Coffee-Table Notes

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow Four stars   The ongoing reboots of Arthur Conan Doyle’s genius detective has kept his creation on trend well into the twenty-first century. Jennifer Dick’s boutique stage version for Bard in the Botanics’ latest non-Shakespeare outing stays true to the forensic peccadilloes of Conan Doyle’s original while putting a feminist spin on things.    Dick weaves together three stories; The Adventure of Abbey Grange, A Scandal in Bohemia, and The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton. At the centre of these is Irene Adler, aka The Woman, the former actress and opera singer who left her mark on the Conan Doyle canon after getting the better of Holmes.    As both seasoned Sherlockians and Wikipedia will tell you, however, Irene only ever appeared in one original Holmes story. That was A Scandal in Bohemia, first published in the Strand magazine in1881 as the first of 56 Holmes missives following two novels. Dick’ considerable liberty taking...

Theatre 118, Glasgow Three stars    For the last month, Theatre 118 has hosted four editions of Play of the Week. This is a series of new short plays rehearsed and produced on no budget in a makeshift sixty seat studio space in a former city centre office block the company currently call home. This has been at the behest of Outerspaces, a Scotland wide initiative to open up unused buildings to artists in order to create work without external financial pressures. While Outerspaces has been embraced mainly by the visual art community, those behind Theatre 118 have seized the opportunity to reveal a seam of untapped theatrical talent that exists outwith the mainstream.    This final play of the season sets out its store in a spartan high rise in Springburn, where old Ms Maara sits waiting for a knock on the door. A murder has been committed, and a High Court appeal from the apparently guilty party is ongoing. When a man from the council turns up and starts asking Ms Maa...

Botanic Garden, Glasgow Four stars    On the street, the barricades are full of bouquets tied on in tribute to the victims of the teenage gang warfare that runs riot throughout Bard in the Botanics’ latest look at Shakespeare’s tragedy of young lovers. Gordon Barr’s outdoor production sets out its store on designer Hannah Grace Currie’s neglected building site. This becomes an adventure playground for the tracksuit sporting rebels without a cause who need to build a kingdom of their own.   While Mercutio and Benvolio might be happy to represent the Montague young team in a square go with Tybalt and the Capulet kids, as soon as Romeo and the boys gatecrash Juliet’s family do, our hero’s one-track mind is set on her alone. Juliet may be up for it too, but if either of them gets found out they’ll be grounded for life, or worse.    The perils of puppy love in the middle of a family feud are plain to see in Barr’s production, which has a mere five actors carry the pl...

Few artists have altered the physical landscape more than Andy Goldsworthy. For half a century now, the Cheshire born sculptor has used natural materials to alter outdoor spaces in ways that are both temporary and monumental. To mark the occasion, Goldsworthy’s work is celebrated at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh with Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years, a major exhibition that opens in July 2025 with a mix of old and new creations that combine to create its own environment.   Prior to this, in April, Jupiter Artland sculpture park outside Edinburgh will show WORK BEGAT WORK: Ian Hamilton Finlay & Andy Goldsworthy. This will display Goldswothy’s permanent commissions alongside work by Finlay, bringing together two of Jupiter Artland’s great inspirations in tandem with Finlay’s own National Galleries of Scotland retrospective as well as Goldsworthy’s RSA show.   “ We've been working on it now for a couple of years, so it's a bit more than an exhibition,” Goldsworthy says...

