The Pin 

Having seen Alex Owen carry the Cambridge Footlights a couple of years ago, I was quite excited to see him given control of his own double act – in tandem with Ben Ashenden. These two have already had breaks on BBC3 and ITV, and it is easy to see why; with Owen as the taking-himself-too-seriously straight man, and Ashenden as the nerdy, awkward foil, these two have a natural comedic chemistry that allows them to get the audience roaring with belly-laughs with only a minimum of traditional “sketch material”. The bits, genuinely amusing in their own right (Frank Lampard the thespian, over-politically correct exam questions); but it is the in-character fillers, with Owen venting his frustration at his partner’s Mr Bean-like incompetence, that really drive the laughs. A very funny show, and worth seeing.

 The Pin will be performing at Pleasance Courtyard until 26^th August. Tickets cost £10. 

BEASTS

I was only able to catch this group for a 20 minute slot at a late night revue, but it is one of my regrets of the 2013 Fringe that I wasn’t able to see their full 60 minutes. These three had a very successful debut run in 2012, and return this year with plenty of buzz about their new material. The trio have a strong chemistry, with each of the rotating the high and low status roles, in what is perhaps a more traditional style of sketch comedy that The Pin. A lot of the material relies on slightly warped reproductions of childhood classics – an oikish pig geezer explaining his building nous to a big bad wolf, sullen Teenage Mutant Ninja turtles – sandwiched between quick one-line bits. The formula is not ground-breaking, but it is highly entertaining.

 BEASTS will be performing at Pleasance Courtyard until 26^th August. Tickets cost £9.

Lead Pencil

Lead Pencil generated fantastic reviews for their debut show in 2012, and equally promising feedback from this year’s piece; I was understandably a bit surprised to find a few spare seats at the back of their Underbelly venue. The only possible reason I can conceive for this is that their show runs during the 1-2pm death slot, in which most of their target audience (i.e. anyone familiar with late 1990s mass culture) will still be conked out from a late night before. If you are feeling a bit muggy of an early afternoon, go and watch Lead Pencil; the sketches, which focus mainly on the fruits of our youth (Art Attack, crappy Nokias and the Fresh Prince), will tickle your nostalgic nerve as well as your sense of humour, and the whole show is performed with such incredible energy that you will leave the room feeling buoyed ahead of the rest of your day.

Lead Pencil will be performing at Underbelly, Bristo Square until 26^th August. Tickets cost £9.50.

Cambridge Footlights

The Footlights have had a long and and happy relationship with the Fringe, and have become one of the best-known acts at the Festival. This year has seen them return once again to Pleasance’s Ace Dome, though I can safely say that their sell-out audiences are thanks to the strength of the 2013 material, and not trading on the Footlights history. This was probably the strongest sketch show that I saw at this year’s Fringe, with a fantastic mix of experimental sketches (“Press this button when the sketch should end”, “Here is a sketch menu” etc) and amusing running jokes; Matilda Wnek’s death machine saga carried the show. Wnek was just one of a core trio of brilliant actresses (alongside Rosa Robson and Emma Sidi) who, alongside the lovable Matty Bradley, provided a whole host of meomrable characters and scenarios.

 Cambridge Footlights will be performing at Pleasance Dome until 26^th August. Tickets cost £9.50.

Oxford Revue

This year’s Revue was right at the other end of the spectrum from The Pin and the Footlights in terms of its presentation; no white back drop and plain uniforms, but a wonderfully cluttered set and eccentric outfits. The skits were equally quirky, and managed to extract the maximum laughter from a given scenario without ever taking it too far: a World War I soldier with cramp, a rather difficult birds and bees slideshow, a brilliantly honest primary school teacher. Perhaps the finest thing about this show is the quality of the transitions, with sketches fading into one another with a smoothness and precision that indicates an enormous amount of thought and hard-work in rehearsal. Watch out also for the running jokes, one of which concludes with a rather spectacular bang. Also, check out The Oxford Revue Presents: Toby Mather, for the best comic poetry this side of Tim Key.

