Coffee-Table Notes

Òran Mór , Glasgow Three stars   What makes a girl’s world is everything in Sara Amini’s new play, whether it is singing revolutionary anthems on the school bus with the gang, dancing at a wedding or singing at the temple of Madonna, Maria Callas and the sublime beats of Iranian pop. Unfortunately for Sara, the woman at the heart of Amini’s play, she grew up in Iran, where women aren’t allowed to sing.    Sara’s answer is to fling herself into a world where she can indulge her passions, from nightclubs to the stage in Paris, London and other hotspots where freedom isn’t frowned upon and she can chase her dreams. With her own child also coming of age, Saria must face up to choices she has no say in.    Amini and co-director Manuel Lavandera’s production sets out its store in Sara’s tastefully cluttered home in this A Play, a Pie and a Pint lunchtime presentation of a show by Amini’s Seemia Theatre company that opened at Camden People’s Theatre earlier this month....

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars    In December 1982, twelve miners descended 2000 feet below the surface of Kinneil Colliery in Bo’ness. This was no ordinary working day, however, but a sit-in protest at the announcement by the National Coal Board of the pit’s imminent closure. Two years before the Miners’ Strike, and with no support from the unions, the protest’s failure was the shape of things to come as British working class culture was transformed forever.    Almost forty-three years after the Kinneil sit-in, Sylvia Dow’s play excavates this piece of local history in a play that is both mournful and monumental. As it honours the recent past, it also looks to the future in a parallel plot in which a couple of centuries hence everyone is living underground, with the perils of outside an alluring totem of what went before.    For those who occupy both time zones in Philip Howard’s production for Dow’s Sylvian company and the Bo’ness based Barony The...

Òran Mó r, Glasgow Three stars   The heat is on when Iain meets Zainab after going in search of a place to cool down. Being downtown Marrakesh, however, things don’t quite turn out as planned. Iain is a gay man from Manchester who turns up at Zainab’s spa. Given the strict rules in Morocco regarding the rights of women, the two shouldn’t even be in the same room, let alone be preparing a very special massage. With Iain wheelchair bound and unable to bear to be touched, even that comes with complications. With protests on the streets outside, Zainab is as alive to the power of dissent as Iain is, and once both let their guard down they find a surprising amount of common ground.    Simon Jay’s new play - the latest in this season’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint series of lunchtime plays - is a warm and human take on everyday solidarity across cultures where differences might normally turn into something toxic. Jay’s script may have a polemical heart, but the way his characters m...

