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Beyond the Fringe - 11 Theatre Shows to See on Scotland's Stages in August Elsewhere From Edinburgh

The world may be about to descend on Edinburgh for its assorted festivals, but there is plenty happening elsewhere in the country in August, as a small army of powerful women on stage appear to be taking the lead. The first four shows have their final dates this weekend, so grab a ticket while you can.   Lear Pitlochry Festival Theatre, until 1 August Maureen Beattie takes the title role in Finn den Hertog’s new adaptation of Shakespeare’s saga of sanity, madness and the family in a very personal take on the play that nevertheless remains faithful to the original. As an ageing matriarch only wanting to be told by her daughters how special she is, while Goneril and Regan tell her what she wants to hear, Ailsa Davidson’s Cordelia is having none of it. The result sees Lear lose the plot and do a runner, tended to by Cordelia’s clown doctor Fool, while her big sisters embark on a war that looks like something Quentin Tarantino might have dreamt up if he’d gone cyberpunk. This is Beatti...
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Sandra George, Lee McCormack and Common Threads

The day Edinburgh photographer Sandra George’s vast archive landed on the doorstep of the then recently set up Craigmillar Now organisation changed things for everyone who was there. With one eye on the neighbourhood’s past in the form of Craigmillar Festival Society, the globally recognised community arts organisation that paved the way for everything that followed, Craigmillar Now opened in 2020, and had just established a weekly archiving initiative.   A chance encounter with George’s former partner Jimmy Hewitt saw her archive rescued from a garden shed where it had sat since her death in 2013 and put into Craigmillar Now’s care. As  thousands of negatives were digitised, a vital portrait of Edinburgh life in the 1980s and 1990s seen from the frontline of George’s lens was revealed.   Also there that day was Lee McCormack, another photographer tending to her own neglected archive after working as a photographer around the same time as George. Where George worked ...
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The Duchess of Malfi

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow Four stars     Blood is very much thicker than water in John Webster’s 17th century Jacobean revenge tragedy, in which a merry widow Duchess marries beneath her station in the form of her steward, Antonio. This is much to the chagrin of her brothers, with her twin Ferdinand and their Cardinal elder using their respective power bases to keep an eye on their sister’s most intimate exchanges through the eyes of their spy, Bosola. As the Duchess and Antonio’s cross class love story evolves into a domestic bliss that should be for life, Webster dismisses any prospect of a happy ending by killing off pretty much everyone in sight.    This is brought home in scintillating close up in Jennifer Dick’s five-actor version for Bard in the Botanics’ silver jubilee season. With assorted pairs of boots laid out at the altars that mark out the space in the Kibble Palace Glasshouse, Dick’s own production sees the Duchess’ passion for Manasa Tagica’s Antonio b...
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Emma

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow Three stars   When Jane Austen wrote in 1815 of how the heroine of the novel she was about to begin was a woman ‘whom no one but myself will much like’, one might presume she was about to create a monster. As it turned out, and as was established in the book’s first line, Emma Woodhouse turned out to be ‘handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition’. She may have been the sort of beauteous untouchable who breezed through life in a way that leaves the rest of us swooning, but she’s a nice girl, really, even if she is the sort of person for whom the phrase ‘check your privilege’ was invented.   So it goes with Jennifer Dick’s new stage adaptation of Austen’s yarn, which in Gordon Barr’s open air production for this year’s Bard in the Botanics season stays true to its posh frock roots to make for a delightful summer confection.    Esme Bayley’s Emma is a thoroughly modern young woman who burls through the nineteent...
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I Can Die Too

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Three stars    When French poet Jean Cocteau was told of singer Edith Piaf’s death in 1963, he is said to have declared the words ‘I can die too’, and duly had a heart attack in solidarity. This possibly apocryphal yarn concerning such a grand gesture says much about offstage drama, making it an ideal title for this new chamber musical presented by an amalgam of international producers with Pitlochry Festival Theatre.   A vehicle for West End and Broadway star Frances Ruffelle, who wrote it with Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s artistic director Alan Cumming along with Sally George, Ruffelle is Lily, the leading lady of a production of Cocteau’s 1930 play, La voix humaine (The Human Voice). One of the great monologues for women, Cocteau’s solo piece puts its star on the telephone throughout, as her long-term lover prepares to marry a younger model.   As she emerges from a cage-like construction made out of walls of hanging down phones, Lil...
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Lear

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   The dustsheets are covering the furniture and the paintings have been taken down in the family home where Lear holds court in Finn Den Hertog’s brutal and bloody version of Shakespeare’s all too human tragedy of power and loss. The chandelier too that will later resemble something between a wrecking ball and a guillotine is all wrapped up as the ageing matriarch indulges a last gasp chance to lord it over her three daughters. As the sisters gather, it looks for all the world like their mother is about to be carted off to what these days might be euphemistically be called a retirement home.    As Lear’s cry for attention seeks only flattery from her offspring, her oldest and middle daughters Goneril and Regan tell her what she wants to hear, and are duly awarded a slice of the queendom as their inheritance. Her youngest, Cordelia, alas, is having none of it. This not only drives Lear mad, but kicks off a full on war, while Cordelia p...
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Twelfth Night

Botanic Garden, Glasgow Four stars   The seven seas are rocking at the start of Bard in the Botanics’ main stage flagship production to mark the stalwarts of outdoor Shakespeare’s silver jubilee year. Once the storm subsides, twins Viola and Sebastian are all washed up on a strange island, with Viola landing in what by way of Heather Grace Currie’s design appears to be the beer garden of the sort of docklands boozer where men are very much men. In the whirligig of dressing up box cosplay that follows, for a while at least, so are some of the women.    While her new pal Feste mainlines feelgood karaoke hits, Viola dons cap and trews like a sailor ashore, attracting the unwarranted attention of all comers. This includes handsome himbo Orsino, who treats his new sidekick like one of the boys, despite the pretty obvious truth staring him in the face.    The boozer’s regulars led by Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, meanwhile, belie their aristocratic origins ...
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