Coffee-Table Notes

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   To be young, female and with writerly intentions probably wasn’t easy in American Civil War era nineteenth century Massachusetts. This is partly why Louisa May Alcott’s much adapted semi autobiographical novel was so ahead of its time. Initially published in two parts in 1868 and 1869, Alcott’s rites of passage saga concerning four very different sisters as war rages elsewhere tapped into a radical need for women’s emancipation, literary or otherwise.    A love for Alcott’s story concerning the growing pains of Jo, Meg, Amy and Beth March is palpable at the start of Anne-Marie Casey’s adaptation, directed here by Loveday Ingram. As the girls huddle around Jo’s writing desk at the corner of Ruari Murchison’s tree lined set, this is Jo writing her way into her life. Surrounded by a mix of the natural and domestic worlds and bathed in the corn coloured glow of Mike Robertson’s lighting, it is through the subsequent loves and losses th...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Five stars   The sirens that usher in this latest revival of Stephen Daldry’s epoch making reimagining of J.B. Priestley’s drawing room skewering of the monied classes speaks volumes about what follows. Written at the end of the Second World War and set two years before the First, Priestley’s play took the whodunnit formula and gave it a social conscience that Daldry’s production explodes into view.   At the heart of this is Inspector Goole, who gatecrashes the fancy dinner held by factory owning industrialist Arthur Birling to celebrate his daughter Sheila’s forthcoming nuptials with the equally well-heeled Gerald Croft. Birling’s feckless dipso son Eric is also in attendance, with queen bee Sybil set to make her entrance.    Goole arrives with news of the death of a young woman called Eva Smith. This may have been by her own hand, but as her assorted circumstances are laid bare, the Birlings appear to be complicit in her demise en masse. It ...