Jenni Ajderian

     If the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is about letting the little guy play with the big guys, about innovation and creativity, about finding a show that at first baffles and then delights, then this is the perfect Fringe show. Based on a text-based Youtube game which swiftly went viral, John Robertson brings us his live version of an eighties' low-budget video game.      It is unlike anything else on the Fringe this year. It relies heavily on audience participation but even more so on Robertson's own wit and the strength of the prepared game screen-shots. It is wonderfully well made and self-consciously low-budget. Prizes range from ancient computer games to rubber gloves and considering the fact that every Fringe contains more Shakespearian adaptations than you can wave a ruff at, it is mind-bendingly awesome that this exists in the first place.      A few minutes' introductory stand-up sees Robertson leaping across the stage in leat...

     Just the Tonic at the Caves, 16:40, every day but the 13th       Remember the one about Odysseus? No? Well, neither do the Sleeping Trees, really. Having read the ancient classic a few years ago, this Total Theatre Award shortlisted troupe present the bits of the Odyssey that they can remember, and hope we can ignore the bits they've forgotten.       By way of breath-taking distraction, the trio chant, dance, sing, leap around and provide their own sound-effects and inner monologues without the need of such modern things as lighting or sound techies. After all, when originally performed or recited, the Homeric classic would have been accompanied by just these kinds of wild gesticulations, enthusiastic facial expressions, and sky-high suspensions of disbelief.      The show is the last of the troupe's Stories project, which has relied entirely on the performers, rather than props and scenery. This has become a common ...

     Of nearly 3,000 shows at this year's Edinburgh Fringe, nearly a third are comedy, and for any one publication to review them all is a pretty impossible task. This will be my fifth year at the Fringe, and my first at reviewer publication Broadway Baby, where I'll be humbly taking up the post of Comedy Editor, so it's my job to pick and choose which shows are worth sending a reviewer to. Of course this is what anyone does when they arrive at the Fringe, filtering the 3,000 shows down to probably five or six to spend an average of £8 a ticket and hoping beyond hope that it's worth the ticket price. Personally, I'll be attempting to get to all of these, regardless of price and regardless of whether or not I'm reviewing them- Reginald D Hunter: In the Midst of Crackers Starting with the big names in comedy, Reginald D Hunter is an essential for lovers of wildly intelligent satire and unstoppable wit. Hailing from Albany, Georgia, Hunter has lived in the UK f...

WOMEN     SPOKEN WORD     FREE     DISCUSSION     POETRY      Yes, we've added in some extra boxes just so we can tick them here, since this year's Fringe programme contains a whole section devoted to the still hazy title of Spoken Word acts. First things first- DO NOT BE SCARED. Yes, You, the one who remained a wallflower during our forays into improvised comedy, You who skirted round the Physical Theatre section of the programme, You who baulks at anything involving a 'fascinating real-life story' or puppets (they are creepy). Yes, You is, in this respect, Me, but we've gone past that now. My first Spoken Word event was attended on a whim and I'm very glad I went. Ranging from rap to epic poetry, this section is small for now, but promises to bloom in future years. A large amount of the performers here give their words away for free, and the smaller venues they occupy create a more intimate atmosphere for any performance...

UNEXPECTED     PLAY     WOMEN     NEWBIES     LOCAL     IMPROV      There is an award, I learned this year, for Comic Originality, which bares the infamous name of Malcolm Hardee, a comedian who in life drove tractors into neighbouring performances who he thought to be too loud, and in death continues to encourage 'alternative' comedy and 'cunning stunts' similar to his own. The award is not given to run-of-the-mill stand-ups. No Michael McIntyres here, no family-friendly stuff and no knock-knock jokes either. We've already discussed the darkness in comedians in Mark Olver's Dancing About Architecture , and in acts like these it gets onto the stage. The line between dark humour and just plain darkness is so fine as to be almost imperceptible, so these acts can be forgiven for teetering over to the other side every now and then... Casual Violence: A Kick In The Teeth      Winner of the Hardee Com...

FREE     WOMEN     NEWBIES     UNEXPECTED     LOCALS      I've told you before about the merits of seeing free shows, and to that I wish to add with three of my favourites from this year's selection. It's worth knowing that the Free Fringe is split between two promoters, the directors of which apparently have beef with one another from a mysterious event that happened a few years ago (Laughing Horse hit on PBH's mum, or possibly vice versa), and as such there may be twice as many free shows to go to as you may expect. Programmes are organised by time, which is a godsend if you just have a couple of hours to spare and fancy a free giggle. Hurt and Anderson      Since we're vastly under-represented as a gender in the realms of comedy, I've been trying to head to female comedians' shows in particular this Fringe, but have still avoided them if they sound awful, or make a big deal about the whole not-having-a-peni...

