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Front Row: Edinburgh Festival review: The Grand Old Opera House Hotel; Funeral; Kieran Hodgson: Big In Scotland; Vanessa 5000; AI Art; Food

Edinburgh Festival review: The Grand Old Opera House Hotel; Funeral; Kieran Hodgson: Big In Scotland; Vanessa 5000; AI Art; Food

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Edinburgh Festival review: The Grand Old Opera House Hotel; Funeral; Kieran Hodgson: Big In Scotland; Vanessa 5000; AI Art; Food

Kate Molleson and guests review the highlights of this year's Edinburgh festivals

A Front Row Edinburgh Festival review special with novelist Sir Ian Rankin, journalist Chitra Ramaswamy, and theatre critic Fergus Morgan

A review of two of the big shows at this year’s Edinburgh Festival: Olivier award-winning writer Isobel McArthur has had great success with her genre-busting works Pride and Prejudice* (*Sort Of) and Kidnapped.  Her latest play The Grand Old Opera House Hotel is a rom-com set in a haunted house filled with opera arias – it’s worlds apart from Funeral, a calm, interactive meditation on the nature of life and death by the Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed.

Our reviewers give their verdicts on the comedy shows they’ve sampled this year. Kieran Hodgson is a Yorkshireman outsider in TV’s Two Doors Down: his new show Big in Scotland reflects on identity and belonging; magician and clown Geoff Sobelle explores the comedy of consumption in his show Food; and Sonja Doubleday’s comedy of the absurd – Cheekykita: An Octopus, The Universe, ‘n’ Stuff – features a nonsense trip through space.

The impact of artificial intelligence has been cited as one of the reasons for the current writers’ and actors’ strikes in Hollywood. AI is also the topic at the heart of Courtney Pauroso’s Vanessa 5000, which features a sex robot and in Edinburgh University’s Inspace gallery exhibition, The Sounds of Deep Fake, where the human voice is put through its paces by AI. 

Presenter: Kate Molleson
Producer: Ekene Akalawu

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Edinburgh Festival review: The Grand Old Opera House Hotel; Funeral; Kieran Hodgson: Big In Scotland; Vanessa 5000; AI Art; Food

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