Coffee-Table Notes

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars In every dream home there is heartache for the couple at the centre of Amy Conway’s play, the latest in A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s current season of lunchtime theatre. Henry is almost caught with his pants down when the buzzer goes at the door of his flat, but it’s nothing compared to what happens next.    The woman at the door may look like the spitting image of Henry’s ex girlfriend Liz, but behind the belted raincoat and the hyper efficient persona is the sort of all access dream girl that initially at least seems even better than the real thing. When things don’t go to programme, however, Henry’s actions are a whole lot more extreme than simply pulling the plug. And when the buzzer goes again, reality bites in disturbingly similar ways in the flesh.    The all-encroaching rise of AI is very much on the agenda just now, as it has been long before science fiction became fact. The humanisation and sexualisation of robots too has bee...

Edinburgh’s festival season may be over, but there is still plenty going on across Scotland’s stages as autumn seasons kick off in earnest with a series of big plays with big ideas. Wiping My Mother’s Arse Pitlochry Festival Theatre until 5 September. Last chance to see this long overdue revival of Iain Heggie’s rewritten sit-com style dark farce first seen at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in 2001. Set in a care home, Heggie’s play navigates what follows when long-term patient Andrene’s son, Derek, turns up to see her with his gobby new girlfriend Kath in tow. With Andrene being looked after by nurse Larry, a not so merry go round of secrets and lies ensues in a play that is revealed as a Scottish heir to Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloan, as well as revealing Heggie as a writer way ahead of his time.      Irvine Welsh’s PORNO Albany, Greenock, 5 September; Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, 12 September; Tivoli Theatre, Aberdeen, 14 September; Macrobert Arts Centre, Stirling,...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   Life takes two people by surprise in this debut work by LC Stephens for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest lunchtime theatre season. Stephens’s play focuses on Clare and Barry, habitués of Glasgow’s West End who find themselves in the same student friendly boozer one night trying to offload their respective baggage to each of their ill suited companions. Through a series of alternating monologues, we discover that both Clare and Barry’s worlds have been turned upside down by very different matters of life and death. We also learn that both parties feel like bit part players in their own story to the point of invisibility. Oh, and as Barry realises, even if Clare doesn’t, they already have history with each other.    There is a lovely sense of everyday mid life longing in Stephens’ script, brought charmingly and wittily to life in Graham McLaren’s elegant production on Gillian Argo’s simple but effective tables and chairs set. This is ide...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars   Matthew Zajac’s now almost twenty-year-old solo play has had a journey almost as remarkable as its subject matter. Opening for previews in Glasgow’s now long lost Arches venue back in 2008 prior to a successful Edinburgh Festival Fringe run, Zajac’s autobiographical tale of his father’s flight from his homeland in the then Polish area of Galicia and everything that followed has travelled the world several times over.   This latest tour of Scotland is the biggest for some time, and chimes with the publication of a new edition of Zajac’s play that also charts his own quest to find his roots. The result in this revival of Ben Harrison’s production for the Highland based Dogstar Theatre Company is a show that retains its original intimacy as it explores Zajac’s deeply personal story about fathers and sons. Through this backdrop it becomes a far bigger universal tale that lays bare the unintended consequences of war in terms of migration...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Five stars   Imagine a world where truth doesn’t matter anymore. Then imagine someone who held on to old truths is spied on, hounded and tortured until they kow-tow to the official version and fall in line with everyone else. Welcome to Chris Hannan’s searing new stage version of George Orwell’s visionary novel, which sets out its dystopian store with major resonances of so called democracy now in terms of how dissent on all sides is dealt with.    From the opening bombardment of electronic noise, Dominic Hill’s production brings home the mix of mundanity and terror in Hannan’s adaptation. This comes in the regulation utilitarian blue uniforms worn by Winston Smith and his regimented peers as much as it does from Winston’s final submission to the system following a relentless series of rapid-fire torture scenes. In-between comes the frightening realities of masked men turning up at meetings to remove deviants, and the collective release of a bayi...

Kevin Rowland has never been shy of exposing himself emotionally in song. From his early incarnations of Dexys Midnight Runners almost half a century ago, Rowland has driven a restless musical potpourri of Celtic white Soul that has veered between euphoric and mournful in its mercurial brilliance. Now here he is with the latest edition of his newly rechristened group after a decade as just Dexys with what is hinted as being the grand finale to Rowland’s musical quest.   What we get in this David Holmes produced affair is a Proustian trawl through Rowland’s personal back pages awash with purging and redemption. This forms a companion piece of sorts to Rowland’s candid memoir, Bless Me Father (2025) and accompanying in conversation shows.   From the opening remembrance of the dead end kids he ran with as a Wolverhampton tearaway in ‘My Life in England Pt.1’, Rowland casts himself as an old sage reflecting on his lot by way of well-worn shaggy dog stories of times past. Inbetween...