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Pyrenees

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars "If you don't want to see a man fall," the Proprietor of the out of season Alpine hotel says at one point in David Greig's stately meditation on identity, "look away." Like the play it belongs to, it's a line that works on many levels. The fall the Proprietor refers to stems from the army of intrepid would-be explorers braving the rocks, but it also refers to the plight of the unnamed middle-aged Man found unconscious in the snow but unable to remember anything of himself or how he got there. A young woman, Anna, is dispatched from the British Consulate to find out who the man is, only to fall for his world-weary charm. When another woman, Vivienne, arrives at the hotel, a whole new world opens up about who exactly the Man might be. There is laughter and forgetting aplenty in John Durnin's urbane revival  of Greig's 2005 play, which, in the courtyard of Frances Collier's design, is rendered as a piece of

The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black, Black Oil

Dundee Rep Five stars The ceilidh band is already playing as the audience step onto the bare floorboards of Joe Douglas' revival of one of the defining plays of twentieth century Scottish theatre, and the whisky is flowing. Not as a sweetener to encourage the smatterings of audience participation that ripple throughout the show, but as a celebration, both of the play itself and  the spirit of artistic and political resistance it continues to define. First performed in 1973, John McGrath's ribald melding of variety traditions tells the hidden history of how Scotland has been plundered by self-serving capitalists from the Highland Clearances onwards. What could so easily have been rendered as cheeky revivalism becomes in Douglas' heartfelt production for Dundee Rep's Ensemble company a vital statement on the world we live in now and the way very little has changed in terms of who's ruled the roost over the last forty-two years. At times its series o

Joe Douglas - The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil

Joe Douglas was "Minus ten," when a rough-shod fusion of ceilidh and popular drama knitted together as something called The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil began a Highland charge around the nation's village halls in 1973 that would go on to redefine Scottish theatre as we now know it. In the forty-two years since, John McGrath and his 7:84 Theatre Company's melding of music hall and political commentary has become an iconic benchmark of how theatre can fuse radical intent with populist heart in a way that has trickled down to the National Theatre of Scotland's equally seminal production of Black Watch and beyond. McGrath's original production of The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil featured now well known names including John Bett, Bill Paterson and Alex Norton in a cast that also included McGrath's actress wife, Elizabeth MacLennan, her brother David, folk singer Dolina MacLennan and fiddler Allan Ross. The show m

Stones in His Pockets

Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh Four stars Marie Jones' tragicomic dissection of cultural colonialism by a predatory Hollywood film shoot in rural Ireland first appeared in Edinburgh in 1999 en route to the West End and Broadway. At that time, the so-called Celtic Tiger which had  reinvigorated the Irish economy and the film industry that went with it so spectacularly was in its final throes of unfettered largesse. More recently Ireland's landscape has provided a suitably fantastical backdrop for Game of Thrones, though the sentimentally inclined sentimentalising of tradition continues to prevail elsewhere. Jones puts her story in the hands of down-on-their-luck film extras Jake and Charlie, played by two actors who proceed to unveil a cast of thousands, from the last surviving veteran of The Quiet Man to the American starlet feeding off the local colour. Through this device, a very serious statement is made about the relationship between art and commerce using an apposite and in

Document Scotland – The Ties That Bind

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, September 26th-April 24 th 2016 One of the main legacies of the 2014 Scottish Referendum will be the multitude of images from all sides that document the pains and the passions of one of the country's pivotal political moments of the twenty-first century thus far. With this in mind, it's only fitting that some kind of collective response is gathered. Step up photographers Colin McPherson, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, Sophie Gerrard and Stephen McLaren, who as Document Scotland have pulled together some fifty to seventy-five images of Scotland and its people from the front-line to commemorate the first anniversary of such a seismic event. It is this sort of thing that makes documentary photography so evocative of moments great and small as the human hearts behind those moments are framed in a way that both historicises and mythologises them in the best senses of both words. While a patina of politics is inherent in such an undertakin

All My Sons

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars If war is a curse, pity the official opening night of Rapture Theatre's new touring revival of Arthur Miller's post World War Two dissection of the business of bad government. Not only was actor Paul Shelley temporarily indisposed from playing the play's pivotal character, Joe Keller, requiring company member David Tarkenter to step into the breach, but midway through Act Two, actress Trudie Goodwin, leading a crucial scene as Joe's self-deluding spouse, Kate, passed out, causing the action to be halted for several minutes before the curtain raised once more. While both unfortunate incidents made for an understandably uneven evening, they also lent a certain edge to proceedings, so that by the time we get to a funereally played last act, the tension is palpable to all. Prior to that, things had started off in a wonderfully sunny American suburbia, where Joe and Kate's forced niceties barely hide how Kate pines for her pilot son, w

Danny Krass - Kind of Silence

What does music mean when you can't hear it? That was one of the questions composer and sound designer Danny Krass asked before making Kind of Silence, his new piece of theatre for the Solar Bear theatre company, which opens in Glasgow this week. Loosely drawn from the legend of Echo and Narcissus, which featured in the third book of Ovid's Metamorphosis, Kind of Silence fuses physical theatre and choreography with state of the art technology that enables Krass and co to explore the relationship between them all in a deaf theatre context. “It's quite a strange thing to be a sound designer on a deaf theatre production,” Krass points out, “and whenever I've done it I've always considered my role to be about making things accessible for a hearing audience. I've worked on a couple of shows for deaf people, which is I suppose where the initial idea for Kind of Silence came from. It always made me think about communication in different ways, and how you might look