Coffee-Table Notes

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Matters of life and death are an everyday experience for Daniel Pearce, the doctor at the centre of Allan Cubitt’s little-seen 1991 play, in which the good doctor must face up to his own mortality. As all the women in his life – his lover, Jane, sister, Ruth and nurse, Kate – flock to his bedside, Pearce falls down a Hogarthian rabbit hole inspired by the painting that hangs on the stairwell of St Bart’s Hospital, and which gives the play its title. The delirium that ensues throws up a vivid scenario in which Pearce poses as Christ for Hogarth’s painting, while his real-life loved ones are reinvented as a parade of eighteenth century good-time girls and fops. It takes more earthbound associations with a bottle of Polish vodka provided by Callum Douglas’ hospital porter Simon and a meeting with a former patient, however, to put Pearce’s priorities into harsh perspective. The play marked the first sighting of Cubitt, who rapidly moved into

T om Murphy, playwright Born February 23 1935; died May 15 2018 Tom Murphy, who has died aged 83, was a towering figure in Irish theatre. His plays were fired by a rage that influenced a younger generation of writers such as Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh, who perhaps recognised a kindred spirit in a man regarded by many as Ireland’s greatest playwright on a par with Brian Friel. While Murphy didn’t attract as much attention as his near contemporary, he blazed a fiercely individual trail over more than half a century. The tone was set from the controversy caused by his second play, A Whistle in the Dark, a volatile look at an Irish family in exile. Kenneth Tynan declared the play “arguably the most uninhibited display of brutality London theatre has ever witnessed.” Over more than twenty plays and a sole novel, The Seduction of Morality, published in 1994, Murphy filled the imagined lives of his characters with compassion, even as they roared and howled at the world t

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars Imagine a country ripped in two as easily as you’d tear a piece of paper in half. Then imagine hundreds of thousands of people displaced from their homes and forced into the other half of the country. Fast forward a few years, and think about what might happen if some kind of prodigals’ return ushered in an uneasy peace of sorts. That’s only part of the complex, still unfinished history of Cyprus, the former British colony (natch) riven by divisions between Greek and Turkish Cypriots that have resulted in invasions, land grabs and a mess of collateral damage. The deeply personal consequences of all this are explored here by the Edinburgh-based Ludens Ensemble. With support by the European Capital of Culture Pafos 2017 and the Greek arts-based Syn Festival, a four-strong ensemble present a semi-verbatim collage of anecdote and experience drawn from testimonies from both sides of the divide. Accompanied by live video feed, shadowplay and

Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw were in an old army barracks in New York when they first heard the phrase that would give them the title for their new show for Split Britches, the avant-garde queer feminist theatre company the pair co-founded in 1980. “The base had been used in the Cold War, but was now mainly used as an art space,” explains Weaver, “and I went for a walk around the space, but before I went I was told to be careful where I stepped, because there were unexploded ordnances there. I’d never heard that term before and asked what it meant, and was told it was unexploded bombs. Because we’d been working with elders, and because both Peggy and I are elders, the phrase was the perfect metaphor for us. We all have our unexploded bombs and things we’ve always wanted to do but have never done.” The incident planted the seed for what would become Unexploded Ordnances (UXO), which is currently on the London leg of a British and Irish tour which stops off in Glasgow next week as