CHAT          UNEXPECTED          HEADLINERS       Once you've seen X amount of stand-ups and sketch shows and improvised comedy troupes, patterns start to emerge. This is an art form, like sculpture or baroque music, and it has its precedents, classics, techniques and stories repeated time and time again. Comedians are a clever bunch, and they know all of this. Talk to one and you'll feel this experience beaming through, as well as a real love of their chosen profession.      Sit four of them down for an hour with a talented host, such as in Mark Olver's month-long chat show Dancing About Architecture, and all of this comes to light in a way it never can by simply watching Dave of an afternoon. Olver's guests vary by the day, and many of them are well-known faces on the comedy circuit- Seann Walsh and Gareth Richards today, Russel Howard on Saturday- and all seem g...

CHAT          IMPROV          WOMEN          UNEXPECTED      It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Fringe show must be in want of an audience. Since the best form of advertising seems to be word of mouth, it makes sense to promoters to give out a small number of free tickets in the initial stages of a show's run, so that seats are filled, laughs shared, and memories made. In these early stages it is therefore worthwhile for an audience member to not have a plan, to go out of an evening and see what you may stumble upon, even if it ends up being just a cheeky pint in the shadow of a huge up-turned cow.      On just such a night, a friend and I stumbled into Monkey Toast: the Improvised Chat Show, imported from Canada by David Shore. The format of such a show seemed alien at first (whi...

FAVOURITES          PLAY                   'Crying with laughter' doesn't quite cover it. If I smoked, I would have needed a cigarette, but instead settled for a walk, a twix and bashing out a review. Like the second album, the second Fringe show is a difficult thing to pull off, but somehow from Holmes and Watson last year to the crack team of Con Artists they portray this year, Max and Ivan have kept the standard breathtakingly high with a show so impeccable it's difficult to know exactly where to start.      Having developed a talent for moulding their two faces into a crowd of characters, Max and Ivan fly full-throttle into their double-act, with not two but eight main characters, each distinguished by accent, pose, expression and relationship to one another, so that a six-way hotel phonecall is pulled off astonishingly well with a cert...

FREE          STAND-UP          WOMEN          LOCAL          NEWBIES      If you're at the festival early in the month you may have to see someone's first gig. Don't be shy. Someone has to. The best place is the free Fringe circuit, where you can find some hidden gems and not have to pay a penny (and if it's really bad, walk out and don't worry about wasting the ticket price).      Ticking five of our boxes is the Edinburgh Revue's first show. Otherwise known as the Edinburgh University Comedy Society, the group provides an open discussion-based forum for comedic students to distract themselves from their studies, and has given us an hour of free afternoon entertainment on Grassmarket. The hour is comprised of four steadily improving comedians and a comper...

     This time last year I spent my August running around Edinburgh reviewing Fringe Festival shows for the free publication Three Weeks- a kind of pop-up magazine custom built for the Fringe that endeavors to cover everything listed in the festival programme, from free one-man-shows to Ukelele orchestras, Shakespeare to Interpretive Dance and huge exhibitions at the National Gallery. In exchange for free tickets I turned in a total of 68 painstakingly hand-crafted reviews, got about seven hours' sleep a week and ruined a pair of converses staggering across cobbled streets through sun, wind, rain, slush, insistent flyerers and rumors of a Londonian riot.      This year, I'm in Edinburgh for a scant three days at the start of the festival, but last year's old habits die hard.  In lieu of the aforementioned free writing gig, I give you Three Days of the Fringe, where I will attempt to sample the comedic essentials as much as possible. To get a good tas...

     I don't like running in public. It's not far from Glasgow Central Station to the Arches, but I'm still out of breath by the time I get there.      "I am SO sorry, it took an hour and a HALF to get here from EDINBURGH."      They like you to be early to pick up press tickets. They like to see your credentials and cross-check everything before handing over a free ticket.      "Nae bother, it happens. Enjoy the show!"      Uhm. Okay.      As it turns out, the show is half an hour late to start anyway, and continues far longer than the normal hour-long slot I'm used to. Since venues aren't booked up 24/7, the Glasgow International Comedy Festival is a lot, and I mean a LOT more relaxed than the Fringe over in Edinburgh. Spanning over a mere two weeks, and mostly occupying the evening, the festival goes on while normal Glaswegian life continues above ground, with none of this traffic-stopping ...

(originally published by The Student )      “We've been killing a lot of zombies”, the comedian and bouffant-haired Tom Deacon explains from the notably zombie-free Brooke's Bar upstairs in Potterrow, “and I'm not really getting any thanks for that.”      Alas there are no awards for control of the undead, not like there are Chortle and Student comedy awards, which Deacon has no trouble in collecting. Away from the zombies and his beloved Xbox (“the most important thing in my life”), Deacon has his second hour-long Fringe stand-up show, a weekly Radio 1 show and a new comedy play to keep him occupied, all of which is a far cry from the dingy student pubs he was playing in just a few years ago.      Deacon is living a non-stop month this August on both sides of the border. In the day time, he performs in Joe Bor's new play Who Killed the Counsellor? , and finds the hormonal 17-year-old within. By turns huffy, boastful and se...

