Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   A black hole sign, as a nurse patiently explains to her patient in Uma Nada-Rajah’s new play, is a medical term for the markings of a scan revealing an ever expanding haemorrhaging of the brain. It is also used here by Nada-Rajah as a knowing comment on the state of the UK’s National Health Service, which is equally under attack by predatory parasites who would bleed one of the greatest post Second World War initiatives to the death if they could.   Such is the way in to Nada-Rajah’s very human case study of one night on the frontline of a hospital ward, where Helen Logan’s head nurse Crea is navigating her way through a whirlwind of everyday dramas involving staff as much as patients. Nurse Ani is trying to ensure one of her charges isn’t left alone during the night. Tersia has her silver dancing boots on as past and future collide. Isla is in more pain than she lets on, and there’s a hole in the roof that’s getting bigger by the minute....

Òran Mór , Glasgow Four stars   How to get away with murder? One answer to this age old driving force of pulp fiction the world over might be to look up the historical advocates of the soon to be abolished Not Proven verdict. This long time fixture of the Scottish legal system has been a questionable fudge that effectively gave guilty parties a Get Out of Jail Free card. This was certainly the case back in 1857 when Glasgow society girl Madeleine Smith knocked off her secret French beau Pierre with a dose of arsenic after getting a better offer that also enabled her to stay in the family way.    Such is the starting point for Tom Cooper and Jen McGregor’s bite size musical rendering of this much adapted true crime story for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest season of lunchtime theatre. From the moment Morgan E. Ross’s wannabe pamphleteer Plume steps up to tell the tale to an old school parlour piano soundtrack played live by Sam Macdonald, it is the stuff of prime ti...

Ella Wildridge – Translator, dramaturg   Born  December 27 1945: died August 26, 2025   Ella Wildridge, who has died aged 79, was one of Scottish theatre’s great unsung heroines. As a translator and dramaturg fluent in German and French, and who read in Russian, Italian, Spanish, and later Farsi, Wildridge brought a sense of internationalism to the Scottish stage that included translations of writers from Germany, Quebec and France. Working alongside her partner, playwright Tom McGrath, and then at the Traverse Theatre, Wildridge also helped foster a new generation of Scottish playwrights throughout the 1990s and beyond.   Ella Muriel Wildridge was born  at Clover Hill Farm in Broughton, Peeblesshire,  the youngest of four sisters to  Gilbert Johnson Wildridge and Constance Lila Wildridge (née Hooper). Her father was a Cambridge graduate and farmer who encouraged his daughters’ intellectual pursuits. Her mother studied at the Central School of Speech a...

Cumbernauld Theatre  Four stars    Life is hell for young Òran. Ever since he sold out his best mate Euan and watched him fall into the dark side, that old bond they had at school has long gone. Having already lost his brother, the void in Òran’s life is as painfully obvious as some of the pictures on his mobile. Guilt tripped to the max, the only thing Òran can do is dive into the mess he’s gotten both himself and Euan into and see what he can salvage.    The Orpheus myth was originally a tale of lost love as our hero dug deep into his own soul to rescue Eurydice from the lower depths. Owen Sutcliffe’s reimagining transforms this into something of a boy’s own yarn, in which adolescent angst crossed with peer group pressure and online posturing becomes a mire of bullying, betrayal, digital damnation and even an Alan Partridge chant.     This is brought to life in Jack Nurse’s production for the lively young Wonder Fools company by a suitably heroi...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh  Four stars   In every generation, there is a chosen TV cult that will stand against the reality shows, sitcoms, and forces of prime time darkness. Between 1997 and 2003, that show was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Josh Whedon’s kick-ass yarn concerning Sarah Michelle Geller’s wisecracking new girl in town Buffy Summers and her ever-morphing entourage of high school misfits. Over seven seasons, Buffy and co saw off all manner of vampires, demons and whatever else the Hellmouth beneath Sunnydale High School could throw at them in order to show that the geek really could inherit the earth.    For those of us who witnessed the growing pains of Buffy, from queen nerd and slayer extraordinaire to reincarnated badass and actual saviour of the world, resurrections are welcome in any form. Judging by the Fresher's Week aged crowd who make up a sizeable proportion of the packed audience for Brendan Murphy’s comic compendium of the show’s 144 e...

When  twenty-two people were commissioned by a community arts project in the North-East of Glasgow to take photographic portraits of their fellow Glaswegians, the 30,000 images taken between 1989 and 1993 documented a city and its citizens at work, rest and play. Three decades on, these images have become a vital grassroots archive of a city in flux. They also document a world that existed beyond some of the glossier initiatives that spearheaded Glasgow’s tenure as 1990 European City Of Culture.   Glaswegians was the brainchild of Alistair McCallum, then artist in residence with Cranhill Arts Project, the community initiative founded in 1981. Around the same time, McCallum and artist collaborator Jane Carroll found themselves designing and producing banners and posters for some of the numerous political events that were galvanising assorted protest movements across Scotland. While many of the photographs are in black and white, the posters and banners are rich in colour and em...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars  Something momentous happened at the Citizens Theatre over the weekend. First of all, the official opening night of Frances Poet and Ricky Ross’s brand new play on Friday following a couple of preview performances was the first time the Gorbals based theatre had opened its doors to a first night audience in seven years, as the international institution received a major makeover. The results of this are as plain to see in the spacious new foyer area as they are in the auditorium, which both honours the ghosts of Citizens past even as it remakes and remodels the space for the future. Secondly, Poet and Ross’s play itself brings a heartbreakingly recent tragedy to the stage in hugely ambitious fashion. Through a mix of multiple narrative threads, song, and the massed talents of a remarkable acting company, it honours those who lived and died through the experience with a dramatic gift full of heart and soul.  The night Pan Am flight 103 travel...