‘I was a bit of a force of nature when I was younger. Nobody was going to challenge me, and nobody did.’   This is Pauline Black talking about her early life in Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story, Jane Mingay’s documentary inspired by Black by Design, the autobiography of the dynamic Selecter vocalist published in 2011. Mingay’s Scottish Screen co-produced film rather handily arrives as The Selecter set out on a tour with the sort of itinerary that would make younger bands feel exhausted.   “ I still enjoy performing with The Selector,’ Black beams over Zoom like a very friendly force of nature, “and we’ll do it while we still can. I don't have any real plans for any kind of retirement, and this tour is an opportunity to celebrate our 45th anniversary of releasing Too Much Pressure. We’ve never really left those songs, even though we’ve always been recording and pushing on.’   The Selecter burst out of the original 2-Tone scene that came straight outta Coventry in 1979 with a ...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Three Stars   When the massed ranks of Scottish Brass champions the Whitburn Band join forces at the end of Lau accordionist and guitarist Martin Green’s new play, alternating with the Fife based Kingdom Brass, the sound they make together is one of unity laced with a bittersweet mix of sadness and euphoria. As the culmination of a show about working class experience in a former mining town decimated by the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike, it is a finale that speaks volumes about everything that went before.   This is embodied by the seventeen-year-old firebrand who gives Green’s play its title. Keli’s everyday life may be chaos as she tends to her mum inbetween shifts at the supermarket and a failing college course, but when she plays her tenor horn with the local brass band she comes alive. Keli’s musical skills are recognised by bandleader Brian, who promotes her to soloist for a competition at the Royal Albert Hall.    While Keli makes it t...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars   A World War Two soldier is playing We’ll Meet Again on the piano at the start of this latest tour of C.S. Lewis’ classic morality tale. The melancholy melody is about the most down to earth thing you’re likely to see over the next two hours of a show that turns its dramatic world upside down in epic fashion. Scaled up by director Michael Fentiman from Sally Cookson’s 2017 version at Leeds Playhouse, the result is spectacular.    The opening song sets the tone for the wartime evacuation of the four Pevensie children, who are decamped to Aberdeen, where the allure for their new home’s spare room proves too much for the eternally curious Lucy. Before she knows where she is she has gone beyond the flea ridden fur coats and landed in Narnia.    As imagined by designer Tom Paris and original designer Rae Smith, the Narnia under the queendom of Katy Stephens’ White Witch’s more resembles some Fritz Lang styled dystopia driven by...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   Esme has gone a bridge too far in Millie Sweeney's new play, her professional debut after it won the St Andrews Playwriting Award. A Glasgow art student who's lost her mojo, Esme has given up, not just on her painting, but for  anything resembling life itself. Harris is just the opposite. He's just scored a new job with a high-class eaterie and is on a roll. He may only be washing dishes, but it's a start.    When Harris saves Esme’s life after she attempts to throw herself into the Clyde, both are affected in radically different ways. As Esme manages to pull herself back to the surface with the help of family, therapy and friends she never knew she had, Harris sinks to the lower depths. As the duo’s parallel lives circle around each other, they trace an all too hazardous line between hope and despair. This is an assured and heartfelt debut from Sweeney, whose initial diary like speeches by Esme and Harris become ever rich...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars    The missionary position, as set down in the gospel according to Mormon, is to spread the word of the Lord as far and as peachy-keenly as possible. Such is the premise behind Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone’s now fourteen-year-old Broadway smash, which returns to Glasgow for a three-week run. For those not already keeping the faith, the show transforms the perfectly coiffed door stopping evangelists from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints into an all singing, all dancing, perma-smiling showbiz troupe.    In-between throwing shapes cheesy enough to have graced a 1950s family friendly variety show, like the animals in the Ark, our heroes go forth two by two as they are packed off to far-flung climes in need of salvation. In the case of goody-two-shoes himbo Elder Price and puppy-dog terminal liar Elder Cunningham, they are tasked to convert the masses in a seemingly godless Uganda. For the locals, alas, a few o...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Three stars   Life is one great big musical for Charlie, the young woman at the heart of Taylor Dyson and Calum Kelly’s lo-fi musical, the latest lunchtime treat as part of Oran Mor’s current A Play, a Pie and a Pint season of bite-size theatre. For Charlie, alas, where once all she had to think about was the job she loved in the Inverness bowling alley that gives the play its title, a run of everyday tragedies suggests any kind of happy ending is a long way off yet.    Having lost her job, her home and all of her family except her brother Ross overnight, Charlie’s solution is to head for Dundee, where her granddad’s long lost brother may or may not be hiding behind sunglasses and a Stetson. Missing presumed lost by Ross, Charlie’s penchant for attracting disaster causes him to fear the worst. Charlie, however, is merely changing lanes as she finds a new song to sing.    There is charm aplenty in Dyson and Kelly’s quirky tale of an innocent abr...

The Pavilion, Glasgow Three stars   All life walks through Kim’s Convenience, the Toronto based corner shop that gives Ins Choi’s play its title. Best known to many from its Canadian Broadcasting Company TV adaptation that ran for five series between 2016 and 2021, and which can still be found on Netflix, Choi’s 201l template set the tone by putting a Korean immigrant and his increasingly westernised family at its centre.    Where Appa (Korean for ‘dad’) works all hours holding court from behind the counter, Umma (‘mum’) quietly keeps the family together. Their daughter Janet has ambitions to be a photographer, while estranged son Jung can only communicate with his mother at church. The shop may be at the heart of the local community, but with Janet looking set to embark on a fine romance with local cop Alex and everything else going on besides, it doesn’t look like Appa will have anyone to leave his empire to any time soon. Jung, however, might just beg to differ.  ...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow  Four stars   The irresistible rise of theatre built on the premise of dramatic calamity both on and back stage has come a long way since it was arguably spawned by Michael Frayn’s ingenious 1982 farce, Noises Off. Since then, the likes of the tellingly named The Play that Goes Wrong has seen a younger generation of artists take what was once a fringe pursuit into the theatrical mainstream.    So it goes as well for the Say it Again, Sorry? company, whose starting point may be Oscar Wilde’s subversive drawing room comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest, but who manage to disrupt it with the sort of anarchic intent that might appeal to dear Oscar himself.   All seems well at first in what looks like a decidedly old school wheeze, as man about town Algernon awaits a visitation from his chum Ernest. When his arrival is announced, alas, his absence is more akin to Waiting for Godot. This prompts an intervention from the show’s director, who ...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars    When radical Italian farceur Dario Fo first performed his scurrilous solo take on biblically inspired yarns penned with Franca Rame back in 1969, revolution was in the air and the peasants were revolting against pretty much anything that was going. A 1970s TV production of Rame and Fo’s play even prompted the Vatican to take a dive into arts criticism when they dubbed it ‘the most blasphemous play in the history of television’.   When the late Robbie Coltrane took to the stage in 1990 with Joseph Farrell’s translation, Rame and Fo’s comic theological riffs were as damning of assorted establishments as ever. Three and a half decades on again, as Farrell’s new Scots version is brought to turbo charged life in this week’s edition of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest season of lunchtime theatre, not much has changed. Nevertheless, Lawrence Boothman’s rude intrusion as an anarchist on the run from the rioting outside the theatre he is seeki...

