Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Four stars   Blood is a lot thicker than water for Oskar and his new friend Eli in Jack Thorne’s stage version of Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist’s much-filmed teen vampire novel. Revived here by director Finn den Hertog in a production performed by final year acting students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Oskar is a teenage schoolboy bullied by the tough kids at school. Eli appears to be the girl next door who can more than hold her own in a scrap.    As their friendship clicks, the pair tap out after dark messages to each other in morse code on the bedroom wall they share. When the local murder rate increases at the hands of some kind of blood sucking serial killer, alas, for Eli and Oskar, the going gets weird.   Den Hertog has his cast play out Oskar and Eli’s slow burning rites of passage at an almost funereal pace that at times resembles a Scandi-noir thriller rather than the spate of supernatural...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars   “Welcome to Dreamland” says the host known as the Engineer in this rebooted production of lyricist Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel  Schönberg ’s Vietnam war inspired musical. Originally produced by Cameron Mackintosh, who is still on board with fellow producer Michael Harrison now in charge, Boublil and  Schönberg ’s epic update of Madame Butterfly is now a staggering 36 years old.    The atrocities of Vietnam and the subsequent fallout that rocked America throughout the 1970s may be getting further away in time, but even on this year’s fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, remains in living memory. Whether Boublil and Schonberg’s vision is an accurate part of that memory is up for discussion, but it remains a theatrical phenomenon that still fills main houses.    Inspired by a photograph of a Vietnamese woman leaving her child at the gate of the airport en route to live with their American ex GI fat...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Five stars   “Four scruffy working class oiks?” says one of the the posh twits who have just accidentally ended up managing one of the most incendiary musical forces of the 1960s. “It’s the new thing.” So it goes with the history of British pop since some of those oiks first strapped on a guitar. The story of The Kinks is a quintessential part of that history. It is also one that should be required reading at all music industry teach-ins lest a younger generation of wannabe rock stars get caught up in a similar mire. In the case of the Kinks, preternatural talent and working class ambition are put through an industry wringer of success, exploitation, burnout and a residue of cynicism that sits alongside a brilliant and era defining back catalogue.    This is hardly the stuff of dancing in the aisles jukebox musicals, perhaps, but as Edward Hall’s production of Joe Penhall’s script has shown since it was first seen more than a decade ago, it has mad...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars    Halloween is about to bite, the party frocks are on, and a creepy time is about to be had by all round at Auntie Sandra’s place. Such is the state of play in Éimi Quinn’s new comedy for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s ongoing season of lunchtime theatre. Sandra and her niece Lisa are dressed to kill, and judging by the fact that Sandra has just battered Lisa’s cheating husband into the kitchen Lino, death very much becomes them.    But what to do with the body? The only solution, it seems, is to do a Sweeney Todd and cut their prey into enough tiny pieces to fill up several bin bags. If only the duo’s stream of gentleman callers weren’t constantly interrupting them from the task at hand, be it busy body neighbour Dennis, whose sole saving grace is his intimate knowledge of bin collecting times; or crap clairvoyant Mark, who seems intent on attempting the exorcise the place. With an unseen builder also trying to get through Auntie ...

Perth Theatre Four stars    Seasonal snow came early to Perth last weekend in this high-class tribute to the songs of Irving Berlin, who transformed the Great American Songbook with some of the twentieth century’s greatest showtunes. This was despite the fact that Berlin couldn’t read sheet music and only had limited piano skills.   White Christmas alone has become a tinsel tinged evergreen that graced two musicals in its first flourish, was picked up by all the greats, from Bing Crosby to Frank Sinatra and beyond. The song has since become a guaranteed showstopper at festive functions and family gatherings ever since. There is, of course, a story behind how Berlin came to write it.    Writer Jane Livingstone and director April Chamberlain use this as the perfect excuse for a fantastical burl through Berlin’s greatest hits that sees the song itself show up in Berlin’s Tin Pan Alley office. This is occupied by Moneta, who may or may not be a gallus goddess who be...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   The stars and stripes stands unassumingly unfurled throughout the courtroom scenes of Bartlett Sher’s production of West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin’s take on Harper Lee’s much loved novel. The flag may never impose, but, given the story’s themes of institutionalised racism, justice, truth and the American way, its silent symbolism is hard to ignore.    Lee’s novel tells  how a young black man in small town Alabama named Tom Robinson is found guilty of raping Mayella Ewell, the daughter of local bigot Bob Ewell, despite it being a physical impossibility. It may be set in the 1930s, but was published in 1960, just as the civil rights movement was coming to the fore. Sorkin retains the original setting, but in the wake of Black Lives Matter and the rise of the American right, its resonances today loom ever larger.   Sorkin dovetails the action between the courtroom and the outside porch of Atticus Finch, the widowed prope...

