Coffee-Table Notes

When Kirsty Findlay finishes up playing the lead role in The Sound of Music at Pitlochry Festival Theatre at the end of December, it will be the end of a very special year for the Glasgow based actress. Prior to becoming the solution to the problem of Maria, Findlay appeared in three Pitlochry productions over the Perthshire theatre’s  summer season.  While Findlay shone in both Sense and Sensibility as Elinor, and as small town bad girl Ariel in Footloose, it was her magnificent embodiment of singer/songwriter Carole King in Beautiful that showed off Findlay’s full range as actress, singer and musician. Findlay was on stage throughout in Sam Hardie’s production of Douglas McGrath’s play, and despite playing piano in front of an audience for the first time ever, rarely has an actor looked so at ease with what she was doing in a bravura performance that might just be the best of the year.   ‘ I never thought in a million years I would get to do all the shows I’ve done over...

14. Carla J Easton & Blair Young First time feature filmmakers Easton and Young garnered huge acclaim for Since Yesterday, their film about Scotland’s lost girl bands, which premiered at Edinburgh International Film Festival. Eight Years in the making and inspired by Easton’s own experience in all woman band TeenCanteen, the duo have created a vital document of hidden history. 17. Sett Studios The artist run Leith Walk gallery and studio space has produced a huge turnover of exhibitions and events over the last year. Founded by a core group of Abi Lewis and Rehan Yousuf, with support from Steve Robb at Settlement Projects, there are currently seventeen artists on board in a vital non-hierarchical space.     31. Flannery O'kafka Flannery O’kafka’s exhibition, For Willy Love and Booker T: Blue babies do whatever they want, made full use of the Sierra Metro gallery’s space during its Edinburgh Art Festival run. The show’s mix of photography, film and a cosily carpeted en...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars    Elizabeth Newman’s final show as Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s artistic director is the last in a hat-trick of in-house musicals that follows Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and Footloose. All three have featured Kirsty Findlay as their female lead. Here she completes a magnificent season as Maria, the untameable force of nature who becomes governess of uptight widower Captain von Trapp’s seven children. Maria’s presence brings the growing pains of all into sharp focus, as love and liberation blossom even as the Nazis muscle in and annexe Austria. For the von Trapps, the hills and exile beckon.   Newman has invested Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s perfectly constructed adaptation of the real Maria Rainer’s memoir with a freshness and a poignancy that makes for a moving and irresistible experience. With a cast of twenty singing and playing all instruments in what has become Pitlochry’s house style, from the show’s tit...

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars   The world has been turned upside down several times over in the sixteen years since Matthew Zajac first performed his remarkable solo work in honour of his Polish/Ukrainian father who settled for the quiet life of the Highlands following the turmoil of the Second World War. A decade and a half on, and after more than 300 performances across the globe, the acquired baggage of Ben Harrison’s production for Zajac’s Dogstar company has gained a vital currency.    Following a sold out four week season in London, it is serendipitous that Zajac’s show arrives in Edinburgh for a brief run the week of Polish Independence Day. With Russia’s assault on Ukraine ongoing, Zajac’s play may be a deeply personal work, but as he embarks on a pilgrimage in search of his own roots, it becomes a hymn to much bigger histories. As illustrated on the map projected behind him on Ali Maclaurin’s set, those histories may have shaped the world, but they also ...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Three stars   Someone had clearly let the dogs out before Wednesday night’s delayed curtain up of this new canine musical. Not that the young audience seemed to mind once things eventually got going after the runaway hounds had presumably been rounded up.    First on the scene was Pongo, the abandoned mutt whose adoption by puppy loving Danielle takes them on a walk in the park, where they become entangled with fellow pedigree Perdi and her human, Tom. From here this perfectly matched happy family embark on an adventure that sees them almost lost to the high fashion ambitions of Cruella de Vil. When dogs and cats combine forces, however, they knock spots off her.    Drawn from an original stage adaptation by Edinburgh based playwright Zinnie Harris, the show’s book by Glasgow panto legend Johnny McKnight with songs by Douglas Hodge look to Dodie Smith’s 1956 children’s novel rather than the 1961 Disney animated feature or its 1996 John Hu...

A collegiate approach prevails over this group show of six graduates from Collective’s 2024 Satellite Programme of emerging artists. Taking its title from an Irish proverb that loosely translates as ‘people live in each other’s shadows', pass shadow, whisper shade is disparate in approach, with shared themes of personal history throughout. Tellingly, almost all artists make reference to their parents, grandparents or older ancestors.     Emelia Kerr Beale draws inspiration from her father’s now demolished factory with a large scale grid of graphite drawings of ‘clock’ patterns, parts of a mechanical knitting machine and an industrial soundscape by Clara Hancock that sounds like a factory sampled.    Hannan Jones’ looped 16mm based moving image piece, Hiraeth: Pandy Lane (2024) looks to Jones’ grandfather’s attempts to buy a suit in a piece that resembles a 1970s folk horror public information film.    There is folk horror too in GASTROMANCY (2024), Katherin...

Lochgelly Centre Three stars If ever a strong political voice for the arts was needed, it is now. The fact that there isn’t currently one emanating from either Holyrood or Westminster brings shame on both Houses. What better time, then, to be reminded of Jennie Lee, the Fife firebrand who became the first ever Minister for the Arts, and who founded the Open University, championing education for all.    Lee had quite a life before such epoch making activity, as is brought home in Matthew Knights’ epic dramatic biography, which premiered at the weekend a stone’s throw from his subject’s birthplace 120 years ago. Coming at a time when arts buildings are fighting to survive, it is telling too that Knights’ play opened in a venue that might not have existed without Lee’s vision.    Knight sets out his store in Emma Lynne Harley’s production for the Angus based Knights Theatre in the variety theatre and hotel where Lee grew up, as the show’s three actors raid the dressing ...

Tramway, Glasgow Four stars   Sound and Vision are the heart of director Neil Bartlett’s theatrical reimagining of Derek Jarman’s final film, completed four months before his death from an AIDS related illness in 1994. Featuring an Yves Klein hued blue screen for the film’s full 74-minute duration, Blue features a collage of voices speaking excerpts from Jarman’s diary as he gradually lost his sight.    As Jarman ruminated on friends and lovers lost to what had been demonised as ‘the gay plague’, this opened up a bigger picture of a world that had been decimated. This was offset across several sections by a more impressionistic narrative.   Thirty years on, Bartlett brings a new quartet of voices to recount what has now become a (self) portrait of a major moment in late twentieth century social and political history. More than that, as the cast of Travis Alabanza, Joelle Taylor, Jay Bernard and Russell Tovey line up on stools beneath the screen, it becomes a rhapsody...