Anna Rieser

Communications lead for BEIS Local Climate and Energy Team. Media, Communications and International Journalism MA Graduate, previously Edinburgh Festivals Magazine Deputy Editor. Fascinated by how culture and politics and environment interact in the digital age.

Edinburgh Festivals Magazine •

Review: Wild Swimming at Pleasance

Full Rogue’s production of Wild Swimming is a joyful, clever and funny show about gender, privilege, poetry and swimming. Alice Lamb and Annabel Baldwin play Oscar and Nell, two childhood friends with different destinies as a man and a woman. We meet them in the sixteenth century where Nell is left in Dorset until she is married, whereas Oscar heads to University, to fill his mind with ideas about poetry and swimming the Hellespont. The play twists and turns through four hundred years of English
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine •

Review: Un Poyo Roco at Dance Base

Un Poyo Roco sees Argentinian dancers Luciano Rosso and Alfonso Barón in a locker room. They are in competitive spirits, dancing for one another and fighting, first as play then as dance and then for real. The whole show bristles with energy. Sat still on the stage their bodies can’t help but betray the incredible ways that they are able to move. They ripple like liquid rubber, able to transform into whatever creature they wish to become. So we get the fluttering of feathers as they imitate
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine •

Review: Everything I See I Swallow at Summerhall

In the demonstration room in Summerhall, a girl is suspended from the ceiling, bound in an elaborate shibari knot pattern like an enormous spider. Her mother, dressed in a hot pink trouser suit steps forward and tells us not to look at her. This acts as the set up for this tale of generational struggle, tangled up in second and third-wave feminism. The girl begins to speak, unwrapping herself from the ties that bind her. She talks of discovering she was beautiful, how the gaze on her changed li
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine •

Review: Hotter at Underbelly-White Belly

Mary Higgins and Ell Potter are posing on the stage, decked out in fur coats and sunglasses in a very sweaty, darkroom. They are best friends and ex-girlfriends who, crucially, put a deposit down on a fringe venue before they broke up. They wanted to make a show about what gets women and transpeople Hot, so they did it anyway, break up be damned. Now they are HOTTER (Higgins plus Potter get it?). In a festival bursting with shows about female sexuality, this one stands out as having a broader
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine •

Review: Kid X at Assembly Roxy

Kid X is a collaborative piece of theatre with Bassline Circus and MHz in association with Feral [Scotland]. It opens with the kind of slickness that is familiar from superhero movies. Eva Lazarus is the super-successful scientist that graces the cover of Time magazine having found success with the creation of a synthetic heart. This heart was first transplanted to her adopted son; Kid X, saving his life but meaning he can never fall in love. The implication is that her own heart has hardened in
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine •

Review: Traumboy at Summerhall

Daniel Hellman has been a sex worker for nine years now. It started with a dating profile, a much older match followed by a sloppy blowjob and scrubbing in the shower. Or so he tells us. There is ambiguity in this piece, so much that Daniel says his day to day existence is at times at the mercy of this identity blur. Is he Daniel or his sex work ego Phil? As an opera singer and performer as well as a sex worker, this is not a new sensation for Daniel, but playing the same role for almost a decad
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine •

Review: S!nk and Kate in the Kettle at the Pianodrome at the Pitt

The Pianodrome is one of those incredibly rare things; a passion project that has been successfully executed. The space is a kind of amphitheatre made up of old pianos that were destined for a life of sad decay. In their new incarnation, the pianos make up seating and playing areas for a small audience. On the day of this gig, they were packed to the rafters, to the extent that an elaborate mime had to be constructed to remove an audience member from a piano stool needed for the performance.
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine •

Review: This Is The Kit at Leith Theatre for EIF

The voices of Rozi Plain and This is the Kit are quiet yet incredibly powerful. At once raw, intimate and sweet, they make an immediate connection with the listener, shrinking the world down to a den-like space delineated by their tender lyrics. Having only seen their music in much smaller venues, the Leith Theatre seemed a challenge. For Rozi Plain’s supporting set, this was to an extent true. Her clear voice was somewhat lost in the cavernous hall. However, she maintained a casual stage pr
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine •

Review: Coma at Summerhall

Darkfield has developed a reputation for its immersive theatre. Their last two shows, Seance and Flight, have used the same conceit of immersing their audiences in total darkness in a shipping container. The kind of darkness where you can’t see your own hand in front of your face. This is combined with binaural sound- a soundscape that mimics the feeling of movement around your body. The combination means you left totally disorientated in the limitless blackness. Going in blank to Coma is a d
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine •

