Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It’s a rum old do down at Admiral Benbow’s Home for Reformed Pirates, where Duncan McLean’s new adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s swashbuckling romp first embarks. The seemingly washed up old sea dogs cared for by young Jim Hawkins band together to tell their story, as Jim, Lean Jean Silver and a puppet puffin set sail from Leith for the Orkney islands in search of buried booty.    Such is the playfully irreverent license taken by McLean in Wils Wilson’s rollickingly riotous production, set on Alex Berry’s galleon sized set of ropes, ladders and sails. What follows is a supremely daft take on Stevenson’s yarn that sees McLean tap into the ridiculous spirit of The Merry Mac Fun Co, the punky 1980s theatre troupe he co-founded, performed with and wrote for.    This is evident in some of the verbal riffs between the six actors on stage as well as some very silly song lyrics set to composer Tim Dalling’s Tom Waitsian junkya...

Dundee Rep Four stars   Oor Wullie without his bucket is like Christmas without a comic book annual. Dundee Rep’s revival of Noisemaker duo Scott Gilmour and Claire McKenzie’s musical reimagining of Scotland’s’s favourite cartoon boy is something of a double whammy in this respect.     As our spiky haired hero has his bucket poached from beneath him, prodigal daughter Nilo returns to Dundee to see her dad, though not before she is gifted an Oor Wullie annual by a mysterious woman on the train who goes by the name of Ms Watkins. As the book’s cover star steps out of the annual’s pages and into Nilo’s domain, Wullie rides again.    Andrew Panton’s production has been substantially rejigged since its first outing in 2019. While the quest for the missing bucket by Wullie and his pals remains the same, the changes in plot and characters maintain the show’s very meta take on family and friendship.    Much of this comes through the script’s Peter Pan like por...