Coffee-Table Notes

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   Living forever is the only way forward in John Maley’s solo drama that forms the penultimate offering for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s current season of lunchtime theatre. The Man at the centre of Maley’s story rocks up at the start of Lesley Hart’s production dressed as an old school vampire. Given that it is the blood of the young that keeps him and his once wrinkly contemporaries alive and kicking, this is an all too appropriate fancy dress for the brave new world he now bounds through with a boyish grin and a rejuvenated body to go with it. What follows, alas, in Maley’s expansive future fiction, is a world where age withers, however fresh the offerings.    Stevie Raine plays the Man with a Bela Lugosi cape and a rock and roll heart in Maley’s one-man opus, which in spirit is akin to the sort of speculative fiction that crept out of 1960s counter culture and added a dystopian satirical archness to its pulpy roots. The power of eternal yout...

This weekend is the very last chance to see a welter of major productions, so if there are any tickets left, probably best get them now. While the next couple of weeks also see the last legs of assorted tours, midway through the month we start seeing the first of the season’s festive offerings. We’ll save full on panto season until next month (oh yes we will, etc), but remember, pantomime isn't just for Christmas.   1984 Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh until 7 November. There is something unmistakably now about Chris Hannan’s new stage adaptation of George Orwell’s very British dystopian classic, brought to life in Dominic Hill’s production with a sense of theatrical largesse on Tom Piper’s set. With Jack Tarlton and Jessica Hardwick leading the cast as Winston and Julia’s pair of rebels with a cause who rise up against the groupthink of a post truth future, Hannan frames the bleak and brutal meat of the play with an appearance by Orwell himself, who finds his views challenged whil...

Perth Theatre  Four stars   Life’s a scream for the young Governess at the centre of Henry James’ much adapted 1898 gothic novella, which lives again in Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s striking new stage version for Blackeyed Theatre, touring to Perth this week. As the Governess recounts to a strange and provocatively doubtful man, things took a strange turn the moment she was hired by an even stranger man to look after his niece and nephew, Flora and Miles, who have been holed up in a big old house since their parents died.    As the influence of others casts spectral shadows, hints of dark goings on behind closed doors have left young Miles with a surprisingly grown-up attitude to all who cross his path. And what fate befell the previous governess is anybody’s guess, the current one included. But will the men involved believe her fantastical story?    Nicky Allpress’s production is a suitably dark hearted affair, which ramps up Lloyd Malcolm’s reimagining of James...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   Life got cold for the three ice skating instructors in Lex Joyce’s play in the latest edition of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s lunchtime theatre season. What did it for them was a fatal accident in the rink that left the brilliant white ice stained scarlet. The effect this has on Noa, Donal and Gus is to open old wounds that have been too close to the surface for too long. It may be easy enough to resurface the ice with the machine that gives the play its title and make like it never happened, but there are some things that just can’t be swept away so lightly.    Joyce’s play flits between workplace banter and internal monologue that tells it how it is as the trio prepare for Christmas. Initially we see them having fun putting personalities on the skaters shoes or else preparing their Secret Santas. As things take a darker turn after the accident, visits home, driving lessons or even just doing their job become loaded with everyday trauma....

King’s Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars War stories come in many guises. Telling them in the form of musical theatre is a far from unheard of proposition, and has paid serious dividends for the SplitLip company in their multi award winning show that tells the stranger than fiction tale of one of World War Two’s most complex pieces of espionage, deception and military derring-do. This involved co-opting the corpse of an unknown vagrant, planting them with false documents regarding the allies next move and dumping the body off the coast of Spain where it fell into the about to be duped hands of the Germans.  SplitLips’ ingenious confection takes a story already long immortalised in print and on screen and translates it into a jolley-hockeysticks fusion of cabaret style show tunes and slickly conceived comic routines. These combine in Robert Hastie’s production to tell a story that takes in MI5 skulduggery, a bit part for a pre James Bond Ian Fleming, and one man’s curiously expert knowl...

When Raydale Dower visited the old Bon Accord Baths in Aberdeen, the memories came flooding back. Having grown up in nearby Ferryhill, the artist and composer had visited what is now one of the last surviving Art Deco pools in the UK as a child with his mum and grandmother. When he was shown one of the cubicles where people living nearby who didn’t have baths of their own came to wash, he suddenly recalled being there when he was three years old.  “I was standing in this room with a bath and this eight foot high wall, “Dower remembers, “and the person showing me round was laughing, saying how you had to turn the hot water on from outside. I suddenly remembered this whole setup as a young person, wondering why I was having a bath in a public place. Then you've got this backdrop of the noise of a swimming pool, with this cacophony of echo and people running around. It was all really vivid, and I honestly felt like I was in the exact same cubicle.”   Dower has channelled this int...