Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars    Teenage Flo has been brought before her social worker and a policeman to find out why she hit her teacher. Flo is in care, her best friend has died, and she writes stories to help her survive. When a mysterious figure wielding a guitar appears and encourages Flo to take charge of her life and live it on her own terms, the sanctuary she finds when she runs away isn’t always what it seems.    As opening gambits go, one might be forgiven for presuming Robbie Gordon and Jack Nurse’s new play for their Wonder Fools company to be an exercise in everyday social realism. Instead, while Flo’s traumas are explored, Nurse’s production takes a more fantastical turn, as Flo ends up at a kind of fantasy dinner party with historical figures after stumbling on a Shangri-la of sorts in the hills of Dumfries and Galloway.   The fair on Kelton Hill is occupied by serial killer William Hare, vainglorious national bard Robert Burns, and feminist f...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Five stars   Almost two decades have passed since the National Theatre of Great Britain’s monumental staging of Michael Morpurgo’s anti war novel first galloped into life in a heroic co-production with South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company. Since then, the horrors of battle Morpurgo depicts have become ever more pronounced, even without the horses forced to lead the charge as they were in the First World War that ripped the world asunder several times over.    At the heart of this, of course, is Joey, the horse bought at market in rural Devon, and who becomes young Albert’s best friend before being sold off to the army and ending up on the frontline with a million others. Essentially what follows is a story of the bond between a boy and his horse. Beyond this, its epic rendering says something about holding on to some kind of belief system even as the bombs fall. The interplay between Joey and Tom Sturgess as Albert is genuinely moving to witness...

Where did all the working class photographers go? This was a question posed by Johny Pitts when he started thinking about curating the exhibition that became After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024. The answer comes in images by a diverse array of more than twenty-five artists that make up the exhibition. As the show arrives in Edinburgh from the Hayward Gallery as part of a UK tour, it highlights an often-overlooked era in British photography.   “A s a kid I started to see the old world disappear, and this new world ushered in by neo liberal capitalism,’ says Pitts, who draws the title of the exhibition from  American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man . “On the one hand there was the complete destruction of working class community, but then there was this kind of resurrection of it through capitalist consumption. Yet what lingers are the ghosts of a working class culture, and even within th...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars    When Dawn Sievewright stands at the front of an empty stage wielding a guitar at the end of Nicole Taylor’s stage version of her Tom Harper directed hit 2018 film, it doesn’t matter whether she is acting anymore. For the previous two and a half hours Sievewright has owned the Lyceum stage as Rose-Lynn Harlan, the big city girl with a tragic back-story and a dream of becoming a Country music star in Nashville. As she sings a heart rending version of Glasgow (No Place Like Home), the only song especially composed for the film, Sievewright transcends any fictional rendition to become the star Rose-Lynn so aspired to be.   Sievewright provides the heart and soul of John Tiffany’s all singing, all-dancing production, and is one of the many magnificent things about it. From the moment Rose-Lynn prepares to leave prison accompanied by a foot-tapping ensemble rendition of Primal Scream’s Country Girl onwards, Taylor, Tiffany and ...

The Studio, Edinburgh Three stars   Wanna' buy a bridge? Maybe later, but before we begin, a history lesson. Between 1820 and 1837, a Scottish soldier called Gregor MacGregor fairly successfully attempted to get hundreds of believers to invest in a country in Central America he claimed to rule called Poyais. When those who bought into MacGregor’s promised land sailed out to embrace their new homestead, alas, they found only uninhabitable jungle. Or so we’re led to believe.    Such a back story is about as true to life as it gets in Liam Rees’s solo show, in which he explores our willingness to suspend disbelief and put our faith in pretty much anything a smart talking huckster like MacGregor can offload, however non-existent it might be. Rees does this in an affable mix of pop history lecture and shaggy dog stand-up routine, in which he double bluffs the audience with geeky charm, only to bamboozle them with what may or may not be details of his own personal history. He t...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four stars   Down by the docks they’re talking tough in James Graham’s stage adaptation of Alan Bleasdale’s classic twentieth century TV drama. For the unlikely Liverpool lads thrown on the scrap heap in the thick of 1980s Thatcher’s Britain, all that talk won’t pay their rent or feed their kids. As each man moves from dole office to cash in hand desperation to an increasingly volatile home life, the Kafkaesque absurdities of the dole office ‘sniffers’ become the enemy.    Licking their wounds from the disaster of a get rich quick job a year ago, Chrissie, Loggo, Yosser, George, Dixie and Dixie’s son Kevin’s lives collapse like the wall on the dodgy building site that kills old George’s political firebrand son Snowy. Beyond ideology, the survivors are felled by a kind of collective emasculation.   While Graham’s script remains faithful to Bleasdale’s original, Kate Wasserberg’s production steps out of its naturalistic roots with a series of the...

