Coffee-Table Notes

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   The world doesn’t end in Oliver Emanuel’s play, but sometimes that’s how it feels. Over its bite-size 70-minute duration, Emanuel’s play is a living monument that preserves the emotional paper trails that chart the magic moments of people’s lives. Originally seen in a studio based version in 2024, the play charts the love affair of two people, played here by Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson, who become arbiters of something eternal that came in the shape of this play.    He is a terminal adolescent who’s just been chucked hard enough to provoke him to spend his nights playing Radiohead at full blast. She is living next door, and puts a postcard through his letterbox to ask him to turn that racket down. When they meet, the rest is history. As we watch them relive their life together, that history is barely contained in a box of old tickets, receipts, a jar of confetti and magical origami creations.    The play was wr...

King’s Theatre, Five stars   America is sick in Tony Kushner’s epic evocation of the rise of AIDS and its political fallout in what eventually becomes a visionary hymn of hope. Thirty-four years since Kushner’s two-part magical realist fantasia first appeared, the world has changed and changed again in radical fashion, with sex in the city a very different proposition these days and big pharma ramping up the prices of life saving medication.    Despite the play’s 1980s setting, Ivo van Hove’s International Theater Amsterdam revival of a production first seen in 2008 nevertheless reads like a tragicomic state of the nation prophecy of today’s increasingly dark times and how we got here. An early riff between one of the play’s key couples lays out the 57 varieties of migrant that make up the American diaspora, with the near five hour performance being played in Dutch adding to the international melting pot.    Shortened from the play’s original seve...

Dovecot Four stars    Jack Ellis was a teenage schoolboy when he first stumbled on the masterpieces of Vincent Van Gogh. This came after he was banished to the library by his art teacher after talking too much in class. This happy accident has stayed with Ellis for life, to the extent that he now lives in Arles, the South of France haven where in 1888 the Dutch master attempted to gather together like minds to form a brotherhood of artists. Only Paul Gauguin, alas, turned up to the party. As these two very different but equally driven artistic personalities spent the next nine weeks making work, this was where the fun began.    Ellis relates his very personal history of Van Gogh and Gauguin’s time in Arles in a script and production concocted with Edinburgh Fringe veteran John Retallack. As the audience lend their ears, Ellis relates the story in a conversational style that sees him slip in and out of character as both artists.    Crucial to the production ...

Assembly Roxy Three stars    Paradise, as is the case in Jack McGregor’s new play, isn’t half as nice as advertised. This is something scientist Kerris discovers first hand while on a research trip to a forgotten British outpost somewhere in the South Pacific. Arriving on the island of Saint John - population 48 - Kerris is taken under the wing of local man Joe, with the only fun in town seeming to be singing at the nightly religious service.    As the audaciously redrafted bible Kerris finds in her room indicates, there’s a lot more going on here than the apparent idyll indicates. With talk of a mysterious prophet laying down the law, Kerris’ private investigations reveal her own vague connection to the history of Saint John. When she comes face to face with this would-be new messiah, anyone who’s ever watched any of the multitude of documentaries on religious cults can guess how things pan out.    Jumping between Kerris’ time on the island and her at...

Scottish Storytelling Centre Four stars    Meet Bonnie. Bonnie’s the Scottish lassie in the tracky top who’s just slunk on stage to say hi - well, awright, actually - and looks like she’s got something else to say besides. Over the next 75 minutes of Fraser Scott’s solo play, Bonnie tells all  about who she is and where she comes from. More importantly, she says it in her own accent. It’s the one she learnt growing up with her Papa, and it’s the one the posh kids laugh at and the Americans treat as a novelty. As she learns along the way, however, it is the only voice she’s got, and  if you’ve got it, flaunt it.   As brought to life by a magnificent Olivia Caw, Bonnie is a whirlwind of working class Scottish self-determination. In-between learning about what words are worth on bookshelves in other places at university, Bonnie gives the audience a few lessons in the power of saying some of the choicest words with a Scots accent, and how their meanings can change a...

Summerhall Four stars    In a world full of heroes, sometimes it is the forgotten ones who are worth unearthing most of all. So it goes with Matthew Webb, the Shropshire born Victorian seaman who became the first man to swim the English Channel. Adam Riches here takes a deep dive into Webb’s life as seen through the eyes of Webb’s trainer and swimming champion, Fred Beckwith.    With the shrouded body of Webb sitting centre stage, Beckwith gives what is effectively an extended eulogy to his former charge, with the audience mourners at his wake. In Riches' rendition, this becomes a legendary yarn of such largesse as to elevate him to the sort of grand old man of the sea who might occupy a story by Herman Melville.    Riches has channeled a tale of rivalry and failure, and of one man’s sheer determination in the face of public ridicule to achieve what was once thought impossible, or else die trying. This is offset by a comic swagger from Riches, who gets...