Leith Theatre , Edinburgh Four stars   Irvine Welsh’s new novel, Men in Love, is on sale in Leith Theatre’s foyer, its soundtrack album is launched in Leith next weekend, and a new Welsh based documentary, Reality is Not Enough, will close this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival next month. As an example of local boy done good, this brief run of Davie Carswell’s stage version of Welsh’s 2002 sequel to Trainspotting is a welcome addition to this spate of high profile activity surrounding the Leith born novelist.    Having begun its life on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2022 five years after Danny Boyle filmed Welsh's book as T2, Carswell's adaptation became a West End hit. Bringing it all back home for what probably won't be the last time is living testament to the ongoing power of Welsh’s ever expanding back catalogue.    The handy translations of Leith patois projected onto the back wall of the stage lest a passing west coaster stumble into the bui...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars    John Buchan probably couldn’t have predicted the liberties  maverick film director Alfred Hitchcock would take with his 1915 novel, in which dashing Richard Hannay takes flight to Scotland after a night at the theatre throws him into a world of intrigue and adventure. Hitchcock too might have raised an eyebrow regarding how writer Patrick Garland transformed his 1935 big screen adaptation into a pocket sized stage pastiche requiring just four actors to do the business.    Garland’s irreverent hybrid of Hitchcock and Buchan’s creations has run and run for two decades now and counting. Ben Occhipinti’s new Pitlochry Festival Theatre production breathes fresh life into a show that has tremendous fun with the existing material while managing to put a personal stamp on things.    This is led by Alexander Service as Hannay, who flaunts his character’s matinee idol looks with a nice line in self parody as he flees...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four stars   Now, here’s a funny one. Take three comedians, household names the lot of them during the 1970s, and all used to dying a death on the variety circuit during their early years. Then, like some celestial impresario, put them on the same bill, and see who comes out laughing.    Such is the premise behind Paul Hendy’s play, revived for a UK tour following a west end run after being a hit of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Hendy’s conceit is to put Tommy Cooper, Bob Monkhouse and Eric Morecambe in a grotty dressing room where the wall is adorned by photographs of other greats of the comedy world no longer with us.    Over the next eighty minutes, professional competition develops into a philosophical dissection of what people find funny. This is punctuated by some well-honed gags that sees each man go some way to reveal the personal drive behind their acts, be it Cooper’s ramshackle magic show, Morecambe’s double act with Ernie Wise...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   The football season may theoretically be over for the summer, but as diehard fans know in their bones, it never really ends. With this in mind, this latest and apparently final run of Davie Carswell’s loving homage to one of Celtic Football Club’s greatest heroes, whose life was so cruelly cut short by skin cancer in 2008 aged just 51, could probably be seen as either a pre season warm-up.    And what a match Carswell and director Adam Felix O’brien have knitted together. Burns is brought to life by way of a series of dramatised anecdotes that make up the story of a man who came up from Glasgow’s Calton district to become a top-flight player and manager of the team that was already in his blood. As the play makes clear too, Burns never forgot his own description of himself as ‘a supporter who got lucky.’   Football may be at the play’s centre, but Carswell’s script focuses on the man beyond, be it as husband, father, devout Cathol...

Theatre 118, Glasgow Three stars   Serial killers have been a mainstay of true crime TV for decades. Julie Calderwood’s new play puts the makers of such programmes in the dock as much as their subjects in a work that looks at men in power and the abuses they wield on the women who get in their way.    Calderwood sets her play in a maximum-security prison, where man of the people TV host Hugo Cameron prepares for his exclusive interview with Thomas Cullen. Cullen is incarcerated for the murders of five women, but the interview is his last chance to convince the world of his innocence, with his on camera plea aimed especially at his daughter.    Before all that, researcher Grace has had to navigate her way between the two evils that confront her. On the one hand, putting up with Hugo’s old school obnoxiousness seems to be part of the job description. On the other, Thomas’ initial charm points to a different side of a man with nothing to lose.    On camer...

Ten seconds into Linder’s new performance creation, and a baby starts crying. It’s Saturday afternoon in Mount Stuart House, the gothic country pile on the Isle of Bute, and the storm outside has already provided a dramatic backdrop to  A kind of glamour about me  and  its accompanying exhibition, which sees Linder drawing from Victorian photographs of a family dressing up for some kind of Alice in Wonderland cosplay.    The title comes from Walter Scott, who wrote how ‘There is a kind of glamour about me, which sometimes makes me read dates, etc, in the proof-sheets, not as they actually do stand, but as they ought to stand.’ Such notions chime with Linder’s own mystical fantasias.   For a moment at the start of the performance, one wonders whether the infant wail is being conjured up by composer Maxwell Sterling on his electric cello at the side of the stage. Either way, it seems to fit with the maelstrom that follows as a quartet of extravagantly cl...