4 stars Gary McNair is probably best known for his ever-expanding canon of self performed solo stage works. These have largely been personal passion projects, from homages to Morrissey and Billy Connolly, to McNair’s granddad in the recently revived A Gambler’s Guide to Dying. McNair has also applied his masterly storytelling to new stage versions of classics including Ben Johnson’s The Alchemist and a version of Charles Dickens’ rites of passage novel, Great Expectations, reimagined as Nae Expectations.   Rites of passage are here too in McNair’s urgent version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ultimate boy’s own adventure yarn, stripped down to an hour without losing any of the original’s narrative largesse. McNair sounds both chatty and conspiratorial as cabin boy Jim Hawkins, on the run from his dead dad’s pub and on a mission that sees McNair embody the voices of Billy Bones, Long John Silver and all the rest with an intense sense of unfinished business. Pulsed by Michael John McCar...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   Everyone wants a piece of Robert Burns, from haggis toasting fanboys to those who see out Hogmanay around the world with a chorus of Auld Lang Syne. In the latter case this is sometimes without realising who penned Burns’ rousing community singalong. But what of those who were the main inspiration for Burns’ lusty canon? What have they got to say about the pop star poet’s shagabout ways that left them high, dry and sometimes holding the baby?   This is a question posited in John Binnie’s new play, in which Burns’ mum, Agnes Broun, his much put upon wife Jean Armour, and writer’s moll Clarinda, aka Agnes McLehose,  accidentally meet at the great man’s graveside to pay tribute on the first anniversary of his death in 1797. As they role-play key moments in their respective lives and times with Burns, the three women find common ground through their very different experiences.   Binnie and musical arranger Alyson Orr’s collaboratio...

5 stars There is something profoundly physical about this living retrospective by Andy Goldsworthy, whose environmental interventions into the natural world over the last half-century have literally changed the landscape. Here, Goldsworthy manages to subvert the RSA’s grand interior, which he bends and shapes to his own needs with something truly monumental.   From the moment you step up the stairs either side of a multi coloured woollen rug, you have wandered up the garden path and not so much entered an environment as an entire world. This has been carved, shaped and manipulated into artistic life by Goldsworthy with all the muscle, guts and hard labour that entails.   One room houses stones from 108 graveyards in Dumfries and Galloway. Another is filled with a giant circular curtain of wooden sticks, which you can step inside. A barbed wire fence is hung between pillars blocking off access as with a private field. Red Wall (2025) is an entire gallery wall plastered with red...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars   For a certain generation, the image of William Wallace means a be-mulleted Mel Gibson in Braveheart roaring about freedom from behind Saltire inspired face paint. Fast forward to 2025, and such stuff of Hollywood legend doesn’t quite cut it as imagined history anymore. Or does it?   Whichever way you roll, stand up for Rob Drummond and Dave Hook’s bite-size hip hop musical dissection of the much mythologised thirteenth century knight who led the charge against the English army in 1297, and has been considered king of Scotland’s ‘hood ever since.   Drummond and Hook set out their store in a pub conversation between a trio known only as Scotsman, Wummin and Sassenach. As Hook, Patricia Panther and Manasa Tagaca embody these archetypes, they argue the toss over who Wallace was, what he was all about and whether Scotland’s ultimate hero of independence even existed. Their various interpretations of history are played out through a series of mini...

A Play, a Pie and a Pint  Òran Mór , Glasgow. Season begins September 1.  Glasgow’s renowned lunchtime theatre phenomenon returns with a new season of twelve brand new plays accompanied by the beverages that gives this Glasgow institution its name. It opens with Wallace, Rob Drummond and Dave Hook’s brand new hip hop musical looking at Scotland’s stories beyond the Braveheart mythology and Saltire patterned face paint. Other potential treats include Our Brother, Jack MacGregor’s drama about `Scottish Marxist Malcolm Caldwell, who was shot dead after interviewing Cambodian dictator Pol Pot; Feis, Anna McGrath’s story about a struggling dance school; The Glasgow Poisoner, a true crime story by Tom Cooper and Jen McGregor; and Cheapo, Katy Nixon’s study of what happens when two teenagers play chess in their local KFC. All of which sounds well worth feasting on.     A Toast Fae The Lassies Pitlochry Festival Theatre until September 24 . Robert Burns has been lionised in ...