The Studio, Edinburgh Three stars   Art, life, and the blurring between the two are at the heart of Maria MacDonell’s play, in which MacDonell plays Estelle, a model at a life drawing class run by The Artist. He is the sort of pompous ass whose grand statements seem to have stepped out of the 1950s. As he waits for Estelle, some of the audience sit at easels on the stage as surrogate class members, while those in regular seats are similarly given pencil and paper to sketch out their impressions if they wish.    Only when Estelle arrives does The Artist’s high theory open up into flesh and blood material, as Estelle’s personal archive becomes crucial to her own art. This makes for an impressionistic and abstract self-portrait of bodies, ageing and a life that was once a blank canvas that has become shaded in by a life of incident and colour.    Not since Jacques Rivette’s 1991 film, La Belle Noiseuse, has the relationship between maestro and muse been so exposed,...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   Take three plays, each around an hour in length, and all originally commissioned and performed at Glasgow’s Oran Mor venue as part of the lunchtime phenomenon that is A Play, a Pie and a Pint. Then put them into the Tron’s bijou Changing Room space with a trio of directors and a cast of three in a mini rep season of brand new productions and see what happens.  The result in Studio3, an initiative introduced by the Tron’s new artistic director Jemima Levick, is a bite size showcase of wildly different work.   Alright Sunshine is a monologue by Isla Cowan that sees police officer Nicky describes her life in a day patrolling Edinburgh’s Meadows. As Nicky recounts her observations, her initially chatty portrait takes an increasingly dark turn as a seemingly minor incident over a Frisbee gives way to all too justifiable anger.    Dani Heron is magnificent as Nicky in Debbie Hannan’s tautly paced production. As she delivers Cow...

The Studio, Edinburgh Four stars   When Arthur met Jane, it was love at first spillage. In a crowded bar accidentally serenaded by a Frank Sinatra soundtrack, the red wine might have stained, but the merry dance the couple in waiting stepped out into was all part of Arthur’s plan. A lifetime and the onset of dementia later, alas, Arthur and Jane may sit next to each other like bookends, but Arthur can barely remember either of their names. As soon as their song comes on, however, they are loving each other to the moon and back once more.    Matthew Seager’s beautifully realised two-hander tackles the cruellest of illnesses and the redemptive power of music in exquisitely intimate fashion. Performed by Seager himself as Arthur and Lydia White stepping into Jane’s shoes, the power of Andy Routledge’s production comes in its quiet understatement. As Arthur becomes increasingly dependent on Jane, Jane is overwhelmed by a life she never planned. As Seager and White step out of...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh  Four stars   When Baz Luhrmann made Moulin Rouge in 2001, the last of the Australian auteur’s ‘Red Curtain Trilogy’ after Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet was an audacious fusion of turn of the nineteenth century Paris-by-night bohemianism and contemporary pop bangers. This made for the ultimate backstage musical. Almost a quarter of a century on, director Alex Timbers and writer John Logan’s delirious stage mash up has become a global sensation. First performed in 2018, productions in New York, London and Melbourne are still running, with the show’s first world tour opening in Edinburgh where it is in residence for the next six weeks.   This extensive back-story only goes some way to introduce the sheer scale, ambition and outrageous excess of the three hyperactive hours of  breathless spectacle that is the result. If plot is what you’re after, Logan’s book stays faithful to the film, as American dreamer in search of a scene Christ...