Coffee-Table Notes

Summerhall Four stars   Any relationship that exists between Scotland and South Korea has lain largely undocumented until now. Cue this hugely ambitious collaboration between Glasgow’s Wonder Fools company and South Korea based Theatre SAN. After two years of sharing stories, the result is this epic family saga that crosses continents and generations to tell a tale of love and war.   It begins in 1918, with a ceilidh in full swing as the audience enter, before idealistic young missionary Dae Han arrives in a Glasgow still scarred from the effects of World War One. Here Dae Han meets Jane, who lives in the pub he is decamped to. Fast-forward half a century to 1970, and the older Jane is being interviewed by a young Korean woman about the connections between Scottish and Korean folk music. In-between, in 1951, Jane’s daughter Nancy embarks on a mission of her own in the thick of the conflict between North and South Korea. A reunion between Dae Han and Jane will take another twen...

Church Hill Theatre Four stars   So you think you’re a cowboy? Well, if you come along to the Church Hill Theatre over the next few days, you’ll find yourself in good company, pardner. The lone gunslinger at the heart of this fifty-minute solo family friendly show sure does. Without a word spoken, this strong but silent outlaw type on stage stakes his claim from the desert where he’s dying of thirst to a possible mirage of a one-horse town. The latter begins to look increasingly like a film set that can be knocked down and built into another world any second.    The loner manipulating all this is no man with no name, mind you, but is a French clowning auteur who goes by the handle of Olivier Rannou. Working with the Rennes based Bakélite company, Rannou takes the gritty swagger of spaghetti westerns and transforms it into an intricate and ingenious bite size display of object theatre.   In terms of comic demeanour, there are shades here in Rannou’s...

Traverse Theatre Four stars   It begins, as most true crime podcasts do, with a mystery in Malaika Kegode’s new play. That mystery is about a young musician called Ben, who disappears while staying in a converted shed in a rural outback where he is recording  an album for the girlfriend who dumped him. The eccentric old lady called Bridget Brock who runs the AirBnB the shed has become has songs and stories of her own. When Ben vanishes, however, the songs stop.   A decade on, and wannabe documentary maker Meles is looking for an outlet to call her own. With her ailing mother Dora to tend to, Meles’ private investigations lead her down the garden path where little creatures come out to play after dark.    The key here in Jenny Davies’ elegiac production is in the telling. With Kegode herself at the helm as the Storyteller, she leads us through assorted lost recordings and voices from the past by way of a laptop and some vocal manipulations worthy of Lau...

Royal Lyceum Theatre Five stars   The truth hurts in Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy’s remarkable treatise on justice, power and how dissenting voices can be demonised by corrupt systems. The story of this all too current state of affairs may have been set down by Norwegian naturalist Henrik Ibsen back in 1882 in his play An Enemy of the People, but his tale of Thomas Stockmann’s discovery of a contaminated water system in his town only for him to be dismissed as that enemy is all too pertinent.   Jatahy, alongside writer Lucas Paraizo and actor/writer Wagner Moura, have brought this home to Brazil and back out into the world with a contemporary sequel of sorts that puts both Stockmann and the system he stands up against on trial. Moura introduces this idea to the audience in an exchange that sets out its inclusive dramatic store from the start. With both performers and tech crew sat on stage operating live camera feeds and archive video, nothing is hidden as Moura s...

Traverse Theatre Four stars   Milly Sweeney’s exploration of twenty-something crisis by way of her debut professional play has already caused ripples since it premiered at Pitlochry Festival Theatre in 2025. This came after Sweeney won the St Andrews Playwriting Award for her efforts. As the original production receives a last minute Edinburgh Festival Fringe run, its study of two young people’s respective long dark nights of the soul following a chance meeting on a bridge overlooking the River Clyde is well worth another look.    Esme is an all at sea art student, a small town girl in the big city with no friends, no motivation and what looks like no future. Harris is a cheeky young lad on the up, who has scored a job in the kitchen of a fancy restaurant and an inexplicably cheap riverside apartment with his best pal. When Harris saves Esme from throwing herself off the bridge, the duo’s parallel lives go in different ways before the tide turns, and Esme is helping preve...

Traverse Theatre Four stars    Mo and Réaltín have a story to tell in Eva O’Connor’s new play, which arrives in Edinburgh after a run at Galway International Arts Festival. Given that this odd couple - one a radical Glasgow girl, the other a Cranberries loving Irish émigré - bonded over a bottle of Buckfast in a broken lift during freshers week at Edinburgh University, the transfer of O’Connor’s increasingly wild affair is all too appropriate.    Somehow Mo and Réaltín have landed in couples therapy, which forms the setting for the entire play, with the duo talking out front on Alyson Cummins’ office bound set, as if the audience are the therapist, listening in as they confess all. The room  can’t contain them for long, mind,  as they rewind on the events that brought them here. These begin with Réaltín’s whirlwind romance with a muscle-bound Finn who only wears each pair of his underpants once before throwing them away, to a brief but crucial dal...