Coffee-Table Notes

Amanda Gaughan – Theatre director Born August 27 1982; died March 12 2018 Amanda Gaughan, who has died suddenly aged 35, was one of the brightest young directing talents to blaze a trail through Scotland’s theatre scene over the last decade. Much of her work focused on strong women, and, as is the case with the best artists, reflected her own personality. Gaughan’s main stage productions of Hecuba and Hedda Gabler were vibrant, impassioned and full of life, always questioning, always getting behind the surface veneer to expose the sometimes brutal truth of things. Moreover, Gaughan’s work was always delivered with heart and soul bursting from the core of it’s being and barely contained by whatever stage it appeared on. Gaughan’s work may have been seen at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, the Lyceum, Edinburgh or Dundee Rep, but it felt like she was only at the start of a career which by rights should have grown and matured over several decades. As it is, what Gaughan already...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars What eighteen-year-old Katie does in Jack Thorne’s one-woman play is probably not that far from what a lot of small-town schoolgirls do when their older boyfriends get into a fight after his ice-cream gets splattered by a cyclist who he promptly kicks into the middle of the road. Just like the bump and grind rhythms of the r’n’b she flicks through on her phone as the audience enters the Tron’s intimate Changing House space, Katie goes with the flow. Motor-mouthing her way into the back of a stranger’s car en route to a vigilante revenge attack is one thing. Talking herself into what might just be a wake-up call to take her future into her own hands is something else entirely. In this sense, Paul Brotherston’s revival of a play first seen in Edinburgh almost eight years ago is a quietly life-changing piece of work. As it joy-rides its way around the complexities of multi-cultural Britain, it shows how, in towns like Luton, where the play is s...

Jack Thorne was living in Luton when he got the idea to write Bunny, his searing one-woman play that is revived this week at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow in a new production by Paul Brotherston. More specifically, the Bristol-born writer was standing in the queue of his local post-office in the town he’d moved to because London was too pricey when the out-and-out weirdness of the place hit home. “Luton’s a really strange town,” says Thorne. “I lived there for seven or eight years, and it’s really weird how divided it is. It’s quite insular in its politics, and obviously it’s the birthplace of the English Defence League, who’ve done a lot of damage to it. “I was standing in the post office, which was run by a lovely Pakistani gentleman, and in front of me was someone wearing an EDL badge, and I just wondered how they could go in there like that. It was the same when I first moved there, and the estate agent was showing me round the property, and we were talking about the election ...