The Edinburgh Festival is apparently hoping that a dose of controversy will boost ticket sales, announcing that it will stage an adaptation of Michel Houellebecq’s controversial and explicit novel, Platform, directed by Calixto Bieito, who was last seen inserting an oral sex scene into Hamlet. Kate Bevan isn’t impressed: “Doubtless Bieito’s Platform will sell many tickets, and critics are surely already practising their choicest phrases of outrage… Yet somewhere along the line the consumer (and the critic and the commentator) will have been taken for a fool… To assume that we need grotesquerie to make us take notice of what they say is to assume that we can’t hear and understand for ourselves.”