EVERYTHING MARKED WITH: Edmund Rumania


Ariane Branigan August 18th, 2018 by

‘Ariane Branigan is a prospective student living in Edinburgh’ says her potted Wee Review biography. Yes. She hasn’t EVEN managed to be a student yet. She’s a PROSPECTIVE one. So… You know those woke little squits wriggling about in a sea of deactivated culture semen? She hasn’t YET MANAGED to become one of them. Fucking […]


John Gibson August 16th, 2018 by

Imagine being a reviewer and watching a show predicated upon (for the first half at least) a cuddly bear. Imagine taking so little interest in what you’re watching that you thought the bear was a monkey. I mean, you saw it in the Monkey Barrel after all; it ought to have been a monkey. It’s […]


Sophie Cartman August 13th, 2018 by

I can’t remember… is Sophie Cartman the underprivileged London one or the feral Scottish winner of the Steve Bennett Lower Class Munificence Outreach Award? At any rate she is producing reviews for Chortle at the rate of one a week, so we’re tempted to tell Steve he’s on a losing wicket here. YOU JUST CAN’T […]


Laura Pujos August 26th, 2017 by

Nobody could accuse Pujos of being dismissive about what she sees. Bloody hell no. She attends comedy shows as if she’s been asked to take notes for a Hague War Crimes tribunal; presenting each point before cross-examining it and (usually) finding it guilty of something. This jurisprudence is not in the service of seeing both […]


Paul Whitelaw August 23rd, 2017 by

Nick Doody has a joke (and I won’t spoil it by doing the whole thing), that says you can’t write ‘swan’ on a pig and shove it out onto the lake. And yet over the past five years we’ve discovered that we have to accept things as they’re labelled, however little sense it makes. It […]


Nina Keen August 15th, 2016 by

Is the world just wrong? Or is Nina Keen just wrong? Because one of the two MUST be wrong. Nina Keen is not averse to the reviewer-speak standby of saying that a thing does or doesn’t “live up to its title”. So excuse me for saying that, whether she is wrong or not, Nina Keen […]


Stephanie Withers August 30th, 2015 by

Stephanie Withers gives the impression of being scared of running over the word limit. Her reviews release their information in staccato squirts of data. Occasionally she’ll pair two sentences with a comma. But mostly it reads like this. However, her reviews are better than this makes them sound. They’re perfectly clear and she always takes […]


Dave Coates August 28th, 2015 by

Dave Coates is one of those reviewers who, like a teacher at a long-established school, wants everyone to try their best. And he wants them to be cheerful about it.Jack Barry, for example, “seems self-aware enough that his mis-steps suggest a performer in the middle of a promising learning process”. Coates could have added “Will […]


Nick Awde August 26th, 2015 by

Nick Awde has been around since gaslighting, writing about theatre and working on a string of large stage productions, some of them at the Fringe. This pedigree may explain the aloofness with which he told Phil Ellis’s Funz and Gamez Tooz to fuck off: “Guys, you got last year’s award because you were an in-joke […]


Tamarin Fountain August 23rd, 2015 by

First the good news: Tamarin Fountain has an excellent name. Well, that’s not the good news. But she does, though. The good news is that Tamarin Fountain writes very clearly in plain English. Her style is friendly in a sub Marge-Proops way, and she lets you know what’s going on without getting too deconstructive: “This […]


Catriona Scott August 23rd, 2015 by

There’s something very amusing about Catriona Scott’s reviews. She writes in the style of a Victorian botanist describing something nobody has ever seen before. She describes the physicality of the scene, the species of jokes and the sequence of events as if she’s anxious that the police might want to know later. She doesn’t find […]


Daisy Malt August 11th, 2015 by

What would the Fringe be without Three Weeks waking up really late in the proceedings and sneezing embryonic reporters all over us? It simply wouldn’t be as much fun. Every year we at FringePig scan the wires for the pitter patter of moisture falling from the wet patches behind the ears of these delightful people. […]


Gill Geoff August 10th, 2015 by

I’m starting to lose my faith in One4Review. In a year when Steve Bennett and Julia Chamberlain seem to have decided to do all their own spelling mistakes, One4Review seems to have spawned a whole new clutch of single-named review monkeys (all of which we’ll surname ‘Geoff’, because that’s what we do). However, I’m half […]


Vyvyan Almond August 17th, 2014 by

Vyvyan Almond’s sentences are quite over-constructed. They sometimes take so long to reach their point that reading his reviews puts you in mind of a Dickensian preamble. And Dickens, as we know, was paid by the word. That’s not to say that Almond writes with the wit or pathos of Dickens, of course. In fact […]


James McColl August 12th, 2014 by

If all reviewers wrote like James McColl, Fringepig would be out of business. Not that Fringepig IS a business, obviously. Not until someone has the guts to take out an advert with us, anyway. No, if they all wrote as matter-of-factly as this chap there wouldn’t be much to moan about. “Laurence Clark is a […]


Edimbrugh Fringe Dog August 5th, 2014 by

Well, you wait 67 years for an Edinburgh Fringe parody to happen, and then two come along at once. This one is very wet-nosed and friendly and is called Edimbrugh Fringe Dog. Fringe dog spells everything wrong and gives everyone five stars. As you know, we at Fringepig get quite cross with reviewers who use […]


Mark Monahan August 3rd, 2014 by

To be honest, I’ve never much cared for the way The Telegraph denomes Mark Monahan “joint dance critic … and also writes about film and stand-up comedy”. It’s almost as bad as his colleague Dominic Cavendish, stand-up comedy critic AND deputy theatre luvvie. What do these disciplines have to do with each other? Nothing, that’s […]


Justin McCarthy July 17th, 2014 by

Justin McCarthy doesn’t so much write reviews as retch words from every orifice. Like someone with lexical norovirus the deluge flows from both ends of his points of view, creating a big mess all over the page. “Simply the most bizarre show you will ever have the unfortunate and detrimental privilege to watch” he writes […]


Paul F Cockburn July 17th, 2014 by

I’m not going to say anything bad about Paul F Cockburn because the photo of him makes him look like he’d gladly kick the stuffing out of my head and feed it to his staffie. But we shouldn’t judge by first impressions, should we? For instance, when I start reading a review in Broadway Baby, […]


Peter Dorman July 17th, 2014 by

I’m going to ignore the fact that Peter Dorman uses phrases such as “strap yourselves in” and “not one for the easily offended” and even – EVEN! – “a must see”… because, for the greater part, Peter Dorman is a capable reviewer. His reviews get to the point and express his opinion in plain English […]


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