By the time Ken Currie graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1983 his work was steeped in politically driven socialist realism. The acquisition of two of Currie’s works from that time - Union Organiser (1987) and The Calton Activist (1987) – highlight the significance of such early pieces.     Currie is probably best known today for paintings such as Three Oncologists (2002), a study of three doctors at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee. More recently, Currie’s fascination with mortality and the body saw him paint Unknown Man (2019), a portrait of forensic anthropologist Dame Sue Black. Many of Currie’s works are set against dark backgrounds full of foreboding that suggests his figures are spotlit as if for a film.   Currie’s early career saw him became part of a generation of artists – Steven Campbell, Stephen Conroy, Peter Howson and Adrian Wiszniewski were others – brought together in 1985 for the New Image Glasgow exhibition at the Third Eye Centre, now the site of the C...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   Happy endings don’t come easy in Elizabeth Newman’s new adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s twentieth century jazz age American classic. Produced for the 100th anniversary of the novel’s publication in this co-production between Pitlochry Festival Theatre and Derby Theatre, Fitzgerald’s ennui laden yarn of vaulting ambition lays bare how money may talk, but it also corrupts.    As with the book, the story is told by Nick Carraway, here a wannabe writer observing the scene he accidentally falls into with an eye for myth making where everything and everyone becomes material. And what a gift Jay Gatsby is, a self-made nouveau riche socialite with a murky background who only wants to impress his former lover Daisy. She may have sold her soul to marriage with nasty Tom, but is tempted back into Gatsby’s social whirl with devastating results.    Sarah Brigham’s production sets out its store on Jen McGinley’s neon tinged set of s...

Theatre 118, Glasgow Four stars   Everyone has their crosses to bear in Chris Patrick’s new play, in which a couple of believers meet in the sort of outdoor venue where decidedly unchristian things might happen in order to curry favour with the big guy upstairs. Our hapless pair aim to do this by way of hammer, nails, some handy DIY and a lot of faith to muffle the screams. When an angel finally does turn up to show them the way, rather than some beatific saviour bathed in a holy glow, this winged wonder is a grumpy naysayer who keeps his halo in his briefcase and is in permanent dispute with his boss.    The Lord moves in mysterious ways in Colin McGowan’s rapid-fire production that sees Patrick’s stream of one liners go beyond what initially looks like an extended routine into a scabrous comic look at the painful extremes of blind faith. Erin Scanlan’s naive disciple makes a kooky comic foil to Ross Flynn’s self appointed right hand man of God, played by Flynn as a...

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow Four stars   Don’t be fooled by the sound of thunder that opens this seasonal outdoor take on Shakespeare’s sauciest rom-com, already seen in several different guises over the last twenty-four years of Bard in the Botanics’ summer takeover of Glasgow’s leafiest gardens. The sound effect is likely just an in-joke on how many times rain has stopped play over the years.    This weekend, however, the gods - and more importantly, the sun - shone on Gordon Barr’s Celtic tinged affair that both sartorially and spiritually seemed to look to the early 1970s free festival scene. This was a time when assorted hippies, freaks and seekers after enlightenment jumped aboard the New Age caravan to get their collective heads together in the country.    Much of this styling is down to Carys Hobbs’ extravagant set and costume design, a magnificent multi coloured patchwork of faux regal exotica. The sound travelling from the two outdoor concerts in Gla...

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow  Four stars    The clock is ticking for the good doctor of Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy of self-destruction, brought to life for this year’s Bard in the Botanics season, tellingly titled Magic – mayhem – and murder.  Jennifer Dick’s three-actor version was first performed in the Kibble Palace back in 2016. Her revisitation is as much a trip into the perils of fantasy wish fulfilment as it was before in an even tauter eighty minutes that sees Faustus throw himself into a tug of love between the two extremes that seem to offer him a lifeline.    Having reached the pinnacle of his profession only to lose his mojo, Faustus’s desires go way beyond the appliance of science. As if by magic, Mephistopheles appears to make him an offer he can’t refuse. Only the Good Angel hanging on his shoulder is standing in his way.   As in Dick’s original production, Faustus is embodied by a returning Adam Donaldson as a frustrated academic wh...