The Pin will be performing at Underbelly, Cowgate until 25^th August. Tickets cost £9.

★★★☆☆

3 stars

Written in 1956 John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger is generally thought to have given birth to the literary model of the ‘angry young man’, depicting a generation left feeling cold in a post-war, post-hope England. The harsh realism of the play, set entirely in a sitting room, also came as a breath of fresh air after years of forced drawing-room comedies being the favored dramatic form. Bringing a play which is very much of its time to the Edinburgh Fringe stage in 2013 may seem a bit of a struggle, but it is what Macaroons, an Oxford company have attempted to do, and for the most part successfully.

The chosen tagline for the play, ‘Let’s pretend we’re human beings and we’re actually alive’ sums up the plot which sees Jimmy Porter, the angry young man in question played by Tom Hilton, embrace highly volatile relationships with all the other characters, particularly his wife, Alison, played by Artemis Fitzalan Howard. This volatility is captured well, largely down to an excellently visceral performance from Hilton. This is complemented by the stage set-up which convincingly recreates the claustrophobia of the 1950’s sitting room, making his performance all the more effective. However, there are flaws.

The directors’ decision to cut out the character of Colonel Redfern, Alison’s father, removes from the play the physical presence of the old order, standing for imperialism and class. While this choice may possibly have been made to lift the play from it’s 1950’s context, if so it is not clear, and the result is that it at times made Jimmy’s anger seem unfocused, and more irrational than it should have done. There were also moments in which the play’s realism was undermined by the actors’ timings coming onto the stage; an off-stage character would be called and then they would suddenly appear from the wings, with little to no time between the two events. Although this only happened a handful of times, it did make the production as a whole feel less slick.

Despite these problems the cast as a whole are strong; Fitzalan Howard plays Jimmy’s downtrodden wife with the quiet depth necessary to prevent Hilton from dominating the stage anymore than his character is meant to. Conor Kennedy should not go without mention either for his steadfast performance as Cliff.

All in all this production of Osborne’s classic is good and worth seeing for the actor’s performances, but for any fans of the play it may fall short of expectations. 

Look Back in Anger will run at C-too, Edinburgh, till 26th August

★★★☆☆

Three Stars

Masterchef is back again. It may be a revamped show, but it does feel like this new version has been going forever. Not much seems to have changed either. There’s the same dramatic music, the same dramatic voiceover, the same dramatic credit sequence. This time, though, John says “Cooking doesn’t get tougher than this!” in the intro. Greg just smiles and says “Hey, that’s my line!”. So, the same awkward banter then.

This time it’s the celebrity kind. The first week it’s all girls (Heidi Range, Jo Wood, Janet Street-Porter and Katy Brand) or, as Greg tends to call them, the “gehls”. Actually, he doesn’t say that in the first episode. In fact, he seems on the whole more reserved than in previous series. He’s a bit of a TV personality now, seen shouting for an hour in a BBC documentary recently, so maybe he’s worn himself out. He does claim at one point that he’d like to “munch the living daylights” out of a pudding if he were left alone with it, but you can tell he doesn’t really mean it. He’s just going through the motions for the cameras.

John also goes through the motions, those mainly being the motion of walking around the kitchen, peering at everyone. He can be a little leery at times. He likes to stand close to the contestants and watch them, smiling but not talking, like he’s just farted and he’s waiting for them to notice.

Janet looks at him like he has, snarling at his and Greg’s every comment. She doesn’t like being told what to do does Janet, not by John and Greg anyway. As she says, “I’ve edited a national newspaper, I can make a bread and butter pudding!” This seems like flawed logic to me. As John says, Heidi Range has played (in the Sugababes) in front of 90,000 people, but she’s still shaking when she tries to fillet fish. Still, she manages it, and pretty impressively too.

They all seem pretty good this time actually. None of them are disasters, no-one slices their finger off; they all just serve relatively good food. It’s a bit boring really. Masterchef is a bit boring when everyone’s just average, and the celebrities don’t add much.

