Coffee-Table Notes

Perth Theatre Five stars Ancient voices seem to rumble through the fields at the opening of Perth Theatre’s revival of David Harrower’s astonishing play. First seen in 1995, on the face of it, it is a dark tale of a peasant woman’s awakening – to language, to her own sexuality and to the fire of life she slowly learns to articulate. While almost taking a leap into gothic thriller territory, in Lu Kemp’s starkly brooding and quasi ritualistic looking production, the play becomes a thing of transcendent beauty. Set in an un-named ancient landscape among the monumental greyness of much reviled miller Gilbert Horn’s work-place, into this world steps Jessica Hardwick’s Young Woman. Wide-eyed and still barely literate on the back of her marriage to ploughman Pony William, she is possessed with a ferocious but still untapped intelligence and a primal hunger for knowledge. Out of this pours a raw mix of brutal sensuality that reeks of the animalistic harshness of a daily grind b

Aberdeen Arts Centre Four stars Birthdays couldn’t come more bittersweet for Robert, the swinging bachelor at the centre of Stephen Sondheim and lyricist George Furth’s Me-Generation dissection of the life and loves of the terminally single male. At the grand old age of 35, Robert is the last man standing among a set of couples, managing to court three different women in-between playing gooseberry at a string of dinner dates where the artifice of domestic bliss is exposed in various ways. Mid-life crisis gives way to peppy epiphany, as Robert realises that just because he got hurt doesn’t mean he can’t still have a ball. Revived here in appealingly boutique fashion by Aberdeen’s s Castlegate Arts in association with David Adkins, and born of the new freedoms afforded by the 1960s collective loosening of belts, Sondheim and Furth’s series of navel-gazing vignettes more resembles a Neil LaBute compendium than standard Broadway fare. As the couples orbit around Oliver Savile’s

Byre Theatre, St Andrew’s Four stars For a troubling second, the sound of cameras ricocheting shut midway through Firebrand Theatre’s revival of Frank McGuinness’ searing monologue about one woman’s response to losing her daughter sound like applause. With twelve-year-old Mary caught in the crossfire of inner-city gang warfare, Sal is making a public plea for her killers to own up, blessing them as she does. She’s speaking into a microphone, as actress Janet Coulson does for much of Richard Baron’s production, talking with rapid-fire nervous energy as if doing some kind of stand-up confessional. As Sal tells it in McGuinness’s painfully of the moment reworking of Greek tragedy, she has fled to a remote Irish island, squaring up to her own pain even as she exiles herself in the sort of safe-house all too familiar in that part of the world. What follows in a performance that flits between light and shade is a meditation on loss, grieving and revenge that’s made all the more sh

The well paid bureaucrats currently in charge of Creative Scotland should be worried. Having made yet another pig’s ear of the latest round of Regularly Funded Organisations (RFOs) by inexplicably cutting valuable resources for some of Scotland’s world renowned artists, theatre-makers and musicians, they have put themselves in the firing line of a justifiable barrage of anger and frustration. Cutting two major children’s theatre companies – Catherine Wheels and Visible Fictions – in the first month of Scotland’s dedicated Year of Young People – was at best insensitive, at worst gross stupidity. Slashing regular funding for disabled theatre companies Birds of Paradise, who are about to celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary, and learning disabled pioneers Lung Ha’s was just as baffling. It was odd too to see a cut too for Transmission, the artist-led committee-run Glasgow art-space which since the 1980s has pioneered a wave of grassroots visual arts activity. This helped foster

‘ The Fall make you think. The consistent unconformity of their barrage of controlled anarchy coupled with Mark Smith’s words, attitudes and expressions make the perfect recipe for a deep-rooted paranoia and feelings of inadequacy, which is how music, any music, should be. The Fall’s music disturbs me, it’s not easy and it nags uncomfortably with a harsh insistence that no other band I know can do, which is why I love their music so much’. Those recently rediscovered words were written in scrawly schoolboy hand-writing in blue biro sometime during the early hours of Wednesday November 4th 1981. This was shortly after I arrived home from seeing The Fall play at The Warehouse, a black-painted club in Liverpool that was later destroyed by fire. It was my third time of seeing The Fall over the previous eighteen months. I’d recently got into the habit of sloping home and penning screeds of earnest reviews of them, with neither hope or clue of how they might be published. Despite the mis

The ancient gods were on Frank McGuiness’ side when he wrote The Match Box, his classically inspired but devastatingly contemporary one-woman play revived this week for a short Scottish tour by the Borders-based Firebrand Theatre Company. Charting the slow-burning aftermath of a 12-year-old girl’s killing, the audience sees this through the mind of her mother, Sal, who has fled the city for a cottage in an isolated rural wilderness. During the revelations that emerge, McGuinness’ play evolves into something as darkly poetic as his work for larger casts such as Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme and Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me. The simmering fury of bereaved mother Sal, however, seems to tap into a more recognisably current malaise. “It started in the rehearsal room of the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool,” says McGuinness, telling the story behind the story with a suitably epic sweep. “I was busy working on a musical, and the Everyman and Playhouse were looking fo