The Fireworks Concert is a chance for the people of Edinburgh to reclaim their city. The programme played by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in Princes Street Gardens focuses on Grieg’s Peer Gynt. The best viewing platforms are Calton Hill and the Botanic Gardens.
Blinded, Edinburgh International Film Festival, UGC, today, 2.45pm
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Sexual passion bursts forth in the Scottish countryside in this debut feature by Eleanor Yule made as part of Scottish Screen’s New Found Films project. It’s an erotic thriller in which Peter Mullan plays a blind landowner whose wife develops a relationship with a travelling labourer.
Demetri Martin, Assembly Rooms, today, 8.55pm
Last year’s surprise Perrier Award winner is back with an even better show. With his homemade music and surreal vision, the New York comedian is as quirky as ever, performing a set only a couple of steps away from straight theatre. When he turns to the art of the gag, he’s as good as they get.
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Helena Kennedy, Edinburgh International Book Festival, Aug 30, 3pm
Behind the rhetoric of the war on terror lies a serious threat to our civil liberties, or so argues Baroness Helena Kennedy. In what promises to be one of the most contentious sessions in this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Glasgow-born QC explains why she believes our government is undermining civil liberties under cover of protecting us from terrorism.
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Peacefire, Gilded Balloon Caves, until Aug 30, 7pm
Macdara Vallely’s one-man show is about a Northern Irish joy-rider who gets drawn into a relationship with the security forces and the IRA. Performed by the Irish-born playwright it is an absorbing study of criminality and terrorism.