Coffee-Table Notes

As July sees the theatre season wind down into something of a calm before the August Edinburgh storm, there is nevertheless a fair bit of on stage action on offer. Bard in the Botanics and Pitlochry Festival Theatre lead the charge with at least one show that will feature a storm, so not that calm at all, really.   Twelfth Night  Botanic Gardens, Glasgow, Until 11 July. Lovers and Madmen is the theme for Bard in the Botanics’ silver jubilee summer season of outdoor Shakespeare. This new production of the bard’s contrarily sunny comedy probably falls very much in the former camp, as shipwrecked twins Viola and Sebastian are separated on the island of Illyria, embarking on assorted mistaken identity sired adventures until the inevitable happy ending brings them and their respective squeezes together once more. All this is likely to be upstaged, in Jennifer Dick’s production, mind you, by the figure of the yellow stocking clad Malvolio in a production featuring some Bard in the B...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Three stars   Arriving fashionably late is probably to be expected of a turn of the century clique of teen princess throwbacks. This is why  Tuesday night’s twenty minute delay to showtime for Tina Fey’s musical stage version of her 2004 film can be forgiven. Conceptually speaking, such divaish timekeeping is kind of in keeping with the classroom and cafeteria shenanigans new girl Cady lands in at the start of the show, but, y’know, whatevs.    Cady has just jetted in from Kenya, and after a girlhood in the wild, has a lot of catching up to do in terms of making friends. She soon falls in with Janis and Damian, the outsider duo who become Cady’s guide through the social minefield of high school, as well as our narrators. As for who rules the school, cue The Plastics, the drop dead gorgeous trio led by the divine Regina George, who appears to be the ultimate Queen Bee until Cady comes along.  What follows in this UK tour of Casey...

Botanic Garden, Glasgow Four stars   The Union Jack may not be everywhere in Gordon Barr’s new look at Shakespeare’s tragedy of jealousy and deceit, but it certainly makes its presence felt. This is the case whether on the camouflaged shoulders of the men of action who either engineer or become victims of macho power plays, or on the locker room doors where all their inner secrets are kept.   This is the world in which Manasa Tagica’s Othello has made it big, a black migrant success story who leads his men to victory, but who is never quite one of the gang. His marriage to Desdemona, Esme Bayley’s well to do white girl whose parents expected more of her, only serves to ramp up an inherent institutionalised racism even more. This is the thin line that provokes Adam Donaldson’s Iago to manipulate his way to destruction as he feeds misinformation, gossip and rumour to his boss, driving him demented enough to seek revenge of his own while Iago pulls the strings.    Perfo...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars    Life is one great big cabaret for Allegra, the woman of a certain age cast as the life and soul of Peter Quilter’s play. Allegra may live on her own, but her world is full of colour, as well as occasional song. The latter is something the shopkeepers of her village know only too well, used as they are to being serenaded by showtunes on any given afternoon whenever Allegra graces their premises.    Dotty eccentric she may be, but Allegra’s fondness for doing a number concerns her brother Ronan enough to bring in Czech cleaner Anna to keep her company. And when Officer Rogers from the local nick turns up at the door, the game would appear to be up. If only they all knew where she left her umpteen bottles of pills, everyone could have a quiet life.    As pro Palestine supporters gathered outside the Theatre Royal prior to the show to protest its star Maureen Lipman's appearance following attempts to cancel its Aberdeen run...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars   As gossipy Magic Circle members might tell you, Derren Brown’s feats of mental skulduggery he bamboozles his fan base with aren’t anything new. Brown himself admits in the second half of his latest theatrical extravaganza that the hardest thing for him to do during his two and a half hour performance is to keep an eye on a deck of cards to see which way one lands. The fact that he tells us this via subtitles on a screen that covers the Playhouse stage’s entire back wall while those cards are shuffled speaks volumes about Brown’s exemplary shtick. And while those self same Magic Circle members may be correct in their professional observations, if they ever let slip how Brown’s tricks actually worked, chances are such a breach of protocol would see us all have to do a disappearing act.    Things begin quietly enough with pre show phone footage testimonies from a stream of satisfied but bewildered customers about how Brown appears t...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh  Four stars   In the city there are eight million stories. Edinburgh being Edinburgh, it would probably like to boast it has a fair few more. Given the Athens of the North’s Jekyll and Hyde style credentials, whereby it puts on a pretty facade for the tourists, while the real tall tales emerge from more intimate exchanges out of sight behind closed doors, this might well be the case.    So it goes with Lyceum at Home, an initiative spearheaded by the capital theatre’s artistic director James Brining, who commissioned four writers to create a quartet of thirty-minute monologues. With each set in Edinburgh, in a project led by outgoing associate director Zinnie Harris, these were then performed around town in people’s living rooms, where sofa bound audiences were unavoidably up close to the action. Now the mini tour is over, the quartet of new works were brought back home to the theatre that sired them, where they were performed on the s...