‘A Little Life,’ ‘Bloody Difficult Women’ Light Up Edinburgh, While ‘Not For Everyone’ Lives Up to Its Name: The Hits — and Misses — of Fringe
Mark Shenton Guest Contributor Two years ago, the Edinburgh Festival — comprised of film and TV events but dominated by the much larger Fringe festival — was entirely canceled by COVID. In 2021, it returned in a much truncated edition that was a hybrid of live and online performances. This year, which is the 75th anniversary of the Fringe’s founding, it has roared back to nearly full strength, at least from the point of view of performances seeking to find an audience. (There are some 3,582 shows to choose from, playing at 277 different venues.) It was at the Edinburgh Festival in 1969 that Ian McKellen, then 30, first made his mark playing Richard II in a performance that the then-Sunday Times critic Harold Hobson called “the uncontested triumph” of that year’s festival; now, more than half a century later, and aged 82, he is back on the Fringe, still pushing personal boundaries as he appears in a 75-minute danced version of “Hamlet,” performing five soliloquies from the play while dancers, choreographed by Peter Schaufuss — who in the 1980s was director of London Festival Ballet (since rebranded the English National Ballet) — enact them physically.