It livens up a bit when they go into professional kitchens though, and everyone goes to pot. Heidi takes half an hour per plate and Katy keeps forgetting to put the cashews in her dish. Which is called Chicken Cashew. The only one who isn’t a nervous wreck is Janet. Perhaps she was on to something after all.

All in all, the show appears, like Greg, to be just going through the motions. There’s decent cooking, terrible jokes and fake tension throughout. When they cook for Cirque Du Soleil, we’re portentously told that if the food’s not good enough the performers will have to nip out for sandwiches, delaying the show and disappointing the 4,000 expectant audience members! So, more than just a few grumpy acrobats at stake.

Janet and Jo do unwittingly up the tension, though, when they pour an alcoholic liqueur over their fruit salad. Which they then serve to acrobats about to go and perform. Hmm. Jo does put brown sugar on it, though, which is hilarious. Because she used to be married to Ronnie Wood. You know, from the Rolling Stones. Who had a song called “Brown Sugar”.

Well, it’s still funnier than anything John and Greg say. Still, everything about this new series suggests that Masterchef will continue to be around for a long time yet. It can be a bit overblown and silly, but it’s still solid entertainment, and the cooking can be genuinely impressive. Though it’s a lot more fun when it isn’t.

On a hot August evening, a friend and I found ourselves under Westway in West London. If you’ve ever taken the Oxford Tube, this is the bit which looks like the cross between a scrap yard and stables. We were supposed to be heading to an exhibition opening in Latimer Road, like the sophisticates that we are (or at least trying to be). Needless to say, we were desperately lost. Sweaty and miserable, we were looking at an evening which finished with a shared packet of quavers and a pepsi; the promise of free prosecco wafting away with the dusty rush hour traffic. However, magically, we finally got the map the right way up, asked a bemused staff at the sports’ centre for directions and sensibly got a little help from my phone and arrived at the Griffin Gallery.

Cool, clean and wonderfully white, it is, in short, everything that Westway is not. Their latest exhibition is perfectly suited to their plain, scientific décor. It is entitled “Insight Radical: Where Science Meets Art” and displays the work of 7 Australian artists who have responded to the work of chemists who are researching free radicals.

For those of you who don’t know, and I certainly didn’t until that evening, free radicals are molecules with unpaired electrons making them very reactive. To satisfy their need for paired electrons they will steal them from neighbouring molecules, turning those molecules into free radicals and creating a chemical chain reaction. This has engineered their reputation as molecular recalcitrants whose highly reactive nature can cause aging related illnesses and cardiovascular disease and some cancers. But, actually, we depend on them; amongst other things, we need free radicals to transfer oxygen from the air in our lungs into our blood stream.

The artists spent time in the lab of the scientists, bouncing off them in the same way that free radicals feed off other molecules (oh so clever) and producing work inspired by the science. Each artist has responded to the scientists and the scientific theory in different way and they also bring their own artistic education and interests to the project. Steve Lopes “UV Portrait” is the sobering oil painting which you meet first. It reproduces a photograph of the Australian adventurer Andrew McAuley who died trying to kayak the Tasman Sea in 2007. A memory stick containing photos and video that McAuley took during his trip was retrieved and the images show how his face and body were degraded by continuous exposure to the elements.

The aging process, caused by free radicals, was accelerated and the painting shows a man whose whole face has been eroded. With his cavernous cheeks, the whole skeletal structure has become visible. Lopes accepts that the effects of free radicals are not always positive and champions the science which develops our understanding of them so that we might harness their positive effects. His other portraits are of the scientists themselves, figured as curious, cheerful and sensitive. “Calculated, Figure III” is a women with hair dyed in an outrageous colours and a massive grin. This is a celebration of the discovery of knowledge.

For me, the best thing about this exhibition (apart from maybe the air con) was the fact that it reflects the work of Griffin Gallery itself. It is the exhibition space for ColArt – the company behind art materials such as Windsor and Newton and Conte pencils. Their offices are above the gallery. ColArt has an artist in residence who has a studio right next to the labs where the products are developed. The artist has ideas for potential products and trials them in the first stages of their manufacture. Upstairs is the mirror of downstairs, where science uses art (and artists) for inspiration.