The Pavilion, Glasgow Four stars   American dreams don’t come much more broken in Arthur Miller’s slow burning 1949 tragedy, brought to life here in Andy Arnold’s mighty production, led by a towering performance from David Hayman at its centre.    Hayman is Willy Loman, the veteran salesman as past his sell by date as some of the wares he’s been hawking for more years than he can remember. Where once he was apparently a hot shot, charming the buyers in Boston and beyond, now he can barely earn enough to pay off all the things he and his wife Linda have bought into. This built in obsolescence of a clapped out fridge and other domestic goods becomes a symbol of the ruthless disposability of consumer capitalism. Willy may be over the hill, but next year’s model will be along any second.    Throw in the terminal underachievement of Willy and his wife Linda’s two sons, Happy and Biff, the missed opportunities with his brother Ben, and the guilt of being caught out in...

Perth Theatre Four stars   When D.H. Lawrence wrote his novel The Rainbow in 1915, his tale of three generations of working class lives saw it hauled before the courts on obscenity charges. More than a thousand copies of the book were burnt, rendering it unavailable in the UK for eleven years in an early example of cancel culture.   Given such an extreme response, one can only speculate what cultural gatekeepers might have made of writer Nicola Werenowska and director Jo Newman’s audacious new stage version, which rips into Lawrence’s story to focus on the three women at its heart.   Lydia is the widowed Polish refugee who lands in rural mid nineteenth century Nottinghamshire where she marries Tom, sevral years her junior. Anna, Lydia’s daughter from her first marriage, inherits her mother’s individualism as she embarks on her own domestic battle. By the time Anna’s own daughter Ursula comes of age, the new freedoms she embraces appear to make anything possible. What foll...

David Keenan’s debut novel, This is Memorial Device (2017), erupted into view like a counter cultural dam bursting. The book’s wild depiction of small town Scottish post punk pop life was based around the short lived crash and burn of a group called Memorial Device.   Keenan’s epic immortalisation of the ultimate legends in their own living room seemed to come from the inside, as Keenan conjured up an entire parallel universe. When the stage adaptation of the book was first performed at Edinburgh College of Art’s Wee Red Bar, a poster for a Memorial Device show remains there to this day.   After five more novels in as many years, such devotion to detail can be seen and heard in Volcanic Tongue – A Time-Travelling Evangelist’s Guide to Late 20 th Century Underground Music. Keenan’s bumper-sized compendium of music writing culled from his years as the Wire magazine’s evangelist in chief is accompanied by a compilation album of the same name. This features the sort of no-fi auteu...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   Storm clouds are gathering in Tim Foley’s new play, set on a beach in North East England that becomes both sanctuary and battleground for the two brothers who reunite to bury their father. Mark is the reluctant prodigal, the one who got away to find success, freedom and a life a million miles away from the now dead end town he couldn’t waiter get away from. Tiny is the one who stayed behind to look after his old man, hanging on his stories, with the big bad world a restless ocean away. For now, at least, the tide has gone out enough to leave them space to try and soothe troubled waters.    Foley’s two-hander is brought to full roaring theatrical life in this touring co-production between the Wigan based ThickSkin and Shropshire sired Pentabus companies. Directors Neil Bettles and Elle While pull out all the stylistic stops to make it work, with he first thing that greets the audience the rolling waves of Sarah Readman’s video backd...

  Jack Vettriano  -  1951–2025    Jack Vettriano, who has died aged 73, was one of the most successful contemporary Scottish artists ever. His often erotically charged studies of brooding figures posed in scenes that seemed to draw from pulp fiction book covers and film noir stills sold in huge amounts. His 1992 painting, The Singing Butler, went at auction in 2004 for £744,500, at the time a record amount for any painting by a Scottish artist, and any painting ever sold in Scotland. It went on to become the best selling art print in the UK.   Celebrity collectors of Vettriano’s work include Jack Nicholson, Sir Alex Ferguson, Terence Conran and Tim Rice. Other fans included actor Robbie Coltrane and Scotland’s former First Minister, the late Alex Salmond. In 2010, Salmond used Vettriano’s painting, Let’s Twist Again, as the image of his official Christmas card. When the original was sold a year later, it raised £86,000 for charity.   His 2013 exhibitio...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Five stars    It is just shy of seven years since Isobel McArthur’s poptastic reimagining of Jane Austen’s girl powered nineteenth century novel burst into riotous life at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre in the fledgling Blood of the Young company’s original smash hit production. Since then, McArthur has picked up the directorial baton for a scaled up version that has toured the UK, wowed the West End and picked up an Olivier award for what has become a fully fledged theatrical phenomenon. One might wager as well that bringing Austen’s work to life in this way has done more for the Brit lit classical canon than more traditionally inclined heritage industry homages that intermittently light up stage and screen.    Now here we are for this latest tour coming home to roost in a much bigger Glasgow space than the one where it all began, with McArthur drafting in a brand new young team of all singing, all dancing, potty mouthed performers to pick up the mant...

