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Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars Whether it's politics or theatre, everybody knows it's behind the scenes where the real work gets done. This is something Lynne Parker's production of the late Stewart Parker's 1984 play, revived by Rough Magic for the Tron's Mayfesto season, recognises in abundance. Parker opens her uncle's study of Henry Joy McCracken, the lost hero of the 1798 Irish rebellion, by having her troupe of actors wander onto a stage which has been turned around to reveal a rare glimpse of its wings. In what begins in a safe-house where McCracken and his lover Mary Bodle are holed up after the rebellion, this framing device heightens Stewart Parker's dramatic fantasia, so history is mythologised even as it is being made. Stewart Parker does this by interspersing McCracken and Mary's last night together with delirious reflections presented in the manner of the greats of Irish literature. Key moments are delivered as part pastiche and p

Lewis Baltz with works by Carl Andre and Charlotte Posenenske

Stills, Edinburgh until July 9 th Four stars The word 'Ideal' (1970) forms the title of a key image by the late American photographer Lewis Baltz in The Prototype Works (1967-76), one of three series of images seen in parallel with two text-based pieces by Carl Andre and a sculptural construction by Charlotte Poseneske. Framed in close-up monochrome as one of ten prints taken from this early selection, the elaborate music-hall turn of a font that beams out from 'Ideal' also points to the false optimism of post World War Two suburbia that never quite delivered. As a prime mover in the New Topographics wave of 1970s landscape photography, Baltz captured the built-in obsolescence of the Californian desert once its untamed public space was co-opted and domesticated by developers across the decades. If The Prototype Works show off worlds already inhabited but destined to be gentrified, fetishised and restyled as 'vintage', the thirty-three images of Park C

Liz Lochhead and Siobhan Redmond - Thon Man Moliere

When Liz Lochhead and Siobhan Redmond talk about being part of a theatrical family, it doesn't just relate to Thon Man Moliere, Lochhead's new play which Redmond appears in at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh when it opens next week. The theatre family that Scotland's former Makar and one of the country's foremost and most fiercely intelligent of acting talents are talking about is something more personal. Ostensibly a comic study of the seventeenth century French playwright formerly known as Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, Thon Man Moliere finds Lochhead returning to the writer who has arguably been her greatest dramatic influence over the last thirty years. The relationship began when she adapted Moliere's most scathing of satires, Tartuffe, into a ribald rhyming Scots that caused a sensation in 1986 when it first opened on the same stage that Thon Man Moliere will. Since then, two more adaptations have followed. Miseryguts, taken from The Misanthrope, appeared in 20

Connolly

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars Audiences could be forgiven on Friday night for thinking they'd stumbled into Liberty Hall for real at the opening main stage production of this year's Mayfesto mini-season of politically driven theatre. The speak-easy vibe that punctuates Brian McCardie's searingly intense solo turn as James Connolly, the Edinburgh-born icon of the Easter Rising, when Ireland's free-thinking would-be liberators rose up against English rule a hundred years ago, may have been distracting, but it couldn't take away from the slow-burning power behind McCardie's performance in this self-penned piece. The evening opened with three songs by singer Maeve Mackinnon accompanied by guitarists Fraser Spiers and the show's co-producer for the Fair Pley company in association with trade union Unite, Stephen Wright. After this, McCardie addressed the audience as if they were volunteers poised for battle. Beyond the low-key but impassioned rhetoric

Three Irish Icons - Mayfesto 2016

When Andy Arnold first began Mayfesto at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, the idea behind the annual season of socially pertinent theatre was to fill a gap left behind by the long defunct trade union backed arts festival, Mayfest. While this chimed with a wider interest in politically engaged drama, Arnold's programmes have consistently cast a net which has combined the contemporary and the historical from both Scottish artists as well as those from further afield. All this is captured in this year's Mayfesto, which focuses on the one hundredth anniversary of the Easter Rising, when Irish republicans attempted to end British rule by way of an armed insurrection that left its mark on politics in both Ireland and the UK forever after. While Arnold's love of Irish drama in general pulses his programme, three works in particular focus on very different Irish icons, both of the Easter Rising itself, and of the previous Irish rebellion of 1798. The Tron's own production see

Mary Poppins

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars When Mary Poppins soars over the heads of the audience at the end of Richard Eyre and Matthew Bourne's musical staging of P.L. Travers' stories, the strings may be visible beyond the brolley, but the New Age mantra of 'Anything can happen if you want it to' uttered by this most radical of nannies makes perfect sense. As soon as Zizi Strallen's Mary beamed down into the upmarket town house where the nanny-baiting Banks children, Michael and Jane, were rebelling against the regimented routines implemented by their banker father George and ex actress mother Winifred, after all, an entire culture of hand-me-down repression was doomed. . Once Mary hooks up with chimney sweeping street artist Bert, by way of a series of wonderful set-pieces led by Bourne's choreography, the park becomes a psychedelic wonderland where statues come to life and a sweetshop more resembles an underground shebeen. This exposes Michae

This Restless House

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Ghosts are everywhere in Zinnie Harris' reimagining of the Oresteia, Aeschylus' ancient Greek soap opera trilogy. They are present in the first play, Agamemnon's Return, in the little girl lost that is Iphigenia, through Electra's daddy's girl in the second, The Bough Breaks, to the Singing Detective style raising of the dead in the final piece, Electra and Her Shadow. Dominic Hill's co-production between the Citizens Theatre and the National Theatre of Scotland is possessed with an expansive wildness that matches the dark flights of fancy that drives Harris' writing. Seen in one marathon sitting, the trilogy evokes an internal fury prompted by domestic unrest in extremis, before demons are eventually purged. Things open in a palace that resembles a community hall or a 1970s social club, where a comic trio who seem to have stepped out of Last of the Summer Wine hold court. Here, Pauline Knowles' Clytemnestra