Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars    If the history books are written by the victors, no-one told the Mary of Rona Johnston’s whistle-stop ride through the life and times of Scotland’s short lived but much dramatised monarch. Here, Mary, Queen of Scots is a folk punk diva reclaiming her story to tell it in her own defiant image over a fifty-minute riot of spoken word monologue and song. As Mary, Johnston is ably abetted by her guitar, drum and fiddle wielding girl gang sisterhood watching her back at every turn as they join in the action.    It begins and ends with blood, as the six-strong ensemble wield their instruments like weapons in Katie Slater’s perfectly poised production for the young Knot Tied Theatre Company. As Johnston takes the microphone on designer Phoebe Wiseman’s regally carpeted stage, Mary’s short life of incident and colour is packed into a fistful of songs that move between rousing hoolies and tender ballads. These are delivered with vocal ...

When a live staging of Derek Jarman’s final film was presented at Tramway in Glasgow last month, it heralded a major new exhibition of Jarman’s work at the Hunterian Art Gallery. Blue Now saw four performers read Jarman’s text for Blue (1993), in which extracts from Jarman’s diaries as he came to terms with losing his sight from an AIDS related illness were heard over an Yves Klein hued blue screen as the film’s sole hypnotic visual.  Digging in Another Time: Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature is the first Jarman exhibition in Scotland since 1992. Despite the thirty-two year gap, it marks a continuation of the late filmmaker’s connection with Scotland dating back decades. While this comes largely through a headline making 1989 show in Glasgow as part of the National Review of Live Art (NRLA), other tangential connections left their mark, with Jarman going on to influence a new generation of artists shown alongside him at the Hunterian.   Digging in Another Time features works from a...

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh Four stars   A row of giant vegetables are lined up like they’ve just won first prize in the local village fete as the audience enters this very special silver jubilee celebration of Magnetic North Theatre Company’s assorted off-kilter adventures over the last 25 years. The smiles on the vegetables skins give the gave away, however, as this rogues gallery of very fresh looking life size produce are actually characters in `Pass the Spoon, a ‘sort of opera’ first produced at Tramway in Glasgow back in 2011.    This TV cooking show set collaboration between composer David Fennessy, artist David Shrigley and Magnetic North director Nicholas Bone is introduced by our hosts, June Spoon and Phillip Fork, before an overripe banana and a depressed egg appear as they await gluttonous guest star Mr Granules. With the vegetables mere appetisers, the result resembles an absurdist Masterchef/It’s a Knockout mash up scripted by Alfred Jarry.    T...

Jeff Merrifield – Writer, musician, arts administrator, Seeker   Born March 9 th 1943; died October 31st 2024    Jeff Merrifield, who has died aged 81, was a writer, musician, arts administrator, archivist and publisher who played a key role in assorted underground scenes across more than half a century that a simple job description can’t come close to capturing. Ultimately, Merrifield made things happen. This was the case whether as co-conspirator with theatrical maverick Ken Campbell on his assorted capers, sorting out Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD festival enough for it to survive a loss making first year, or setting up an improvising orchestra on Shetland, where he settled in 2008.   To co-opt the title of his brick-sized biography of Campbell, published in 2011, Merrifield was a Seeker. His tireless pursuit of artistic enlightenment saw his free thinking evangelism offset by a practical can-do sense of what was required to bring projects to fruition. There were plays, b...

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Four stars   Charles Dickens  has never  just been for Christmas, but at this time of year his seasonal masterpiece comes fully into focus. This was proven over the weekend in glowing fashion by Guy Masterson, the indefatigable Edinburgh Festival Fringe veteran, whose solo rendition of Dickens’ tale adapted by director Nick Hennegan gets back to the storytelling heart of Dickens’ own live renditions of his work.   Hennegan’s production for Theatre Tours International and Maverick Theatre Company is no piece of ornate Victoriana. Masterson embodies Dickens’ bustling world with gravitas and grit, using little more than a wooden chair and an old grey raincoat hanging from the rafters. Once he puts the latter on, it gives his  performance a swish, a swoop and a sweep that are captured like rapid fire snapshots in the moody lighting that accompanies it.    Masterson moves from narrator to the Dickens universe of characters with...

Edinburgh Playhouse Four stars “I did it in a loincloth,” declares Donny Osmond as a rock and roll Pharaoh while observing Adam Filipe’s more modestly attired Joseph kicking off this latest tour of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s now fifty-two year old musical. Osmond is clad in a gold coloured kilt as he makes this nod to his own tenure in the show’s title role during an American revival that ran for six years.     Osmond’s prodigal’s return is a rites of passage of sorts in Laurence Connor’s well drilled larger than life production of Rice and Lloyd Webber’s biblically inspired concoction. Felipe has this all to come as Joseph, the precocious dreamer whose brothers sell him into slavery, only for him to network his way out of prison and become Pharaoh’s economic saviour.   Things begin with the Narrator setting the scene by way of a storytelling session with the cast’s junior members before leaping into a kind of cosplay heaven as the child actors don false beards to...

Scottish theatre has eight million stories. Some of them can be heard in A History of Scottish Drama in Six Plays, theatre critic Fergus Morgan’s boldly named six-part podcast that starts this week. Developed from a bursary from the Scottish Society of Playwrights’ SSP @50 Fellowship Awards, Morgan’s take comes from a desire to discover for himself the sometimes lost history of the world he is now steeped in as The Stage’s Scottish theatre critic.   ‘ The idea,’ says Morgan, ‘was to tell a history, not the history. Obviously you can't tell a definitive history when there are so many different strands to each story, but I wanted to try and tell a hopefully fairly comprehensive history of Scottish drama, principally from the point of view of playwrights, but weaving in all sorts of things along the way.’   To this end, Morgan bookends his series with A Satire Of The Three Estates (1540) - or Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaites if you will - and Black Wa...

Cumbernauld Theatre Four stars   It’s all going on down in Timbernauld, where grand dame carpenter Gepetta tends to her wares, kept company by the grandson she magicked into being with a carving knife and a not entirely pure imagination. While their flea ridden dog Mozart lollops about indoors to its heart’s content, Pinocchio longs to step outside to the big bad world he can only see through the window. A conscientious cricket called Hingmy, meanwhile, only wants to come in from the cold.    Gary McNair’s seasonal spin on Carlo Collodi’s much Disneyfied children’s story is both faithfully familiar and knowingly irreverent in its cheeky reimagining for this four-actor version brought to bright and energetic life in Laila Noble’s production.    As Julia Murray’s wide-eyed Pinocchio embarks on an adventure that sees him conned by radges and kidnapped by human traffickers, Cole Stewart’s Gepetta holds court with Caitlin Forbes as Mozart and Stephanie MacGaraidh as ...

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...