Insight Radical: Where Science Meets Art runs at the Griffin Gallery until 31st August. Entry is free.

Whenever a celebrity marries, gives birth or dies, a slew of seemingly hastily written biographies seem to appear on the shelves of Waterstones or WHSmith, ready to tap into the rising interest. The recent developments in the life of Kate Middleton (marriage and subsequent baby, for those who had their head in the sand over the last couple of years) are no exception to that particular rule.

But how does this sort of thing stand up at this point in time, when the hot air and guff that had given a little lift to the subject of the future monarchy has faded into the mists of 24 hour news reports past? Does a work like Marcia Moody’s Kate: A Biography stand up on its own? Well, no, of course not.

The impetus behind this fawning book is rotten and exploitative, for the life of Kate Middleton is not one that, if we’re being honest, merits a biography. I don’t say that as an ardent republican, but as someone who bothered to read Moody’s brownnosed ramblings, which essentially amount to a list of events Kate attended, and clothes she wore whilst attending them. This is the life of Kate Middleton as things stand.

There’s not a lot more in her early life that makes for a decent biography either. Kate hasn’t struggled – she’s the daughter of a successful businessman. It’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise, and completely unnecessary. Diana was as blue-blooded as they come, totally over-privileged, but is almost certainly biography worthy. She lived a bizarre, crazy and tragic life. We’ll come back to her in a second.

In the meantime, it is important to emphasise that you’re not underprivileged just because you weren’t a boarder, or you take yourself shopping down the local Kensington Waitrose. I’m pretty sure daughter of a multimillionaire counts as privileged, and besides the secure family and close friends she’s enjoyed her whole life (and I don’t begrudge her them) don’t really make for a life of emotional struggle or complexity.

Princess Diana remains the archetypal royal celebrity. We all know that she lived and died in the media’s spotlight, the highs and lows of a turbulent life played out before the country. And there is a craving for more. The media’s coverage of the Windsor clan’s younger members consists of incessant attempts to prophesise their futures through Diana’s life. One doesn’t have to look far to find articles floating around, prophesying the parenting technique of the Duke and Duchess as clearly being derived from the ex-Princess of Wales.

Lurking in the review section of the Amazon page for Moody’s book is ‘Gallia’s’ contribution (four stars, in case you were wondering), which is headed by the line ‘Interesting summary of a (so far) fortunate life’. Hmm, slightly ominous, don’t you think, Gallia? Maybe I’m reading too much into this – maybe Gallia is just exercising a judicious reluctance to predict an absolutely idyllic future for the young duchess and her progeny. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to read into royal coverage a desire to find traces of Diana in the fortunes of her offspring.

A biography like this one, after all the fuss and bother has died down, just can’t stand up on its own. It is designed to tap into the hype and puff of the royal euphoria that grips the country from time to time. But what this amounts to is a series of OK! articles, strung together to resemble a book, peppered with interviews with people that really have little to do with the major moments of her life (does the guy who taught her to shoot count?).

The best bit is the reaction of snooty courtiers to her mother the former air hostess. The ‘vinegary’ Buckingham Palace attendants would apparently mock Caroline Middleton by making snide comments of “doors to manual” in reference to her mother’s former career every time she walked past. I know we’re not meant to laugh at this horribly snobbish comment, but it is also funny, in a bitchy kind of way.

Moody is determined to present Kate as the commoner, who through a sense of duty sustained by love for her husband can burst through the pressures and expectations from the media and establishment, meeting the traditional role of a princess with a touch of modernity. The reality is that Kate has had a life that seems to have consisted mainly of gap-year style trips to South America and Africa, and outings with aristocratic pals to the fashionable nightclub Boujis, where they would down ‘crackbabies’ in test-tubes (that being a drink, apparently, that was also served at Will and Kate’s wedding reception).

