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First Cosmonaut

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars The peasants huddling round a hand-cart and wooden ladder at the start of Blue Raincoat Theatre Company's biographical study of pioneering Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagaran may not be revolting, but the dressed-down quintet are clearly keeping a self-consciously stern eye on the audience as they gradually troop in to a suitably heroic soundtrack. As it turns out, director of the Sligo-based company Niall Henry has them frame Jocelyn Clarke's forensically researched script as an arch  facsimile of a rural Soviet theatre group paying homage to their country-man. As the three men and two women strike a series of Meyerhold-inspired poses, this develops into a gloriously deadpan device which they sustain throughout the play's full seventy-five minutes. Following an opening monologue which appears to give a very Russian nod to David Bowie's Space Oddity, the ensemble's suitably collective retelling charts Gagarin's rise from a littl

Sports Day

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Three stars From the moment River City star, stage actress and musician Joyce Falconer shuffles onstage sporting a vivid pink track-suit, Olivia Newton John sweat-band and Chariots of Fire ring-tone, it becomes clear that teamwork is at the heart of the Citz's big-scale community theatre response to the impending Glasgow-based 2014 Commonwealth Games. Falconer is Geraldine, the retiring but never shy janitor whose last day falls on the school sports day that this compendium of sketches, songs and short plays is based around. With Geraldine the linking device, narrator and social glue between each, Falconer also becomes the fifth member of the show's rousing live band led by Michael John McCarthy. From such a starting block on an astro-turf covered stage, we follow the lead-up to the main event through miniature dramas involving toffee-nosed head-masters, anxious parents, competitive dads and a family fending off  bribes from dodgy politicians who off

Grit: The Martyn Bennett Story

Tramway, Glasgow Four stars Anyone who ever witnessed the full live experience of dread-locked piper extraordinaire, Martyn Bennett, at the height of his 1990s pomp will know only too well how powerful his fusion of ceilidh and club cultures could be. Bennett's tragic death of cancer in 2005 aged just thirty-three robbed the world of a composer and musician bursting with talent and a lust for life which can't help but cause one to wonder how his work might have developed. Much of Bennett's passion is captured in this new dramatic homage, conceived and directed by Cora Bissett, who also collaborates on Kieran Hurley's script for a co-production between Bissett's Pachamama Productions, Tramway and the Mull-based Comar organisation. As with the show's inspiration, Bissett mixes and matches forms with abandon. Opening speeches to the audience find actors Sandy Grierson, Hannah Donaldson and Gerda Stevenson, respectively playing Bennett, Bennett's wife, Kirsten,

Sports Day - Guy Hollands on Commonwealth and the community

The opening of the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow next month has inspired a welter of extra-curricular artistic activity. One of the first out of the traps is Sports Day, a huge community show at the city's Citizens Theatre, which features a compendium of new short pieces penned by major Scottish writers, including Peter Arnott, Linda McLean, Douglas Maxwell and Julia Taudevin, all based around a school sports day. These will be accompanied by a series of new songs written by equally major song-writers and musicians such as Vaselines vocalist Eugene Kelly, Sparrow and the Workshop's Jill O'Sullivan, John Kielty and Claire McKenzie. All this will be linked by a series of scenes featuring River City star Joyce Falconer as the school's janitor. For anyone studying the form, the stats go like this. Sixty non-professional performers drawn from assorted Citizens-based community groups will perform some seventeen new plays accompanied by twelve brand new songs. With only

Chorale – A Sam Shepard Roadshow

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It looks like someone's been stranded at the drive-in at the start of the first night of this weekend's bite-size tour through some of American playwright Sam Shepard's little-seen works by Presence Theatre and Actors Touring Company in association with the Belgrade, Coventry. There's some bump n' grind bar-room blues playing, and, in front of a back-lit big-screen, some drifter in a sleeping bag remains comatose throughout the screening of Shirley Clarke's 1981 video of Savage/Love, Shepard's dramatic collaboration with actor/director Joseph Chaikin. As the title suggests, Shepard and Chaikin's twenty-five minute masterpiece, performed to the camera by Chaikin himself with jazz duo accompaniment, is a relentless incantation on the highs and lows of obsessive amour. On video, it becomes both an impressionistic interpretation by Clarke and an essential document of Shepard and Chaikin's fertile collaboration, whic

Perfect Days

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars One of the most remarkable things about Liz Lochhead's 1998 play is that, apart from a 2011 version in the Czech Republic, it has never been adapted for film or television. Here, after all, is a funny and utterly serious look at an independent career woman's mid-life struggle with life, love and a biological clock that is ticking ever louder, which arrived onstage just a few short months after Sex and the City was first aired. Throw in a gay best friend, a well-buffed toy boy and an ex husband with a girlfriend half his age, and, in the right hands, it could have made for a fine mini-series at the very least. As it is, Lochhead's edgy comedy concerning thirty-nine year old celebrity Glasgow hairdresser Barbs Marshall has become a stage staple that taps into the contradictions of a free-spirited twenty-first century woman who seemingly has it all with wit, style and some very grown-up humour. Liz Carruthers' new production for Pitloc

My Name Is...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars The newspaper headlines that surround the estranged family in Sudha Bhuchar's new play for Tamasha Theatre Company may scream of how a young Scottish/Pakistani girl was kidnapped by her father, but the truth is infinitely more complex. Drawn from interviews with the real life mother, father and daughter whose faces were seen all over the world in 2006 when just such an incident occurred, Bhuchar's play changes their names to try and explain the back-story to what happened. In Philip Osment's simple but stately production, Farhan and Suzy tell how they met and fell in love in Glasgow, with a teenage Suzy converting to Islam as they marry and have children, including their youngest, Ghazala. As personal and cultural tensions coming to the fore, the marriage falls apart and Farhan returns to Pakistan, with Ghazala moving across continents to be with one parent or the other. This is a sad, emotionally raw story that is laid bare without sentimen