spice Girls musical came one step closer to reality and was given a name.

Given it seems impossible to get tickets as a normal person, I once thought it might be a jolly idea to join Glyndebourne. “Think again, sunshine” came the clear response: there’s a £500 fee to go on the decade-long waiting list, a £75 annual fee to stay on the waiting list, a £155 annual fee once you get to the top of the list – and that’s just to get you to the point where you’re allowed to spend £200 on a ticket. It even costs £20 just to join the mailing list.

Glyndebourne, it seems, is for the seriously wealthy and the seriously patient.

Thankfully there are a couple of performances a year when the garden gates are thrown open to those who don’t own yachts, in which best available seats are sold for £30 to those under 30 – still not exactly cheap, but once you’ve been there: a bargain.

Champagne, black tie and evening dresses, an extravagant picnic, beautiful gardens in late summer sun: Glyndebourne is just glorious.

And that’s before you even go inside the lovely (I mean stunning) little opera house, constructed from pale wood and light and air and unobstructed sight lines.

And that’s before you even see Laurent Pelly’s thrilling production of Hänsel und Gretel, revived from the 2008 season complete with its exceptionally inventive design of folding cardboard favellas and supermarket sweep gingerbread houses.

And that’s before you realise it’s only an hour back to London.

If you’re young enough to take advantage of the under 30s offer then go at once; if you’re not, start plugging away at those EuroMillions; Glyndebourne is a must do.

PS You could also do worse than going to a semi-staged performance of H&G at the Royal Albert Hall tonight. Tickets available and you’ll get change from a thousand pounds.

The programme for Deathtrap contains instructions to “keep the plot a secret and don’t spoil the fun for future audiences”. Luckily for you, I’m the sort of person willing to cough up £3.50 for a leaflet full of adverts and instructions like this – so there will be no spoilers here to ruin the suspense. Or will there?

Deathtrap manages to parody the theatrical thriller genre through creating what must be the perfect example of that genre. Yes, the knowing meta-theatricality is laid on thick, but it also manages to be a compelling piece of theatre in its own right.

Much of this is down to the performances, which are superb. This is a lightweight piece by Russell Beale standards but his impeccable skill is still evident, deftly managing every line. Jonathan Groff is in a TV show which everyone I know except me manages to be obsessed by, but he more than holds his own here on the stage and is perfectly cast as the young and earnest playwright. Claire Skinner is playing a role she seems far to young for and Estelle Parsons’ “comic character” produces the most grating moments of the play. Perhaps this was just annoying or perhaps this was to make the very clever and very meta point that outright comic characters rarely work in this genre – let’s give everyone concerned the benefit of the doubt.

This play is really very well done. Slickly directed and performed, beautifully designed and nicely lit. Pity about the audience.

It was clearly First Time Theatregoer night at the Nöel Coward on Thursday. The first Act was bad enough: the rustling, yawning, stretching and talking going on from the American family in Row J; the hearing aid alarm in the Circle which bleated plaintively throughout the second scene; the guy next to me who kept checking his Skype messages (damn you iOS 4.0 multitasking); the Beyoncé ringtone at a pivotal moment.

But then this audience did something extraordinary in the second Act. Infuriatingly, I can’t go into details about what they did without giving away a crucial plot point and I’ve no idea if this reaction would be shared by other audiences on other nights – my crowd were a particularly strange lot for a number of reasons. Suffice to say the reaction from the audience to the big plot twist mid way through the Act was utterly bizarre and one for which they really ought to be pretty embarrassed.

Right, oblique (and if you haven’t seen the play presumably entirely incomprehensible) moralising over: this is a wonderfully fun and well done play. Go at once, and go with friends so you can watch them jump and discuss the perilous ethics of West End audiences after.

Dear Sirs,

A frequent sight at this time of year is increasingly populous groups of enthusiastic young people celebrating their results, unaware that the ‘awards’ and ‘certificates’ they clutch are nothing more than grossly exaggerated parodies of that which former generations had to struggle and strive for.

I write of course about the proliferation of ‘stars’ awarded by non-professionals to productions at the East Alba Great Exhibit of Theatricalitie and Relat’d Trades (commonly, but inaccurately, known nowadays as the Edinburgh Fringe).

