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This Happy Breed

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Three stars If ever there was a play where the phrase Keep Calm and Carry On would make the perfect publicity tag-line, Noel Coward's between the wars soap opera is it. Just as the phrase and its assorted derivatives have tapped into a kitsch form of post-austerity nostalgia for empire, Coward's play is an equally propagandist fanfare for the common man and woman designed to rally the troops. Set in the crucial twenty years either side of the end of World War One and the dawn of World War Two, Coward's play charts the fortunes of the Gibbons family, who breathe bustling life into Ethel and her demobbed hubby Frank's newly acquired Clapham dining room. As period newsreels soundtracked by cheap songs usher in each scene, it is here the play resolutely remains throughout its everyday tapestry of births, deaths, family schisms, tragedy and joy. As voguish whiffs of progressive thought briefly subvert old certainties if not old prejudices

Joe Penhall - Sunny Afternoon

It was back in 1996 when playwright Joe Penhall went to see Ray Davies. After more than thirty fractious years as singer and chief songwriter with The Kinks, Davies had finally broken up the band he'd founded with his brother, lead guitarist Dave Davies, and was embarking on his first solo tour. Somehow, Penhall, who was riding high on the back of the Royal Court Theatre's productions of his first two plays, Some Voices and Pale Horse, managed to squirrel a script backstage. The gift was accompanied by a note to the effect that if Davies ever fancied doing anything drama-wise, Penhall was his man. Eighteen years later, the result of Penhall's fanboy gesture was Sunny Afternoon, a warts and all musical biography of Davies' early days, from growing up as the sixth of seven kids in Muswell Hill, to the first five years with The Kinks. First staged at Hampstead Theatre in 2014, Sunny Afternoon follows its award-winning West End run with an extensive UK tour which arrives

Summer Heart

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars A young woman enters wearing a raincoat, like she's going on a journey. There's a grand piano behind her, and a comfy chair and a coffee table on the other side of the stage. Over the next hour, Maraike Bruening recounts a remarkable visitation that ushers the audience into the life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the Czech-born pianist who survived the Holocaust, and whose surname translates as Summer Heart. As Bruening observes, this is an all too fitting name for the old lady whose smiling face beams from the image of her projected onto the back of the stage, especially given everything she's been through. As Bruening recounts in her understated form of journalistic storytelling in what she styles as a 'piano play', Herz-Sommer's life may have been turned upside down by the Nazi occupation of her homeland, but her hope remained undimmed. In what is as much concert as drama, Bruening punctuates each section of her story with her

Gillian Lynne - Choreographing Cats

Gillian Lynne never wanted to choreograph Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber's now thirty-five year old musical adaptation of T.S. Eliot's poetic suite, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. As an internationally renowned choreographer who worked regularly with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and whose career as a dancer had seen her playing Sleeping Beauty at Sadler's Wells thirty years earlier, she was hardly struggling for work. Besides which, she'd just got married to actor Peter Land, a man twenty-seven years her junior, and had other things on her mind. As a revamped Cats arrives into Glasgow next week for its latest tour following a West End revival, Lynne is glad she said yes to Lloyd Webber, and has remained involved with the show to this day. “It's like my child,” says Lynne, who is now a somewhat hard-to-credit ninety years old. “It's wonderful. The kids get better every time. They sing better. They dance better, and the show still has the three key e

FlatSpin

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars In real life, the perils of the out of work actress rarely stretch beyond taking a second job to make ends meet. As Alan Ayckbourn proves in the second of his Damsels in Distress trilogy of plays, take play-acting to its logical limit and you'll end up making a real drama out of a crisis. So it goes for Rosie Seymore, who is co-opted as a stand-in janitor for the expensively bland London docklands flat where all three plays are set. For Rosie, it's a gig considerably better than wearing rabbit ears in a Transit van schools tour, but not as good as the prospect of playing Jane Eyre on prime time TV. A knock on the door from next door neighbour Sam sees Rosie adopt the mantle of absent tenant, the mysterious Joanna Rupelfeld, which is when things really get weird. Brought playfully to life for Pitlochry's summer season alongside its sister plays by director Richard Baron, FlatSpin is on the face of it a straight ahead comedy yar

The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil

Dundee Rep Four stars If Dundee Rep's speedy revival of their 2015 production of John McGrath's seminal ceilidh play makes one thing clear, it is how, forty-three years on from McGrath's own 7:84 production, nothing has changed in terms of how Scotland continues to be colonised by big business at home and abroad. Nowhere is this more evident than a stone's throw from the theatre, where the city centre's numerous building sites suggest a progressive form of regeneration is ongoing. Given that the millionaire-owned construction company headlined on the billboards was recently exposed as being part of a cartel that blacklisted building site workers for years, Joe Douglas' production seems even more timely. The ten-strong cast are already playing ceilidh numbers in front of a backdrop of a stag's head as the audience enter to a bare floorboards mock up of the sort of village hall 7:84 made their own. As a history of social cleansing and political rackete

Yohann Lamoulere & Franck Pourcel - Glasgow Meets Marseille Downtown

When Street Level director Malcolm Dickson realised that Marseille and Glasgow had been twin cities for a decade, he decreed to do something to commemorate the relationship between these two urban landscapes which have changed dramatically, but which have left areas untouched and largely out of view. The result of this is two off-site shows by Yohanne Lamoulere and Franck Pourcel, two photographers who look at the underbelly of Marseilles in very different ways. In False Towns, Lamoulere looks at reshaping the northern-most area of Marseille, while Roma: Marseille ajar city focuses on a make-shift Roma community built in the area. Twinned with False Towns, Pourcel’s At Twilight captures a city caught between demolition and renewal, while Noailles at the time of rehabilitation, which is paired with Roma: Marseille ajar city, looks at an area in the throes of redevelopment even as it houses migrants and temporary workers. “Both Lamoulere and Pourcel really stood out in terms