When Cumbernauld Theatre was turned down by Creative Scotland for Multi Year Funding in January this year, it felt like a wilful rejection of one of the most significant grassroots artistic initiatives in Scotland over the last half-century.   With 251 arts organisation making successful applications care of a significant financial uplift to Creative Scotland from the Scottish Government, a number of mainly grassroots organisations received MYF for the first time.   Another thirteen organisations were supported by a £3.2m ‘Development Fund’, with the potential of them joining the MYF portfolio in 2026/27. These included the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, the Scottish Poetry Library,, and Culture and Business Scotland. First time applicants for MYF in this group included the Hidden Door festival, Hebrides Ensemble, and Culture, Heritage and Arts Assembly, Argyll and Isles (CHARTS). Of previous recipients of long term funding, only Cumbernauld wasn’t invited to the party.  ...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars    Everybody’s a drama queen in Anton Chekhov’s end of the nineteenth century meditation on the emotional merry-go-round of a bunch of self-absorbed theatrical types all in love with the wrong person. Ageing actress Arkadina is having an absolutely fabulous time as a writer’s moll to literary magpie Trigorin, for whom everything and everyone is material for his stories. Arkadina may still think of herself as a leading lady, but it is her try-too-hard playwright son Konstantin who is centre stage at the start as he tries to impress would-be actress Nina by casting her in his new experimental opus.    Nina, alas, only wants to be famous. While she becomes starstruck with Trigorin in the hope that some of his charisma will rub off on her, Konstantin’s angry young man routine catches the attention of sulky goth in waiting Masha. Masha in turn is doted on with puppy dog devotion by schoolteacher Medvendenko.    All this...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Three stars   Flick and Pie are in love. They do their courting by text message from the back of late night buses and under the duvet, fall big for each other and live happily ever. Except, things don’t quite work out like that, as we discover when Pie ends up in A&E with a bloody face after defending Flick’s honour. It wasn’t the tough lads on the bus that caused the damage, however, but someone a whole lot closer to home. Flick might have thought Pie has told her everything over the last few years of their beautiful romance, but it turns out there are a few things she doesn’t know.   Laila Noble’s new play for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest season of lunchtime theatre is a fast talking love story that starts off chock-full of youthful charm before the big bad world beyond makes some rude intrusions in terms of domestic bliss. This is carried in Noble’s own production by a pair of dynamic performances from Stephanie MacGaraidh as Flick ...

Terry Lane – Theatre director, writer   Born September 7, 1937; died August 7, 2025     Terry Lane, who has died aged 87, was a theatre director who inadvertently changed the theatrical lexicon forever. As one of the co-founders of Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in 1962 in its original home in a former brothel off the High Street, it was Lane whose misreading of what was actually ‘transverse’ theatre – an auditorium with seating either side of the performing area – gave this new home of the radical and avant-garde its name. By the time anyone realised, the name had stuck, and a theatre legend was born.   The first night of Lane’s opening Traverse production in January 1963 of Jean Paul Sartre’s play, Huis Clois provided another legend, when actress Colette O’Neil was accidentally stabbed on stage by fellow performer Rosamund Dickson – also Lane’s fiancé and future wife. While O’Neil thankfully survived, the headlines the incident made attracted audiences, and the Trave...

