Coffee-Table Notes

Giles Havergal – Theatre director, Actor, writer   Born June 9, 1938; died August 23, 2025     Giles Havergal, who has died aged 87, was a towering figure in Scottish theatre. As co-artistic director of Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre for thirty-three years, Havergal helped redraw the theatrical map of Glasgow, Scotland and the world. Working alongside writer/director Robert David MacDonald and designer/director Philip Prowse, from his arrival in the Gorbals in 1969 to his departure in 2003, Havergal blazed a trail of radicalism that reinvigorated the Citz as an international powerhouse.   The tone was set from the start with Havergal’s 1970 all male production of Hamlet that featured nudity, sex and swearing. With the press as outraged as some of the city high hid yins,  some schools cancelled their planned visit. The attention this brought to the production made it box office gold, with many school pupils going to see the show of their own volition.  ...

3 stars    A death in the family does funny things to people. Take Sara and Saskia, two very different sisters who are about to commemorate the first anniversary of their mother’s passing. With Sara camped up in her mum’s old flat, high-flyer Saskia turns up unannounced ready to party, with boyfriend Mark – or is it Mike? - following shortly after. There are ashes to spread and speeches to be made. If only they’d remembered to invite anyone.     Francesca Davies-Cáceres’ production of Florence Lace-Evans’ play hits the ground running in an old school one-room drama that throws a cast of disparate personalities together in a sit-com style set-up. This involves a phallic balloon, a bowl of trifle, a bow and arrow, and a squirrel called Gerald. This makes for some turbo charged sparring between Lace-Evans as Sara and Alexandra O’Neill as Saskia before Jonas Moore provides a gormless foil as Mark.    Developed with SOHO Theatre Labs, Lace-Evans’ script begins w...

3 stars     Sophia Wolbrom is going places. She may not have arrived yet in this sparky New Yorker’s debut show, but she’s getting there. Wolbrom’s autobiographical monologue charts her rites of passage, from musical loving weirdo kid growing up in straight laced Westchester, to where she is now, a real live performer doing her thing on the Fringe. Inbetween are everyday tales of rock school, summer camp and assorted detours inspired by friends, mentors and sheer determination to succeed.    It’s the sort of story that a million others in Edinburgh are living out right now in their own way, and perhaps Wolbrom’s tale should be used as a teach-in for similarly starstruck ingénues about to embark on the same road. Wolbrom is very much her own person here, however, and tells her story with a mix of intimacy and charm that draws you in to her world.    With direction by Kevin Qian for Wolbrom’s Know Smoke Events company, Wolbrom punctuates her st...

4 stars  Poor old Sherlock Holmes. The one and only self styled consulting detective comes home to roost in David Stuart Davies’ hour long concoction that looks at what is effectively Holmes’ last trip in more ways than one. It’s 1916, and Holmes returns to the rooms in Baker Street he once shared with Dr. Watson. Holmes has just been to Watson’s funeral, and all he has left now are old war stories he regales to the thin air where he conjures up the spirits of Moriarty, Inspector Lestrade and a cast of thousands.    Originally written for the late Roger Llewellyn, Holmes is resurrected in Gareth Armstrong’s gothic looking production by Nigel Miles-Thomas, who brings a steely and gimlet-eyed presence to Holmes. While Davies’ script has enough familiar yarns to keep Sherlockians happy, it goes beyond a greatest hits set to bring some of the personal frailties of the man to the fore as he attempts to numb the roar of the modern world.    This is brought ...

4 stars    The sixties may swing in Emily Woof’s new solo play, but while the doors of perception are opened, women are treated as sexual playthings in the name of so called liberation.    Plus ca change for Jane, a woman clearing out her dead mother’s things while recovering from the collapse of her marriage. A job in TV on a documentary about the women of the sixties, however, looks like a big break. As Jane looks into her mum’s history as a teenage Beatles fanatic, beyond the records and love letters to John Lennon, a more troubling past is revealed. Enter Valerie Solanis, whose attempt to blow Andy Warhol out of the New York underground has an effect on both women.    Hamish McColl’s Shared Experience production uses vintage news footage and a rousing fab four soundtrack to illustrate a tale of three women down the decades and the institutional and personal abuse they are forced to accept.    Woof throws herself into each role with an initial ...

