‘Murakami saw his book come alive!’: the Japanese company bringing the author’s science fiction masterpiece to the stage

Saturday marks the 5th anniversary of the current Taliban rule in Aghanistan. They've had a devastating impact on girls' education. A lesser told story is their impact on the education of boys.

Two Edinburgh fringe shows feature savage send-ups of reviewers. Is this petty revenge or do they have a case? Our writer finds one ‘a hoot’ – and thinks the other let him off lightly No one ever built a statue to a critic, they say – but plenty of art gets made about them. There was Wild Bore at the Traverse a few Edinburgh fringes back, an eye-catching performance-art attack on the notion of critical authority. There was Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, Sheridan’s The Critic, and the 70s horror movie (later a play) Theatre of Blood, in which critics are subjected to gruesome murder at the hands of a deranged thesp. And while we’re talking unspeakable gore, one feature of Sarah Kane’s queasy play Cleansed, currently enjoying a revival, is that (in a wanton act of literary vengeance) its sadistic torturer antagonist is named after a theatre critic, Jack Tinker, who’d panned Kane’s work. Runts of the reviewing litter though we are, there’s even a sub-genre of art about comedy critics. The comic Russell Kane wrote a novel about one who was unable to laugh. Ex-critic Charlotte Runcie wrote another about a journo giving a woman a one-star review for her standup, then sleeping with her...

Various venues, Edinburgh From queer narratives to secret histories, this year celebrates the underground and the unheralded. Our writer uncovers so many stories, he feels like Columbo By the time you’re done with Edinburgh art festival you’ll have uncovered so many hidden stories you’ll feel like Columbo. We’re talking queer narratives, secret histories, undiscovered archives: the whole festival is a celebration of the underground and unheralded. You can’t walk into a gallery without learning about some subcultural genius or longlost creative you’ve never heard of. That’s not a bad MO for a city-wide art festival. But EAF is also a big, unwieldy, confusing thing. There are curated displays, satellite exhibitions, performances, off-site projects, and it’s impossible to figure out how any of it fits together. You’ve just got to follow your nose and hope you sniff out something you like. And you’d better like photography, because there’s a lot of it here...