Coffee-Table Notes

Dundee Rep Five stars   Like a Busby Berkeley of the Barras, Tony Roper knows how to make a memorable routine. This is why his comic masterpiece set in a 1950s Glasgow washhouse on Hogmanay where four working class women banter the night away has survived almost forty years and umpteen productions since it first appeared in 1987. Since then, it has become a bona fide contemporary classic, with bums on seats guaranteed wherever it plays.    So it goes in this big new touring production led by cast member Louise McCarthy and Ryan Alexander Dewar’s Rerr Terr company in association with Neil Laidlaw Productions, Selladoor and Dundee Rep. With Roper back in the director’s chair, it isn’t hard to see why his celebration of women, community and the collective power of both retains its rapport with audiences, many of whom are likely to be as familiar with the play as the brilliant cast are here.    One mention of Galloway’s mince by old Mrs Culfeathers is enough to sign...

By the time Elizabeth Blackadder (1931-2021) became the first woman to be elected to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1972, the Falkirk born painter and printmaker had already carved out a unique oeuvre of vibrant landscapes and still lives focused on flowers and  objects. Some of this was channelled into the tapestries and rugs contained in Elizabeth Blackadder: A Life in Colour, a new exhibition of Blackadder works that puts the textiles in dialogue with paintings and drawings drawn from the RSA collection. Marking five years since Blackadder’s death, the exhibition at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh, where the textile works were made, aims to show off Blackadder’s vivid use of colour in her visual language. Blackadder’s relationship with Dovecot dates back to 1966, when Still Life, Tulips (1966) was her first tapestry work. Since then, Dovecot has collaborated with Blackadder on a total of thirty-one tapestries and five rugs. These include Eastern Still Life (1980)...

Royal Lyceum Theatre Four stars    The drums beat loud in this mighty rendering of a 14th century epic Middle Eastern narrative poem. Passed down the centuries in various guises, it is reimagined here from a Syrian version by Palestinian writer/director Bashar Murkus and dramaturg Khulood Basel of their Haifa based Khashabi Theatre. With the seven performers already on stage and welcoming audiences as they arrive, the result over the next life affirming three hours is a gorgeous mash-up of storytelling, dance and a wonderful live score led by drummer Rami Nakhleh and singers Rana Baransi and Abed Zoabi.    The story they tell in Arabic with English surtitles - The Epic of Bani Hilal  or السّيرة الهلاليّ - is an awfully big adventure that takes in battles of love, war and an eternal quest for new lands to call home. Out of this comes a contrary beauty that comes from a joyful and playful delivery by the cast as they act out each chapter o...

King’s Theatre Four stars    Roll up! Roll up! America may not be the greatest show on earth in Geoff Sobelle’s tragicomic depiction of a big top in free fall, but oh, what a night. The acrobats have somersaulted off into the distance, the ringmaster has gone west, and with only the clowns left behind and left to their own devices, the lunatics appear to have take over the asylum, But at least they have an audience, so of course they’ll provide the entertainment, albeit in all its shambolic, falling apart glory.    There’s nothing subtle in Sobelle’s latest work, an Edinburgh International Festival commission following the American physical auteur’s previous visits in 2018 with HOME and 2023 with FOOD. What there is in Clown Show’s 100-minute construction is a meticulously madcap series of ensemble routines that take familiar gags only to upend them beyond the regular pratfalls to self destruct on a grand scale.  Lined up in search of approval from the lifesize ...

Church Hill Theatre Four stars    The title of Greek auteur Mario Banushi’s devastating meditation on death, family and the baggage left behind comes from the Albanian restaurant his father ran, and which translates as Restaurant of Kindness. Kindness isn’t the first thing that comes to mind in the 70 minutes that follow, as Banushi lays bare the agony of a family’s grief in a series of set-pieces that become increasingly ritualistic.   On designer Sotiris Melan os’ tiled wall set, Banushi steps out of the shower having cleansed his sins for a funeral. Once suited and booted, he sits beside a row of grieving women. This is heightened by the remarkable singing voice of Savina Yannatou, whose improvised lament is a wracked howl that at points sounds drawn from the same guttural well as Greek/American virtuoso, Diamanda Galas.   A jacket torn from the earth where the body is buried hangs on the back of a chair. One of the women who has just attempted to f...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow  Four stars    Darkness becomes Gina Gionfriddo’s new stage version of Thomas’ Harris’ 1988 novel. The second in the author’s Hannibal Lecter quartet saw the most erudite of incarcerated cannibals gnaw his way into mass consciousness by way of Jonathan Demme’s 1991 film version. More than three decades on, Gionfriddo returns to the book to pick over the horrors anew. The fact that Lecter isn’t the villain of the piece but its conscience speaks volumes about the age in which he was sired.    In Harris’ tale of rookie FBI agent Clarice Starling’s search for a serial killer nicknamed Buffalo Bill who skins his victims, we enter a 1980s where the fallout of therapy culture has left a lot of psychological damage in its wake.    In Nikolai Foster’s touring production that began life at the Curve Theatre Leicester, John Partridge’s Lecter may initially lack charm as he is wheeled on like some caged exhibit, but his dangerous presen...