4 stars   Absence is everywhere in Matthew Arthur Williams’ new series of photographs. It’s there – and not there – in the barren grasslands where empty chairs sometimes sit in Williams’ pictures. When he appears – naked, posed, in repose – Williams embraces the solitariness in a display not so much an Eden-like retreat as a contemplation in search of himself.   The heart of this body of work made between 2024 and 2025 comes in Another Allegory, a twenty-one minute film developed during a residency at Cove Park and first seen in Nottingham in August 2025. Here, oblique little fragments of music, image and spoken word occupy the spaces without ever overwhelming them. Shot in hazy home movie style 16mm, the camera lingers on secret spaces that don’t look much in daylight, but after dark, who knows?   Images of chopped down trees alternate with close ups of Williams’ collaborator Blaize Henry playing violin. A bare torsoed young man plays a steel drum. A photograph of one of...

Òran Mór , Glasgow  Three stars    Showbiz, as any would-be bill-topper will tell you at length given half the chance, is a fickle mistress. One minute you’re front page news and the world and it’s mistress want a prime piece of you, the next you’re last year’s thing, over the hill and box office poison. But what about those who never hit the big time beyond the ever decreasing circuit they’re trudging around belting out the same old numbers that were once hits for other people?    Come on down Sian Silver, the still game diva put in the spotlight in composer Brian James O’Sullivan and writer Hannah Jarrett-Scott’s mini musical for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest lunchtime theatre season. Sian has been treading the boards since forever in her mirror ball styled outfit, but with audiences down and other attractions all the rage she might just have sung her last number.    This doesn’t stop the creepy super fans hovering round her dressing room in the ...

Dundee Rep Four stars The past is everything in Tennessee Williams’ breakout play, first seen in 1944, but eighty years on as heartbreaking as it ever was in Dundee Rep’s new production. For its semi-autobiographical narrator Tom, it’s about trying to outrun that past and all its broken memories that linger, but failing at every turn. The only way to purge the demons chasing him, it seems, is to conjure them into life in the play we’re watching.    For Tom’s mother Amanda and his work mate Jim, it’s about myth-making on past glories, now lost to lives of disappointment and under achievement. And for Tom’s sister Laura, her past has already shaped a future of lost dreams by being too terrified of herself to live. Like Laura’s glass ornaments that provide some kind of salvation, all four are on the verge of breaking into tiny pieces.    As the lights go up on Christopher Jordan-Marshall’s Tom in Andrew Panton’s production, the blank canvas of his romanticised memories ...

War Horse  Festival Theatre, Edinburgh until October 11. In a month of big hitters, the latest Edinburgh visit for the National Theatre of Great Britain’s staging of Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 First World War set anti war novel about a young boy and his horse remains a remarkable theatrical feat. Featuring life-size puppets from South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company, Marianne Elliot and Tom Morris’ original production was first seen in 2007, with Katie Henry picking up the baton for this current outing. As the Herald said in its review when the show galloped into Glasgow earlier this year, the bond between boy and horse ‘provides a totem of hope in a world of despair throughout a still powerful production.     The Glass Menagerie  Dundee Rep until October 18;  Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, October 21-25; Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, November 4-8. Tennessee Williams’ semi autobiographical 1944 play based around a dysfunctional family living in a St. Louis t...

The Studio, Edinburgh Three stars As Scotland’s legends go, the one about the wrestling bear who became an international superstar is up there with the best. Even better, the story of how professional grappler Andy Robin and his wife Maggie bought the bear as a cub and welcomed it into the bosom of the family is all true.     Younger generations who never witnessed Hercules during his colourful lifespan can use this brand new play presented by the Tenterhooks company as an entry point into his life and times with Andy and Maggie. This fifty-minute child friendly confection was brought together by company member and lead artist on the show Fergus Dunnet. Hercules is brought to life by way of a set of ever expanding puppets by Dunnet and Gretchen Maynard-Hahn, all operated and inhabited by Suzie Ferguson.   Co-directed by Dunnet and Emily Reutlinger, the show was devised with Ferguson and fellow performers Diane Thornton as Maggie and Ben Winger as Andy. The result is a cha...