She may lack blue blood, but the woman who emerges from this book is (not through Moody’s intention, but the pure facts of the case) highly privileged and slightly dull. Kate may be pleasant, and charming, but these qualities alone do not warrant a biography, Ms. Moody.

Kate: A Biography is published by Michael O’Mara and is available here.

Slumping in a metal chair for hours of ranting stand-up comedians and aggressively abstract Sartre adaptations is, against all logic, exhausting. A weekend of intensive Fringe viewing will leave your brain pickled, your shoulders lolling and your digestive system pleading for anything that isn’t Irn-Bru or The Whole Hog Roast Breakfast Bap Special. If the ill effects of rhythmic clapping in huddled dungeons have started to claim your sanity, we suggest a wander through the Scottish National Gallery as a mild tonic.

Peter Doig’s exhibition No Foreign Lands, housed in the top floor of the columned Gallery, is a good place to start. Entry costs £6, but don’t get tricked into paying £6 extra for tickets to the Man Ray Portraits and Witches and Wicked Bodies displays – these are at affiliated galleries on the other side of town. Stepping into the exhibition, you will be struck first by the sound of silence: a half remembered noise of no hecklers, no promoters, no half-naked men juggling swords on ladders. And then Doig’s paintings will catch your eyes.

These boldly-hued canvases are studies in strangeness. Trinidad is his subject, and he obscures it in many ways: a dramatic landscape of a lagoon dissolves in bright shimmering colours, where elsewhere a man in a red canoe foregrounds the tiny isle on the horizon; the country is broken up with Cubist regularity, in the next room plunged into fuzzy woodland shadow and finally posterised in a Rothko-esque game of beach cricket.

The formal innovation is impressive, but there are important questions raised. Is the strangeness a product of the viewer’s perspective? Is it inherently within the island? Or deeper still, is it the lens through which Doig, born in Edinburgh but raised in the Caribbean, sees his childhood home? It is not clear how strongly we should agree with Robert Louis Stevenson’s axiom: “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.”

The Doig exhibition is the drawcard of the Gallery’s festival exhibitions, but downstairs one can also find a trio of free events. We would recommend only the briefest of pit-stops here: the lack of entry fee is a mask for the blatant commercial slant of all three displays, which are effectively shop windows. The celebration of the twenty-first anniversary of Richard Murphy’s successful Edinburgh architectural practice seems like a good excuse to show an hour’s worth of very nice renovations of detached homes to clients looking for very nice renovations of detached homes. Likewise the Collector’s Choices halls, which seem to have more plaques thanking Aberdeen Asset Management than actual works of art.

The redeeming feature of the ground floor is the 21 Revolutions exhibit, which offers a number of objects from the Glasgow Women’s Library – and the artwork that this resource has inspired. Sam Ainsley’s map of Scotland collaged from the names of women’s memorials in the poignant This Land is Your Land stands out, as do Kate Gibson’s domestic chores stickerbook Homespun and Helen de Main’s reimagining of feature articles from 70’s femi-zine Spare Ribs.

But the Gallery is not merely a festival pop-up, and there is a lot more to see here than selection of August exhibitions. The Gallery’s advertising is weighted heavily towards No Foreign Lands and the other temporary displays – to the point that I only discovered its splendid permanent collection by accident. Moving from Renaissance to Baroque to the Romantics, these plush rooms are decked with Velazquez, Bernini, Rubens, Rembrandt, with a cheeky Rodin here and there as a momentary distraction. If you have begun to weary of High Street ska / beatbox renditions of “Smooth Criminal”, go bask in the glory of the Old Masters.

No Foreign Lands will continue at the Scottish National Gallery until 3 November. Tickets cost £6, and are available here. Both Collector’s Choices and 21 Revolutions will run until 8 September, whilst Richard Murphy Architects closes on 24 September.

Brothers Eoin and Rory Loveless may make up one of the smaller bands on the scene at the moment, but they more than make up for their lack of personnel with their explosive sound. The two Irishmen kick things off with more excited rage than a rabid werewolf. The third track on their eponymous debut, ‘I Wanna Break You In Half’ reaches a fever pitch of adolescent fury as Drenge rage against the machine with grunge influences aplenty; the listener’s blood practically boils over as Eoin growls about how he wants to “make you piss your pants/I wanna break you in half”.

