Coffee-Table Notes

When Patrick Hamilton’s play, Gaslight, first appeared on the London stage at Richmond Theatre in 1938, the novelist and playwright had no idea that the title of his psychological thriller would slip into more common parlance as a description for a form of manipulation. This has been the case since the 1960s, but over the last few years has come to the fore once more. While this is something Kai Fischer couldn’t ignore when he began work on his new production, which opens at Perth Theatre this weekend, he wanted to focus on the play’s noirish essence as much as its wider social significance. With this in mind, Fischer is keen not to let loose any spoilers to audiences who might not be aware of the play. “I’d known the play for a while,” he says, “and there was an idea of doing it a few years ago, so when Lu (Kemp, Perth Theatre’s artistic director) approached me to do it, I already had a connection with it. When I first looked at it, to be honest, I never thought I’d push for it,

City Park, Glasgow Four stars A clinical office block housed inside an old tobacco factory is the perfect venue for this suite of three plays exploring the dehumanising effects of technology brought together by director Cora Bissett for the National Theatre of Scotland. When such worlds collide within each play - one full of life and character, the other cold and soulless - we get to the beating heart of what matters beyond Garry Boyle’s largely electronic sound design that pulses proceedings. In Darklands, Morna Pearson positions gloriously potty-mouthed Doric couple Brie and Logan inside a glass box trying for a baby under the scrutiny of a disembodied voice playing God. Metaverse finds Hannah Khalil’s mother and daughter attempting to keep their umbilical connection alive by communicating through virtual reality. Finally, Glowstick is Vlad Butucea’s tender study of a wheelchair-bound older woman called River her carer, an android called Ida, and the liberation they offer

Stef Smith has history with A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen’s nineteenth century psycho-drama about one woman’s emancipation as she stands up to the men who control her. This hasn’t stopped her reimagining the play for her new take on it that opens the Citizens Women season at the Gorbals-based theatre’s temporary home at Tramway this week. Rather than stay faithful to Ibsen’s text, like the heroine of Ibsen’s original, Smith has branched out on her own with a radical new version that breaks out of its realist constraints to liberate it from its roots. For starters, the play has been rechristened as Nora, putting its heroine at the forefront of things from the start, with the original title now playing second fiddle as a sub-title. Secondly, and in an even more radical move, Smith’s play has three Noras. These are contained in three separate time-zones, all key moments in history. The first, 1918, was the year women in the UK were given the vote. The second takes place in 1968, a