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The Persian Revolution

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars A woman kneels across a platform reading Destination Moon, one of Herge’s comic strip adventures of Tintin. In this late tale, our blonde, be-quiffed boy-hero and chums are decamped to the exotic land of Syldavia, where, a good ten years before the first Apollo mission, the space race is already taking flight. It’s Herge’s usual fare of swarthy foreign agents thwarted by the thoroughly European forces of good. As the starting point for the Cambridge-based Anglo-Iranian 30 Bird company’s impressionistic history of Iran on the 2006 centenary of its constitutional autonomy, it’s playful statement of intent. It demonstrates too how, caught between Russian and British empires, a mix and match of eastern and western influence left a template based on the Belgian constitution. And with such a mine-field of material to work with, writer/director Mehrdad Seyf somehow navigates through this densely detailed labyrinth, sketching in the essence of conflict v

Maria Aitken - From the Citz To The 39 Steps

There’s something terribly Noel Coward about Maria Aitken. It’s not just the way this most impeccably aristocratic of actresses turned director turns a phrase as she sits in her New York apartment. Nor is it her appearance in a celebrated production of Coward’s play The Vortex at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre alongside Rupert Everett, who immortalises the time in his recently published auto-biography. Rather, as her production of The 39 Steps arrives in town, Aitken’s old-fashioned aesthete’s sensibility has put her at the centre of an artistic dynasty that’s as irresistible as her own colourful background. Married to novelist Patrick McGrath, and with her son from her first marriage to Nigel Davenport, actor Jack Davenport, wed to fellow thesp Michelle Gomez, Sunday lunch at Chez Aitken’s sounds as la-di-da bohemian as the Bliss family’s country weekend in Coward’s play, Hay Fever (written, incidentally, a year after The Vortex in 1924). While she actually played Coward’s chief matriar

There’s No V In Gaelic

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars Gaelic theatre has had little platform of late, as grail-seeking aficionados favoured gurus from more exotic climes. In such a melee of discovery, work on our own doorstep is inevitably left to rot. This is something TAG’s new co-production with the An Lochran arts agency attempts to address by way of this part professional, part community exploration of popular feminism among a sector of society barely renowned for talking dirty, if at all, about life, love and the whole darn fishing smack. At its centre are nine monologues, performed and, under the guidance of director Guy Hollands, fleshed out into ensemble pieces by the six young women who penned them. From the teacher reduced to using pet words for sexual organs, through bite-size portrayals of single motherhood, infidelity, motorway flirtation, the offloading of gender stereotypes via the hard sell of a perfect doll, and the quest for 21st century identity in an already alienated world, all l

Fergus Lamont

Perth Theatre 4 stars It’s no coincidence that the late Robin Jenkins’ trawl through this country’s psyche in the first half of the 20th century arrived on the scene in 1979. If Thatcher’s first Westminster victory wasn’t bad enough, the devolution referendum earlier the same year had already left confidence shattered. Today’s climate finds us eight years into the real thing, and, with elections pending both sides of the border, Communicado’s adaptation is a timely encounter. Not that the story’s be-kilted back-street hero who acquires a double-barrelled name and confidence enough to wheedle his way into bourgeois society is in any way a polemic. Rather, with parallels easily drawn with Candide, Peer Gynt and Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, director/adaptor Gerry Mulgrew has stayed true to the yarn’s picaresque origins. Self-knowledge rather than revolution is its epicentre in a tale of class, social climbing and fruitless ambition. So Fergus moves from an officer and would-be poet in t

Earfull

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars When Tim Barlow was growing up in Blackpool, all he wanted was a girl on his arm and the aural poetry of Josef Locke’s tenor voice resounding in his ear. When he joined the army, he was made deaf by the sound of his own gun-fire, and had no idea that, prior to being posted overseas, one of those girls was telling him down a phone line how much she loved him. Three years on, and with an army wife and two small children on the go, exposure to a performance by Laurence Olivier was an epiphany, whereby Barlow recognised that his future lay, not on the battlefield, but onstage as an actor. What follows in this auto-biographical monologue, performed by the author himself in Tom Morris and Toby Sedgwick’s loose-knit production, is a candid expose of Barlow’s struggle to be seen and heard in a system geared towards physical perfection at every level. Framed by a structural conceit that sees Barlow’s yarn unravel as he waits for his three thousandth audition al

Devil’s Ship

The Hub, Edinburgh 3 stars Five women look out to sea on the island they live on. The older women are set in their isolated ways. The younger are restless. One who was married to the older woman’s son wants to get away. The only men in the picture - oddly with names resembling characters from Moby Dick - are either dead or else lost to the mainland, as signified by the opening image of this new play written, directed and designed by Attila Pessyana for his Iran-based Bazi Theatre Company. A dummy, first lying buried in the sand, is then raised up to a sitting position, only to fall limp once more. What follows over the next hour is a deeply symbolic work of collective purging that taps into age-old rites via a darkly foreboding intensity and a hypnotic sense of its own stark stillness. This is a fascinating opportunity to see Pessyana’s work, his first on a major platform since Bazi’s UK debut in 2002. with an oddity called The Mute Who Was Dreamed. Where that play’s symbolic natur

Boeing Boeing

Theatre Royal, Glasgow 3 stars Few understand the international language of cuckoldry quite like the French. This still doesn’t fully explain, however, why a fifty year old farce playing on the conceit of a then fledgling jet-age, some casual lounge-core misogyny and the exotic appeal of tri-lingual trolley dollies should still have commercial cache. Especially, one might think, in today’s era of ecologically unsound budget flights weighed down with the flotsam and jetsom of stag and hen weekends. Yet, since its 2007 revival, Marc Carmoletti’s Paris mis-match has continued to rack up air-miles. This economy class touring version features a cast familiar from equally frothy TV fare and a dazzle of retro-kitsch production design that would probably give Alan Whicker a head-ache watching this gossamer-light romp from a time when technology was reaching for the sky. Which is why swinging architect Bernard’s meticulously scheduled liaisons with three different stewardesses on stop-over