4 stars  Lily has had enough in Gabrielle Beasley’s new solo play, in which a lone blow for womankind becomes a call to arms as Lily unexpectedly finds her tribe. As she singles out the men who at various points abused each of her mates, Lily becomes a one-woman vigilante squad who resembles a south London Valerie Solanas. It is the revelations of what happened to Lily and her mum to push her to such extremes, however, that gives the play its meaning.    As Lily ‘fesses up to her actions, Beasley uses the voices of her assorted mates by way of the dick head men who finally meet their match. When Lily joins forces with a support group of kindred spirit super heroines, references to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charlie’s Angels are telling.      Beasley’s street-smart delivery in Bethany Pitts’ production resembles the sort of punky feminist theatre that came out of the 1970s alternative cabaret circuit. Given the context of a modern world where wom...

4 stars   A photograph of blues legend Robert Johnson is projected onto the back wall at the start of this epic homage to some of rock and roll’s more precocious talents, who all breathed their last aged just 27. As Johnson’s Crossroad Blues is reinvented by the band on stage as a barroom rocker, it sets the tone for a seventy-minute power through as many greatest hits by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse as time will allow.    Zac Tyler’s production for Australia’s Amplified House company bring together what amounts to an Aussie supergroup, with vocalists Dusty Lee Stephensen (Wanderers), Kevin Mitchell (Jebediah, Bob Evans), Carla Lippis (Mondo Psycho) and Sarah McLeod (The Superjesus), leading the charge.    With line drawings of the dead icons projected behind them, rather than attempt some Stars in Their Eyes type impressions, each singer stamps their own personality on the classics to make them their own. Like the word...

4 stars   Meet Jade. Like many ambitious working class young women, Jade is too smart to stay where she is for long. As Scouse as a Ken Dodd joke and with attitude to match, after life in a call centre no longer appeals, Jade works her false eyelashes off and gets herself into Cambridge.    The getting of wisdom that follows finds our Jade having a crash course in campus snobbery as she gets a job as a cleaner to subsidise her course fees, bags herself a dim but fit posh boy and is left with an imposter syndrome the size of the Mersey, despite being smarter than pretty much anyone else there. Only when she meets a kindred spirit on the train north does her real education begin.    This brings us bang up to date in Jade Franks’ wisecracking solo play, brought to gloriously rude life by director Tatenda Shamiso for JFR Productions.    Franks’ motor mouthed dynamo is a gobby descendent of Willy Russell’s Educating Rita or Shirley Valentine reinv...

3 star s   ‘YOU’RE DOING SEX WRONG’. So says Ron Low, a David Byrne hair-alikey wearing snazzy glasses, a t-shirt emblazoned with the aforementioned slogan and a fashion magazine friendly kilt from which dangles a tube shaped weight swinging from what we shall politely call the sporran area.    The latter is the TLC Tugger, an implement of Low’s design to help offset the effects of circumcision in a non-surgical manner. Low is on a mission here, as he regales us with some horror show statistics regarding the perilous effects of what some might consider a rites of passage, but which can cause long lasting and sometimes horrific damage, not least, it seems, in one’s sex life.    Low’s lo-fi teach-in is punctuated by a series of songs that sees him accompanying himself on a harpejii, an electronic instrument invented in the early noughties that looks like a hi-tech ironing board.    Over a series of didactic ditties that act as a call to arms and other pi...

Church Hill Theatre  Five stars    All the world’s a stage in Canadian provocateur Cliff Cardinal’s show, which has arrived in town this week to close Edinburgh International Festival’s theatre programme after touring the globe. This was demonstrated on Thursday night at least, when some of what happened in the auditorium proved to be just as interesting as what was provoking it.    Two early interventions saw a gentleman on one side of the auditorium and a lady in the front row make their feelings on what they were witnessing explicitly plain. When the person  attempting to leave shortly afterwards unfortunately fell on their way out, it caused Cardinal to shut the show down for a couple of minutes in an action even he didn’t expect.   But what were they so upset about? So-called radical Shakespeares, after all, are ten a penny in Edinburgh on the Fringe just now. In a show that calls its own bluff several times over, that would be telling.  ...