We must condemn categorically, as have I in numerous editorials for my own Newspaper, these charlatans who pass themselves off as Theatre Critics armed with nothing more than a love of theatre and a desire to share it with the world, entirely lacking the requisite professional qualifications and years of training which are necessary to watch a play and write down what you thought about it.

This invasion of amateur critics and bloggers has led to a gross level of star inflation. I, for instance, have never awarded more than two stars to any of the eight thousand plays I have Reviewed and my immediate predecessor at this Newspaper awarded only a single star in the period 1917-38. Yet some of these “bloggers” regularly award three stars to a single production.

In response to this onslaught, my organisation has chosen to institute a re-denomination of the critical currency: from now on, all plays Reviewed in Real Newspapers will be rated out of 100 stars, rather than the conventional five. It will be immediately apparent to the ignorant masses who frequent today’s theatre that an 80 star review from someone such as myself holds more credibility than the four star review of any of Broadway Baby or West End Whinger.

After thorough research I have identified The Internet (or as I call it, the Great Bolshevik Plot) as responsible for this sort of outrage. It allows people to publish their amateur, uninformed, irrelevant thoughts – which will only lead to confusion amongst those little people who go to plays – without a license from their betters in the theatrical and Journalistic classes.

If people wanted this sort of variety of diverse opinions then the Newspaper industry wouldn’t be enjoying the sort of unprecedented success that it has over the last five years, with circulations soaring and advertising revenues forever rising.

If this “blogging” business is allowed to continue, however, then the hallowed and sacred system which has ruled civilisation for centuries of glueing stars onto fringe posters based on what me and my mates think will be forever destroyed. Frankly, the sooner this Internet is turned off the better.

Yours faithfully,
Honourable Alliance of Theatre Critics for Real Newspapers

Chris Addison is undoubtedly best known as “the young guy* from the political show with the guy who swears a lot”. Picking your stand up from the cast of shows you like can be a dangerous strategy, as them off the telly can have a surprisingly hit-and-miss success rate in translating comedy to a format where they have to do the writing as well as the talking (Cf. the staggering mediocrity of the Mitchell & Webb Anything excluding Peep Show).

Thankfully, Addison is clearly no neophyte and delivers the goods on stage. The material feels tightly written and rehearsed, even if not particularly fresh at times, and the performance is highly polished.

There’s plenty to think about as well, although the most potentially interesting and controversial section (on the taboo status of sex being “just not for me”) doesn’t feel thoroughly enough worked through to be more than just amusing.

Recommended.

4 stars

* Little know fact of the day: Chris Addison is in fact “the 38 year old guy from the political show with the guy who swears a lot”. 38! He’s married! He’s got a four year old! Who’d have guessed?

I find Laura Solon’s comedy to be really rather strange. Now Ms Solon is, of course, quite within her rights to respond along the lines of “Silence blogger! I once won the Perrier, so I’ll tell you what is and isn’t strange in the world of comedy!” – but bear with me.

For those who don’t know, Solon’s stand up isn’t really stand up – it’s more funny storytelling, where jokes come about through a structured narrative in which all the parts and the narrator are performed by Solon herself. According to Wikipedia (which is always right) this came about when her Fringe performance partner in 2005 dropped out and she had to do the show alone. She went on to win the Perrier, a show in the West End, £7,500 prize money and a career in professional comedy. History (well, wikipedia) doesn’t record what happened to the guy who was going to join her but didn’t.

You can see this two ways: either Solon is a pioneer who is breaking out of the rigid confines of the anecdote/punchline comic paradigm; or, she is just telling stories populated entirely with outlandish characters and funny voices.

This year’s story is all about an American model turned journalist who visits the island of Steven as part of a documentary crew seeking the island’s famous owl. Many funny voiced comic situations ensue.

There’s a level of conscious artifice in Solon’s work that makes it difficult to fully engage with: the characters we meet on Steven are entertaining certainly and there are plenty of nicely observed jokes, but for me things never really took off because they remain manifestly and transparently fictional.

It’s clearly naive to imagine that comics really spend their days doing the things they later relate on stage, and wrong headed to claim that fiction can’t be comedy: but what you have with most stand-up and don’t have with Solon is the opportunity to suspend disbelief and share in what makes comedy such a joy: the chance at seeing the world through the eyes of another person.