Next up is ‘Bloodsports’, which showcases the very best of Tom Watson’s favourite band. Drenge are not here to please the indie kids, nor is it their mission to provide some more vapid, jangly indie pop. ‘Bloodsports’ swaggers through its two-and-a-half minutes with the threat of violence lurking under the surface throughout. With the arrogant sneer of Nick Cave, the unfettered anger of the Sex Pistols and the powerful, head-banging riffs of Nirvana, Drenge provide something that’s been missing from music for too long.

After an electrifying opening, Drenge dies down a bit, and if one were to find some criticism for the album, it would be that the band appear to lose track of what they’re trying to do for a bit. There’s only so far that frenetic sub-3 minute songs can get you, and fortunately Drenge appear to realize this before too long.

‘Let’s Pretend’, the penultimate track, is one of the most interesting songs on the album. At more than eight minutes long, it allows Drenge to showcase a more expansive, inventive sound. Drenge then reinvent themselves again for the album closer, ‘Fuckabout’, which reveals tenderness in its soft, gently crooned sound coupled with drawling irony in the lyrics which mock its own love song pretensions (“when I put the kettle on/you put heavy metal on”).

All in all, Drenge have produced an extremely impressive debut, and we can’t wait to get to their live shows and see Tom Watson moshing with the kids at the front.

Drenge’s album is out now and is available to stream here.

Let’s face it, rap hasn’t been interesting for a long time. There hasn’t been any fire in the genre since the Biggie-Tupac wars. The East Coast has failed to deliver on its promise and the current leaders in the genre (Jay Z and Kanye West, indisputably the kings of rap) have just released two albums that, whilst interesting, have nothing to say other than “look at me”.

Shame. At its best, rap is vital, political, fun and many other things. It’s clearly time for a revolution in the rap scene, but this won’t come through the machinations of A$AP Rocky or Childish Gambino (or, god forbid, Macklemore). It will come from a couple of chaps in tweed.

Yeah, that seems strange. However, Chap hop is, well, just brilliant. There’s something bizarrely entertaining about watching the sort of person you thought only existed in Enid Blyton’s fever dreams spit forth rhymes that rival in eloquence anything that Nas or Eminem ever produced.

And so, without further ado, I introduce to you the main proponents of the genre, the Biggie and Tupac of Chaps if you will:

Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer is a gent with a love for tweed and waistcoats, a wonderful curly moustache and a banjolele. If you haven’t already been won over, give his appropriation of rap history a listen and see if you’re any more charmed…

Mr B’s real name is Jim Burke, and he works alongside Britpop also-rans, Collapsed Lung. He plays festivals, from Glastonbury to the Fringe, and is known to enjoy a spot of cricket, as evidenced by his parody of N.W.A.’s ‘Straight Outta Compton.

But Mr B isn’t the only game in town. His rival and arch nemesis*, Professor Elemental, is the leader of the darker side to the chap hop movement. Whilst Mr B is likely to spend the afternoon in his club of at Lords, the Professor is probably cooking up a mad experiment with his butler, an orang-utan named Jeffrey. Here’s his diss song, directed at his sunnier opponent.

The Professor, (or Paul Alborough, as boring people tend to call him), is the chap’s chap, a real connoisseur’s delight. His rhymes, whilst perhaps not as catchy as Mr B’s, are far more detailed and tend to revolve around his obsession (nay, addiction) with regards to a certain hot beverage:

… or the culture of his homeland, which he spares no blushes, indicting us for our timidity, racism, and for giving the world a certain someone (no spoilers!):

If you are, as I am, sick of the narcissistic preening of the current cadre of rappers, why not tune in to what these chaps are laying down. You never know, you may enjoy yourself!

*said rivalry was resolved when both agreed that the other is jolly good at what they do, and was laid to rest by an evening with a crate of sherry and some opium.