Royal Lyceum Theatre Five stars    Life is hell for Faustus in South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company’s revival of their mid 1990s take on Goethe’s classic tragedy. Handspring’s take on the story of the man who sold his soul and saw the world before crashing and burning is reinvigorated as a tragicomic look at how one man can become immersed in a corrupt world.   In William Kentridge’s production, Faustus may initially think he’s struck gold as he’s led by Mephisto on a grand tour of African states, but exploitation is everywhere. In a show led by Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones’ array of puppets, Wessel Pretorius’ dicky-bow sporting Mephisto is somewhat contrarily the only human on show. Pretorius plays him as a fast talking shyster, who oversees the black economy of selling souls like a quiz show host in charge of a call centre.   As for the puppets, Atandwa Kani and Eben Genis bring a hang dog Faustus to life in ingenious fashion alongside what sounds like a towns...

If all the world’s a stage, Cliff Cardinal has moved things further than most in his attitude towards Shakespeare. Billed as As You Like It – A Radical Retelling, on paper, at least, Cardinal’s Edinburgh International Festival debut sounds like a deliberate exercise in ripping up the theatrical rulebook. Whether anyone actually does like what Cardinal brings to his performance remains to be seen, but they should probably leave all expectations at the door.   “ Cliff is a very unique, important Canadian artist ,” says Chris Abraham, artistic director of the Toronto based Crow’s Theatre, who commissioned Cardinal’s new work. “W hen we came out of the pandemic in Canada, it was really important for us, after a period of cultural reckoning that was a global cultural reckoning in the theatre, to think about the practices that we use in making theatre, our relationship to audiences, and the habits, traditions and expectations of our audience.’   Cardinal’s commission chimed with rep...

4 stars   “What a strange way to hold power?” So says the Indian rebel strapped to a cannon and awaiting execution at the hands of the English officer before him. Colonial forces have quelled the 1857 Indian uprising, and now all that is left is the legend that follows. How that turns out, however, depends on who is telling the story.    As Niall Moorjani’s shackled upstart waxes forth on the circumstances behind their own personal rebellion, this is taken to farcical degree when Jonathan Oldfield’s pompous officer from the 78th Highlanders steps out of the audience. He then proceeds to effectively direct his prisoner to tell the story he wants to hear and denounce his cause enough to save his life.    What follows as the two adversaries spar in Moorjani and Oldfield’s co-production of Moorjani’s play is a back and forth that is part history lesson, part philosophical debate, and part plea for acceptance in the face of military rule.    The officer’s r...

4 stars     When Tom turns up at his dead boyfriend’s family farm, he gets more than he bargained for in Quebecois writer Michel Marc Bouchard’s play, translated by Armando Babaioff for Brazilian company Cena Brasil Internacional’s mud spattered production.   While Tom’s lover’s mother Ágatha knows nothing about her son’s romantic life, his brother Francis is a brute who spars with Tom to create an unmistakable sexual tension. Tom becomes a kind of cuckoo in the nest before all hell breaks loose when a woman turns up claiming to be the dead man’s girlfriend.    While the tone of the psychosexual interplay in Bouchard’s play is decidedly Pinteresque, Rodrigo Portella’s production takes it into more unhinged territory on Aurora dos Campos’s set.    With Babaioff playing Tom, the physical exchanges with Iano Salomao as Francis are delivered with furious intent, while Denise Del Vechio’s Ágatha and Camila Nhary as the woman get caught in the crossfire of a...

4 stars   Marcy Aurora is back. After twenty years in the slammer, the former country music queen is in the studio with a fistful of songs and a story to tell. The only stories the press are interested in, alas, is how Marcy ended up in jail. Marcy, however, has a record to make.   The everyday heartache of Lee Papa’s new play could be set to a million country numbers, and is brought to life here in Papa’s own production for the ad hoc French Broad company by Biz Lyon as a hard bitten Marcie. She is helped along by Catherine Mieses as Colleen, the studio engineer along for the ride, and who knows Marcy’s real life back catalogue better than anyone, egging her on with brutal honesty.   With a smattering of late night songs in a show not that much longer than a Grand Ole Oprey greatest hits record, the result is an intimate look at one woman trying to re-find her place in the world through the people she left behind. By the end, it might have taken a whole lot of hurt, but ...