I’m nit picking. Solon is very funny. She’s funnier than almost anybody you or I will ever meet. She is funnier than most comics around, and certainly funnier than most comics at the fringe. But for me the narrative style of her comedy is distancing, which means that for me thus style will always be good, not great.

4 stars

Horatio is a potentially interesting character to do a bit of digging into: he’s the character closest to Hamlet and the one charged with retelling the story to future generations, but he’s a quiet lad in Shakespeare’s play and we don’t get to learn much about him.

So SEDOS’ new play, billed as examining Hamlet’s story from the perspective of Horatio, as he tries to piece the story together from documentary evidence, sounds really promising.

Except that it doesn’t work out like this. Instead of a “new play” from Horatio’s perspective we get a boilerplate version of Hamlet with Horatio wandering around in the background the whole time looking silent and thoughtful.

The new elements introduced consist of changing Polonius to a woman (Polonia), adding a load of business with cardboard evidence boxes (cunningly numbered I to V, representing the different acts of the play) and lots of visual metaphors using a load of tangled and broken cassette tapes (representing both the tangled and broken status of Hamlet’s mind as well as his utter refusal to buy into the cult of the iPod).

The performances themselves are, for the most part, comfortably in the middle of the am dram band, although Adam Moulder as Hamlet impresses and Carolina Main does well with Ophelia.

2 stars

You will struggle to find a more witless production at the Fringe than Obama Mia. Trying to be part musical and part political parody, this fails on both counts and, for the most part, can’t even manage to be charming in an awful school play sort of way.

The plot follows the Obama for America team as they attempt to deal with the repercussions of the candidate falling into a “hope induced coma” – that’s the best joke. He is replaced by an actor and hilarity (well, obviously not actual hilarity) ensues.

The songs are bland, the performances are too amateur to critique politely and the political parody is butter-knife blunt.

Not that the audience, most of who seemed to be family members of those on stage, seemed to mind. They clapped and snapped photos (throughout – literally, they took photos THROUGHOUT) – unless you have a relative on stage, however, this is definitely one to miss.

1 star

Come back, Punchdrunk, all is forgiven!

Sub Rosa is a promenade theatre performance set in a Masonic Lodge just off George Street in the New Town. Touring the building itself, never before opened to the public, is fascinating but the whole proceeding ends up feeling like a missed opportunity.

The story we are told is about Flora McIvor, a young girl fighting for her place in the hierarchy of a corrupt music hall theatre, which does slightly beg the question as to why it isn’t being performed in, for example, a theatre. There are Masonic elements incorporated into the text – the title for instance – but these feel very much like tacked-on afterthoughts rather than integral parts of the plot. It’s not that the Masonic lodge isn’t an interesting venue – it is – but it feels like it is wasted on a plot to which it has little relevance and the plot feels wasted on an unsuitable venue.

Perhaps Punchdrunk have given us unrealistic standards as to the level of detail one can expect from a site-specific performance, but Sub Rosa does feel woefully low budget and low thought in this respect: one stuffed animal and a couple of red filters do not an atmosphere make.

The plot itself is fine enough, but it never really elevates itself to the thoroughgoing examination of power and violence that it seems to hint at early on – and the final coup de theatre is underwhelming.

Nothing exceptional.

3 stars

Look, let’s just leave it at this and we can all carry on with our lives: give this show a miss.

Not nearly as clever as it thinks it is, Teenage Riot follows seven, or maybe eight – who knows – teenagers as they whine about how the world doesn’t understand them, burn pictures of their family and throw tomatoes at projected images of the audience. It’s a bit like an episode of Skins with Flemish accents but without a plot.

The staging is unusual: most of the action takes place in a shed on stage, relayed to the audience by a live video projected onto the downstage wall of aforementioned shed. Quite why isn’t made clear – it does allow for some nice effects, but for the most part is just quite annoying and contrived. At the end of the show the audience is invited to tour the shed – you can give this is miss too, since the most interesting thing about it is that someone’s spent a long time writing WANK over and over on one wall.

Waste of time.

1 star