Skip to main content

Posts

The Bruce in Ireland

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Three stars In a muddy bog, Robert The Bruce is crowned king of Scots after crushing the English and claiming the throne as his own. As with history, it is Bruce's younger brother Edward you have to keep an eye on in Ben Blow's speculative reimagining of the Bruce boys post-Bannockburn assault on Ireland, produced here by the Edinburgh-based Black Dingo Productions. Like a Shakespearian villain on the make, Gerry Kielty's Edward snipes from the sidelines prior to a power-hungry burst of sibling rivalry that sees him left to his own manipulative devices on Irish soil, intent on creating a kingdom of his own. Once in the wilds with his troops, he encounters Failtrail, a young milkmaid who is forced to sing for him before the two face up to the dehumanising realpolitik of power games and become accidental allies, Director Kolbrun Bjort Sigfusdottir sets all this in the bleakest of landscapes in a meditation on war which sounds at times

Modern Scottish Women – Painters and Sculptors 1885-1965

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, November 7th-June 26 th Long before the current generation of female Scottish artists started making waves, muscles of joy were being flexed in a way that paved the way for everything that followed. This major show of more than ninety works from familiar names including Joan Eardley and Phoebe Anna Traquair to less well-known but just as significant figures bookends its time-frame from when Fra Newberry became Director of Glasgow School of Art to the year of Anne Redpath's death. In the years between, the doors were opened to women artists in a way that was unprecedented as they seized on new liberties in a way that allowed them to express their art as never before. Not that it was easy, as the exhibition makes clear by framing it in the context of the conditions female artists negotiated as students and practitioners due to their gender. Given that it moves through the age of suffrage to a more seemingly swinging age, the new researc

Vanya

Citizens Theatre , Glasgow Four stars The light is barely there at the opening of Sam Holcroft's twenty-first century adaptation of Anton Chekhov's slow-burning tip-toe through the seemingly wasted lives of several generations of country folk. As bookish Sonya's diligence at the accounts is disturbed by her uncle Vanya's barely contained frustration at the sheer mundanity of what his life has become, things are exacerbated even more as his city slicker brother in law and Sonya's father is doted on by his glamorous new wife Yelena, who Vanya is besotted with. Only dashing doctor Astrov seems to have any kind of vision for the future, even as he's worshipped by Sonya. Up until he meets Yelena, Astrov's notions of biology are all in the abstract, as he talks at length of insects, pheromones and living wild and free in tribes. Everything else, it seems, is just the end of the line for a bunch of part-time would-be suicides. Stripped to the bones of

Handbagged

King's Theatre , Edinburgh Four stars Freedom and democracy aren't words usually associated with the late Margaret Thatcher, the former UK Prime Minister whose ideology-driven decade in office set the tone of things to come. Those are the exact words, however, which open Moira Buffini's play, which puts Thatcher on stage alongside the Queen as a cut-glass double act showing off the edited highlights of Thatcher's time in office between 1979 and 1990. This makes for quite a history lesson as Buffini imagines a series of meetings between the pair, simply known here as Q and T. As older versions of the two women watch over these formal and frosty exchanges between their younger selves, a world of IRA bombings, royal weddings and the Falklands War is laid bare as Q becomes a quietly radical conscience of the nation. All of this is delivered in Indhu Rubasingham's production, originally seen at the Tricycle Theatre in London prior to this commercial tour, in a

Dominic Hill - The Citizens Theatre's Spring 2016 Season

It's probably not every day a Glasgow cabbie starts talking to his passenger about what a great playwright Samuel Beckett is. That's exactly what happened to Dominic Hill, artistic director of the Gorbals-based Citizens Theatre, however, when he jumped a fast black one day en route to work. The theatre's forthcoming production of Beckett's 1957 play, Endgame, had just been announced in partnership with Manchester's recently opened Home venue, and the cabbie knew all about it. This had little to do with the fact that Hill's production will feature David Neilson and Chris Gascoyne, both familiar faces from iconic TV soap, Coronation Street, as the blind Hamm and his servant, Clov. Rather, the driver was a fan of the play itself, and was keen to tell the bloke on the back seat all about it lest he miss the show. Hill eventually 'fessed up who he was, but not before he and the cabbie had agreed on one thing. “It's my favourite Beckett play,” Hill s

Threads

Eastgate Theatre and Arts Centre Four stars Five women sit on chairs in a row at the start of Sylvia Dow's new meditation on the role knitting has played on Borders life, their faces lit up by the patterns formed from the projections of nineteenth century mill-workers them. When they sing of lifetimes spent in those mills, it is in a harmonious unison gloriously at odds with the disparate yarns that unravel over the next hour in word, song and image. Developed over the last three years as part of an oral history project dubbed Knit Two Together and presented by the ever fertile Stellar Quines Theatre Company as part of the Luminate festival of creative ageing, Dow's script flits from latter-day knitting circles to poverty-stricken women imprisoned for stealing thread to illustrate a hidden history excavated and presented in this most playfully inventive show and tell. Muriel Romanes' production transforms all this into a criss-crossing cut-up collage which, with its mix of

Thingummy Bob

Traverse Theatre , Edinburgh Three stars Bob has lost something. For this gentleman of a certain age, it might just be his whatsitsname, or it could well be his thingummy. Either way, and even if he can't remember his own name, he's going to make the great escape from the old peoples' home that houses him and get back to where he came from come what may. Before all that, however, Linda McLean's new play for Lung Ha's theatre company has each member of the five-strong cast introduce themselves to the audience both out of character and in. Our guide is Karen Sutherland as Bob's niece in Australia, Lesley, who gives us an insight into Bob's life in a way that he's not capable of these days. As Bob makes a break for it to a soundtrack of old Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard numbers, his topsy-turvy world also includes a surreal line-up of invisible dogs, would-be superheroes and talking CCTV cameras. With a spate of plays looking at the effects