The all-absorbing nature of the Festival became all too clear when everyone started going on about some riots down south. Here, our newspapers are replaced by free review magazines, the daily grind with plays and comedy and exhibitions and the occasional concert. The strange filtering-through of news to a flat with no internet, no regular newspapers, no TV, was reminiscent of Glastonbury in 2009 when Michael Jackson died, and while the world outside was crying its face off, most of us were none the wiser. Whereas in the fields and the mud we had RIP Jacko tshirts by the following morning, up here in Auld Reekie the comedians react in the only way they know how- jokes. What seemed like a race to make the easy jokes first meant stand-ups were telling us how they were desperately trying to contact their loved ones in Tottenham- “Size eleven, nothing in white.” (Steve Day, Run, Deaf Boy, Run!), or how they were happy to be already in Scotland before the locals start re-building Hadrian...

If you only see one monumental multi-media sensory-deprivation performance artwork this festival, this year, this lifetime, Il Pixel Rosso's And The Birds Fell From The Sky should be it. A mere fifteen minutes takes us from the real world to a dream and somewhere in between, everything communicated to us through the dense black goggles placed over our eyes and the headphones in our ears. Daylight seems unnatural. As we move through a world to which we are now blind, the world in the goggles reacts, and what starts as a mere vision turns into a story which has us responding to its every whim. We travel in a car with four Faruq- a race painted to look like monochrome circus clowns who speak an impenetrable language, see dreams and visions; we smell the rain, the vodka, the lighter, the grass, we hear the birdsong, and we are asked- Are you sleeping through the best part of this journey? We are given a keepsake. Mine was The Fool, The Tower and The Hanged Man. In Tarot cards, these p...

We learn quickly. Aside from the festival favourites of Always Bring a Programme, An Open Mind and an Umbrella (ESPECIALLY if it doesn't look like rain), we learn the importance of timing. Deadlines being at noon on the following day, one doesn't want to write up reviews minutes after seeing the show for fear of missing the next one; neither should we write them at 2 minutes to noon, typing with one hand and nursing a cocktail of fruit juice, paracetamol and pro plus with the other. We learn the special kind of fatigue which comes from watching shows for four hours a day, walking between them all with our programme, our open mind and our umbrella in tow, and trying to socialise afterwards. See above and the fruit juice-paracetamol-pro plus cocktail. We learn the scale of the city, we learn to powerwalk off the beaten path and to cross junctions at a sharp angle. We learn how to avoid the flyerers which now plague the busy streets- either by singing loudly along with an iPod or ...

Scotland is not a hotbed for Japanese music, so Art Lee and his band of traditional Taiko musicians take time out of their set to give us a background of their art, before launching into an adaptation of Bach or songs from a Japanese coffee machine. In the day time Ocean shows, three musicians play with absolutely serene faces and powerful movements reminiscent of martial arts, while the Mountain shows in the evening feature talented drummers using simplistic instruments that resonate beautifully in this historical Prince's Street Church. Peaceful, meaningful music with a purpose, from prayer to celebration, is played alongside Tango or Rumba music, showing the versatility of instruments and musicians alike. **** St John's Church, 5 – 29 Aug (not 11, 18, 25), times vary, £10 - £12 [originally written for ThreeWeeks magazine]

Fairytales grow up. They grow deeper, darker and stronger. Our heroine is no longer a scared little girl but a stoic woman who insists she is neither lost nor tired. Maggie, part realist, part sleeping child, is woken by a spellbinding fox, surrounded by weeping trees and mocked by a trio of birds. A dreamlike world is created under Soco's flaky ceiling by an earnest cast who take the idea of physical theatre and use it tastefully, and not so much that it should scare away fans of traditional theatre. Seated on camping chairs, we are taken through the forest and into the sky, through suffering and away from the howls of the wolf. Strange and beautiful, touching and magical. **** Flyaway Theatre, C Soco, 3 – 29 Aug (not 15, 22), 2:00pm (3:15pm), £6.50 - £9.50 [originally written for ThreeWeeks magazine]

If the noise and haste of the Royal Mile is getting to you already, I urge you to visit Thomas Houseago's exhibition at the Royal Botanical Gardens. Though huge, metallic and rough around the edges, Houseago's shining collection subtly blends into its leafy background; the piece entitled 'Reclining Figure', placed near a viewpoint of the whole city, echoes Arthur's Seat's curves, while the totemic 'Rattlesnake Figure' has woodgrain etched into its aluminium surface, letting it merge with the surrounding trees. A little far-flung, the pieces are easy to miss if you're not looking- or can't read maps. That said, if you find yourself with a sunny day and a compass handy, let Houseago draw you off the beaten path. *** Royal Botanical Garden – Inverleith House, 1 Aug – 4 Sep, 10:00am (open til 5:45pm), free [originally written for ThreeWeeks magazine]