Review: Alfie Brown- Imagination at The Monkey Barrel

Alfie Brown holds the audience in the palm of his hand, starting conversations with as many of them as he can; all backchat greeted with amiable banter. He has that chameleon comedian’s trick of appealing to all in the room, explained explicitly by Alfie as a manifestation of his deep insecurity and need to be loved. The show is called Imagination, the word emblazoned on a hand-stitched tapestry that his girlfriend’s mother made. This is a broad enough title to encapsulate almost anything, bu
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine •

Review: Blizzard by Flip Fabrique at Assembly Hall

Blizzard opens with a warning that the adverse weather conditions may mean limited visibility, to the extent that we may not believe our eyes. Halfway through the show, a small child wonders up to the stage with the same awestruck look that most of the crowd have been wearing for the past half hour, suggesting they may be right. Taking their inspiration from the harsh conditions of their homeland, this production by Canadian company Flip Fabrique brings all the magic of a snow day to young and
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine •

Review: Neneh Cherry at Leith Theatre

The fading grandeur of the Leith Theatre is just the right atmosphere for Neneh Cherry’s gig, which happens to coincide with a spectacular thunderstorm. Inside the cavernous Hall, bodies are steaming, layers are removed and the whole thing has the strange feeling of a music festival. People; damp and a little dazed are more open than usual, chatting at the bar and laughing. The gig begins with a DJ set by the legendary Joseph Malik which a small gaggle are gamely dancing to. It was perhaps a
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine •

Review: F Off at Underbelly

In this new production from the National Youth Theatre, the audience are the jury and Mark Zuckerberg is on trial. As the show began I approached it with caution. Would the audience participation get tired and would this become a preachy treatise on teen social media use? I needn’t have worried. The NYT have pulled off an incredible feat, effectively condensing Zuboff’s tome on Surveillance Capitalism into a highly entertaining hour-long show that will appeal to old and young alike. In creat
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine •

Review: Algorithms at Pleasance (Baby Grand)

Algorithms’ tagline is ‘a bisexual Bridget Jones for the online, millennial generation’. It delivers on these claims, but could just as easily have been called ‘Fleabag for the less f*cked up’. In a Fringe where almost every press release for a one-woman show is labelled ‘the next Fleabag!’, Sadie Clarke, who plays Brooke, has the most compelling claim to that throne. There is an energy about her that is infectious, she has eyebrows that can raise a room and a knowing smile that makes you fe
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine •

Review: First Time at Summerhall

Nathaniel Hall emerges from a pile of grey duvets, detritus strewn across the stage; he is all apologies. ‘Sorry it’s such a mess, you know what it’s like, bit of a party’ he stammers, claiming he’s not prepared to put on a show, despite the arts council grants he’s received. But he is. Nathanial has been rehearsing this story for years. It’s his own: one of contracting HIV on his first time. It began when he was approached by a handsome Will Young look-alike. Who, shockingly in Stockport in
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine •

Review: The Patient Gloria at The Traverse

Perhaps it is to be expected in a play about psychotherapy, but The Patient Gloria features a lot of cocks. We are greeted by the writer/director, Gina Moxley, asking the audience if they can see her. She’s been fading for years, you see, and now—as an older woman—has been rendered almost invisible. Perhaps the key to her visibility is the hand-sewn penis she is crafting as she waits for us to take our seats. Whatever it is, Gina is having the time of her life, radiating a twinkling charm—from h
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine •

Review: Mustard at Summerhall

Eva O’Connor has a fierce presence, as hot, fiery and burning as the mustard of her play. A one-woman show based around mustard is an intriguing prospect, and this one delivers just the pungent hit to wake you up in the morning. Eva meets the man of her dreams, dancing in an achingly hip club in Elephant and Castle where she finds a baggy of MDMA in a sanitary bin. She reaches new levels of euphoria as he holds her head in his hands like it’s made of precious stone. There follow days of the sor
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine •

Review: Katie Greenall-Fatty Fat Fat at The Pleasance

As the audience shuffles into a hot room in the Attic of the Pleasance, Katie Greenall is doing the cha-cha slide. Against a sparkling backdrop of shredded silver plastic and balloons she slides to the right, before sliding to the right and cha cha now y’alling. It is not until everyone is seated and she takes to the microphone that the importance of the track is explained. At nine years old, Katie was obsessed with CD’s, when given a present by her mother in the form of this ‘banger’ she was th
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