Coffee-Table Notes

When Rep Stripped opens at Dundee Rep next week, it will look a lot different from the Tayside theatre’s usual programme. This inaugural ten-day festival of new work won’t feature full productions as the company’s in-house ensemble have done on the main stage since the company was founded. Instead, under the curatorship of producer Carla Marina Almeida and director Jordan Blackwood, Rep Stripped will see artists at different levels of experience present a series of works in progress and Scratch performances at early stages in development.  With the festival pulled together from an open call-out, the sheer level of activity on offer is an impressively mammoth operation for Almeida and Blackwood to oversee, especially given that both are themselves at the early stages of their careers. “It’s been a really long process to bring everything together,” says Almeida, who for the last year has been Dundee Rep’s Stage One Regional Producer, a UK-wide initiative for young producers. “I

Rob Drummond was at home in England when he looked at the news feed on his phone, and saw a post about the fire at Glasgow School of Art. It was June 2018, and the writer and performer behind such hits as Grain in the Blood, Bullet Catch and Our Fathers initially presumed the post was to mark the fourth anniversary of the 2014 blaze in GSA’s Mackintosh Building, which was undergoing a major restoration after much of it was destroyed. As it turned out, the news was far worse, as reports of a second fire were beamed across the world. As someone who had taken Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s iconic construction for granted while living in Glasgow, Drummond was as stunned as anyone else with even a passing relationship with the Mack. While emotions continue to run high in response to the disaster, Drummond channelled his thoughts on all this into what he does best. The result is The Mack, a new play that forms part of Oran Mor’s A Play, A Pie and a Pint lunchtime theatre season in Glas

Tramway, Glasgow Five stars When Cora Bissett’s autobiographical gig theatre epic first appeared at the Traverse Theatre last year as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, it pretty much stole the heart of everyone who saw it. Bissett’s Herald Angel winning tale of how she went from being a geeky Fife teenager to being signed to a major record label with the band she was suddenly the face of was more than a mere nostalgia trip to more innocent if more excessive times. For all her true life adventures of touring with Radiohead and Blur before everything crashed and burned, it tapped into something more personal, more profound and more moving. Eight months or so since its debut, and like any indie band paying its dues, this revival of Bissett’s show has moved up a gear into a bigger venue before preparing to take the world by storm. For a show which has already made the big time without selling out its rock and roll soul, this isn’t a problem. It starts quietly, with Biss