Coffee-Table Notes

Edinburgh International Festival has a long history of championing the work of persecuted and oppressed nations. Major theatre, music and dance from the former Eastern bloc, the African diaspora and the First Nations of Australia and Canada rarely seen beyond their own borders have all been given a platform in Edinburgh for all the world to see.    A sense of international inclusion has always transcended those borders for EIF, ever since the first festival in 1947 was conceived to heal the wounds of war. While this is still the case, it is telling that the focus of EIF’s 2026 programme is on America. In honour of the 250 th anniversary of American independence, what is left of the home of the brave and land of the free is represented throughout a programme even more tellingly named All Rise. This is named after the opening concert by jazz musician and composer Wynton Marsalis, who will perform it with the New York based Lincoln Center Orchestra, led by Marsalis since 1991....

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars    Edinburgh has so much to answer for in David Greig’s new stage adaptation of David Nicholls’ novel, just as it has in the book itself, as well as its film and TV adaptations. The city’s influence is there at the start as Emma and Dexter drunkenly fall together on graduation day 1988 in what on Rae Smith’s revolving set looks like a mock-up of the University of Edinburgh’s Teviot House Union long before its recent makeover. It’s there as well in the Rankeillor Street student flatshare on the city’s southside where Emma lives with what turn out to be mates for life. Finally, it’s up there on Arthur’s Seat, where everything sort of begins, and where, twenty years on, and with their lives turned upside down, it will never fully end.   As with its source, Greig’s play charts Emma and Dexter’s parallel lives every St. Swithin’s Day on which they intermittently collide. This comes first as friends, then soulmates, before fate ta...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Five stars    When worlds collide it changes everything for Susan, the woman on the verge of what used to be called a nervous breakdown in Alan Ayckbourn’s mid 1980s play. The bump on the head she wakes up from at the start of the play after she stepped on a rake in an unseen piece of comedy slapstick has clearly been an accident waiting to happen for some time.    Vicar’s wife Susan is trapped in a loveless marriage with Gerald, who is more concerned with trying to write a history of his parish than he is for his wife. Their would-be rebel son Rick has just left a sect in Hemel Hempstead for a brand new wife, and Gerald’s sister Muriel thinks her long dead husband is talking to her.    Delirium sends Susan down one of Dr. Bill’s rabbit holes, where a parallel universe steps out of the bushes in the shape of a fantasy family. All drop dead gorgeous, they idolise Susan, who has reimagined herself as a best selling historical novelist....

Òran Mór , Glasgow Four stars Lydia gets more than she bargained for when she visits the local duck pond. Armed with a bottle of gin, a broken heart and a deep-set death wish, she intends chucking herself in the water and ending it all. A resident Swan has other ideas, however, and determines to show her a good time. Before long this oddest of couples are flying high on a bender in dodgy nightclubs and taking last trains to London, where Lydia wakes at dawn.    Or at least this is the story Lydia tells at closing time in this lounge bar musical fantasia by writer/director Eve Nicol and composer/lyricist Finn Anderson.  Based on a radio play by David Greig,  this latest edition of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s lunchtime theatre initiative is a bittersweet tale of everyday emotional survival.    Julia Murray is in fine voice as broken diva Lydia, with Paul McArthur somehow transforming himself from barfly to Swan with just a change of shirt. This ushers in ...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars   How might a generation of young people judge the failures of their parents to protect the environment? This is the starting point for Dawn King’s play, receiving its Scottish premiere in Joanna Bowman’s production for the Tron. King’s line of inquiry takes us into some dystopian near future, where three adults all deemed culpable in the damage done are judged by a jury of teenagers, with euthanisation the potential end result.   The trio are first world cannon fodder, whose speeches of liberal atonement for taking too many flights, working for dodgy oil companies and probably not putting the right rubbish in the recycling bin probably aren’t going to save them. Certainly not from the twelve angry adolescents tasked here to decide their fate with a mere fifteen minutes to make their mind up.    As the unnamed Defendants, Brian Ferguson, Maryam Hamidi and Pauline Goldsmith speak their monologues from designer Jessica Worrall’s state ...

The Studio, Edinburgh Three stars    What do you do when you’re told you’re not the God you say you are? In Dionysus’ case after being barred from Thebes by king Pentheus and his mother Agave in one of Euripides’ defining works, you take revenge on those that disrespected with your own gang, and hell mewnd the lot ofd them.    This is more or less the driving force for Dionysus in Euripides’ much-reimagined  piece of myth-making involving a cast of, if not thousands, then certainly a few. The last time a new version of the play graced Scottish stages was by way of David Greig’s version in 2007, when Dionysus turned up mob handed in the form of Alan Cumming and a gospel choir in tow.    Arriving in Edinburgh hot on the heels of Bard in the Botanics' production of Euripides' other greatest hit, Medea, Ewan Downie’s new take on The Bacchae for the Company of Wolves company couldn’t be more different. Written by Downie, and performed solo by him over ...