4 stars    Flick is no angel working as a nurse on the front line of a palliative care ward. When hunky pyrotechnics expert Mark moves in to Room 13, his presence puts a much needed spring in her step and a rustle in her scrubs. This leads Flick to break a heap of professional protocols as she imagines fireworks of her own that don’t turn out quite as planned.     Writer/performer Madelaine Nunn hits the ground running as Flick with a quick fire series of gallows humour gags that only nurses could get away with. She flirts with patients, goes on a bender with an on/off mate and gets into far more trouble than she should. Flick’s charm may be as infectious as her dirty sheets, but beyond her inappropriate antics something more serious is going on.   A hit of the Adelaide Fringe and now brought to Edinburgh as part of the House of Oz programme, Nunn’s life and death monologue is shot through with a gorgeous mix of poignancy and cheek chock-full of empathy and hear...

The two big Edinburgh International Festival shows thus far may have finished their runs, but both James Graham’s Make it Happen , and Belgian company FC Bergman’s Works and Days have left their mark. The former was a Spitting Image style satire of the 2008 banking crisis, focusing on the role played by disgraced RBS head Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin. Co-produced by the National Theatre of Scotland and Dundee Rep, Andrew Panton’s production also starred Brian Cox as the ghost of Adam Smith. The latter was a wordless invocation   On the Fringe, Karine Polwart’s Windblown , an exquisite meditation on a dying palm tree in the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, has also finished its run at the Queen’s Hall, With any luck, Raw Material’s meticulously put together evocation of Polwart’s song cycle will return. In the meantime, there is still plenty of life on the Fringe, with the following some of the best on show.   She’s Behind You Traverse Theatre, various times until August 24 Johnny ...

Church Hill Theatre Four stars     What to do when artists are told by those bankrolling them not to say certain things lest the plug be pulled on them? In the case of those behind this compendium of bite-size plays responding to Art Council England’s guidelines warning those in receipt of public funding not to be ‘political’, you do the exact opposite of what was asked. Leaving aside the very obvious truism that all art is political, the result is a series of urgent statements on the ongoing atrocities being carried out in Palestine and elsewhere.    The show begins with one of the eight-strong ensemble stepping out as a festival director attempting to rein in those programmed. The theme is continued in the next piece, in which the dead victim of a bombing attempts to pitch their story to a theatre director, only to be sidelined with a litany of bureaucrat-speak.   A young man brings his artist activist girlfriend home to his middle class parents who would...

5 stars   Tom Cruise take note. This is not a tribute show to the Shaggs, the 1960s all female trio who were once described as the best worst band ever. The latter may be part of the reason why Mr. Cruise bought the rights to the story of the three New Hampshire sisters forced by their father to form a band which they named after a hairstyle, but its not what this show by the three dervish-like provocateurs who make up the In Bed with My Brother troupe is about.     IBWMB’s core trio of Nora Alexander, Dora Lynn and Kat Cory have instead spewed out a furious three-act explosion that begins with wordless re-enactments of the Shaggs brief lifespan, pulsed by techno driven captions and some hardcore callisthenics. Once the band splits up, those on stage take no prisoners as they run riot to illustrate how, as with the Shaggs, it is men who are the problem.    This is illustrated by actor Nigel Barrett, as the women rise up to invoke the spi...

5 stars  Comic Genius is a much overused term at this time of year, but Marcel Cole’s hour-long homage to the king of silent movie slapstick and beyond warrants such an accolade on several levels.  Opening with a note perfect condensed re-enactment of Chaplin’s 1925 masterpiece, The Gold Rush, Australian clown Cole enlists several audience members as his cast to chart Chaplin’s rise from poverty stricken childhood to the vaudeville stage and global stardom in Hollywood. Cole plays on his in-the-moment interactions with a masterly sense of comic control with a Sunday morning crowd who clearly knew their Chaplin backwards. Drawing from the maestro’s epic 1964 autobiography, Cole goes beyond nostalgia to take in Chaplin’s reluctant move into the talkies and his anti fascist stance in The Great Dictator. His exile to Switzerland after being dragged through the House UnAmerican Activities Committee looks very much like a forerunner of today’s cancel culture.   While the origin...