Dybbuk
King’s Theatre
Britt on Britt
Assembly Rooms
Surviving Spike
Assembly Rooms
Perhaps it should be the Inter-notional Festival. The posh bit of Edinburgh, the International Festival, is incurably besotted with the idea of conceptual hybrids, of cross-fertilisation between cultures. Their first offering is Dybbuk, a show about Jews, ghosts and exorcism, set in Poland and performed in Polish with an idiot-board over the stage showing a translation for English-speakers. The story is a little hard to grasp. A bride has been possessed by the spirit of her dead lover on the eve of her wedding. Meanwhile, an emigrant somewhere in America is being haunted by a Holocaust victim who is also his half-brother. Establishing these complexities takes an hour. The show then proceeds using all kinds of dated diversions, gratuitous nudity, strawberry-eating, slow-motion dancing, multicoloured video snatches oozing tediously across the back wall.
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