Ibsen’s sprawling epic is the kind of play it shouldn’t be possible to stage. Its title character grows from youth to old age, the setting changes from pastoral village to wild mountain to troll kingdom and onwards to Egypt and beyond, and the script is the size of a novel. But Peter Zadek’s superbly acted production makes light work of such challenges. Working with the Berliner Ensemble, Zadek creates a fluid show that easily justifies its 3½-hour playing time. In the title role, Uwe Bohm is charismatically centre-stage for almost the whole performance, growing from a feckless young fantasist to a world-beaten 80-year-old fearful about the fate of his soul. Excellent support also from Angela Winkler, as Peer’s mother, last seen in Edinburgh playing the lead role in Hamlet.
Lucia Melts,
The Hub, Aug 22 & 23
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The Royal Bank Lates series is the festival’s latest incentive to draw a new audience. Performances are at 10.30pm, tickets are just £5 and some will always be available on the night. It sounds just like the fringe, in fact, except with the programming power of Brian McMaster, the technical standards should be very much higher. Performed in English, Lucia Melts is a play by Oscar van den Boogaard about a woman who refuses to believe in the breakdown of her relationship with a lover who walked out a year ago. With Sara de Roo and Steven van Watermeulen in the leads, it is staged by TG Stan, an experimental Flemish collective whose name is an acronym for Stop Thinking About Names.
Celestina,
King’s Theatre, Aug 23 & 24
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The Catalan director Calixto Bieito has earned a reputation as the bad boy of contemporary theatre. If it’s not the sex and violence, it’s the wilful deconstruction of sacred texts, such as his iconoclastic interpretation of Hamlet in last year’s festival. He’s certainly a director with a distinctive stamp, but his aim is more lofty than his reputation would suggest. He is determined to liberate the elemental forces in great plays, to make them speak to a modern audience without the dead hand of tradition. That’s just what he’s done with Fernando de Rojas’s dialogue novel, which becomes a vibrant and wayward theatrical experience that puts a fresh spin on this low-life tragicomedy about prostitution and coercion. In the title role as the brothel madam who helps a nobleman seduce a young virgin is the brilliant Kathryn Hunter, famed for her performances with Théâtre de Complicité and her cross-dressing leads in Richard III and King Lear. The Edinburgh playwright John Clifford translates.
Il Trovatore,
Edinburgh Festival Theatre, Aug 23
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A second chance to see the work of Bieito, this time in his graphic interpretation of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera. In the director’s typically visceral style, he focuses on the brutality behind this story of abduction, murder and torture. Audience members with weaker stomachs routinely run for the doors within 10 minutes of the curtain going up. However those with a desire to see opera pulsating with life have acclaimed this production by the Hanover State Opera as a revelation.
Epistle to Young Actors,
The Hub, Aug 26
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The man behind the festival’s epic 11-hour production of Le Soulier de Satin, the director Olivier Py, performs a (shorter) late-night rehearsed reading — in English — of his own play which takes a fantastical look at theatre. Performed as part of the Royal Bank Lates series.
Eraritjaritjaka,
Royal Lyceum Theatre, Aug 27-28
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Nominally a string quartet performance featuring the music of Ravel, Bach, Shostakovich and others, Heiner Goebbels’s production is a concert like no other you’ve ever seen. As well as the Mondriaan Quartet from Amsterdam, this late-night show features the actor André Wilms delivering an epigrammatic text taken from the notebooks of Elias Canetti and a multimedia presentation that takes the audience on a journey.
Ballet West,
Edinburgh Playhouse, Aug 27-30
Fans of 20th-century dance will not want to miss this three-ballet retrospective of the work of Antony Tudor. Ballet West, one of America’s leading dance companies, has recreated Lilac Garden from 1936, Offenbach in the Underworld from 1955 and The Leaves are Fading from 1975, pieces that reveal the choreographer’s gift for characterisation and his innovative ability to combine the classical and modern traditions. The 40-strong company will dance to the accompaniment of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra conducted by Terence Kern.