When Kaija Saariaho’s final opera before her death in 2023 opens as one of the flagship productions in this year’s Adelaide Festival, its uncompromising portrait of the aftermath of a mass shooting ten years on should show why it has become a major international artistic event.   Innocence was written with a libretto by best selling novelist Sofi Oksanen, whose fusion of contemporary issues and Scandi-noir type thriller has seen her books, Baby Jane (2005) and Purge (2007), both adapted for opera. For Innocence, Oksanen sets out her store at a wedding for the family of the shooter where one of the victim’s mothers is working as a waitress. For Finnish mezzo-soprano Jenny Carlstedt, who plays the waitress, Innocence is a groundbreaking work.   “I think music should speak about the problems of our world right now, just as Mozart did with The Marriage of Figaro’ says Carlstedt. “I think we have to try to discuss things that are uncomfortable. Through art, we have a chance of appr...

If love makes the world go round, this is confirmed by the stage version of Trent Dalton’s compendium of real life love stories collected on a Brisbane street corner and published in 2021. Captured in the moment on Dalton’s old school typewriter, these hopelessly devoted everyday epiphanies include proposals by flashmob, reunions across generations, and musings on how love lives on beyond death.   With Dalton riding high on the 2024 Netflix adaptation of his 2018 semi autobiographical novel, Boy Swallows Universe, Love Stories was first seen on stage in 2024 at Queensland Performing Arts Centre. The show is adapted by Tim McGarry and directed by Sam Strong, reuniting the trio behind the 2021 stage version of Boy Swallows Universe.   Closer to home, additional writing and story comes from Dalton and fellow journalist Fiona Franzmann. Given that Dalton and Franzmann also happen to be married, this should give an extra frisson to the couple’s own story, used as a framing device b...

Politics and performance are at the international heart of Adelaide Festival’s visual art programme this year, spread over a series of five exhibitions. The Adelaide Fringe meanwhile, features more than sixty exhibitions and events covering an array of forms and themes.   At the Festival, the tellingly named Radical Textiles (Art Gallery of South Australia until 30 th March )  looks at one of the most quietly unsung of artforms that has been central to the visual identity of protest movements, from William Morris in the nineteenth century, and Sonia Delauney in the twentieth and beyond. This exhibition is a patchwork of more than 100 artists, designers and activists drawn from Art Gallery of South Australia’s expansive collections of international, Australian and First Nations collections to knit together a history of textiles across 150 years.   The meaning of family is behind Shared Skin (Adelaide Contemporary Experimental, 15 th February-12 th April), a group show of...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars    Arthur Miller’s major plays may have been written in the mid twentieth century, but their huge hearted studies of the human fall-out of post World War Two capitalism continue to tap into the collective American psyche like few others. It is thrilling, therefore, to have new productions of two of Miller’s mightiest works on our doorstep within a couple of weeks of each other. With Andy Arnold and David Hayman’s take on Death of a Salesman to come, Jemima Levick announces her tenure as artistic director of the Tron with a production of A View from the Bridge that resonates with creative vitality.    Miller’s play charts the downfall of Eddie Carbone, the New York longshoreman who opens his already busy house to his wife Beatrice’s two cousins Marco and Rodolfo, illegally transported from Italy. Where Marco works hard for his family back home, Rodolpho is attracted by the glamour of music and movies. In the middle of this is Eddie’s o...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   Meet Evan Hansen. Hero and villain of Oscar winning songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s Tony and Olivier award winning musical with writer Steven Levenson is a socially anxious seventeen-year-old whose therapist has suggested he write a letter to himself every day. This is so he can buoy himself up for what he hypes  himself into believing can only be a great day. Or not, as it more frequently turns out, in what is effectively the sort of self help secret diary intended for Evan’s eyes only.    When one of Evan’s missives is snatched from his hand by school bad boy Connor Murphy and found in the latter’s pocket after he takes a more extreme option for dealing with bad days, it is presumed Evan and Connor were best buds and confidantes. This sets in motion a series of events that go global, as Evan finds himself at the centre of an accidental fantasy that brings him the sort of attention he’s never had before. When things...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   When seventy-something Diane decides it’s time to die, the only way to go, it seems, is to take a last trip to Switzerland, where assisted dying is legal. The ticket price from Easterhouse isn’t cheap, alas, and Diane’s pension won’t stretch much further than paying for the not entirely legal painkillers supplied by her postman Connor. Diane’s wild days may be over, but she’s still queen of the Scheme. Diane’s carer Julie, meanwhile, finally dumps her philandering husband, an act of mid-life emancipation that points her towards a novel way of fundraising for Diane that is soon keeping them all in clover.    Such is life in Éimi Quinn’s increasingly wild new play, which opens the twentieth anniversary season of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s lunchtime theatre phenomenon - the first under new artistic director Brian Logan - with a bang and a lot more besides. As Julie sets up shop as an online dominatrix, she brings new life as well as a stea...