Coffee-Table Notes

The Studio, Edinburgh Three stars    What do you do when you’re told you’re not the God you say you are? In Dionysus’ case after being barred from Thebes by king Pentheus and his mother Agave in one of Euripides’ defining works, you take revenge on those that disrespected with your own gang, and hell mewnd the lot ofd them.    This is more or less the driving force for Dionysus in Euripides’ much-reimagined  piece of myth-making involving a cast of, if not thousands, then certainly a few. The last time a new version of the play graced Scottish stages was by way of David Greig’s version in 2007, when Dionysus turned up mob handed in the form of Alan Cumming and a gospel choir in tow.    Arriving in Edinburgh hot on the heels of Bard in the Botanics' production of Euripides' other greatest hit, Medea, Ewan Downie’s new take on The Bacchae for the Company of Wolves company couldn’t be more different. Written by Downie, and performed solo by him over ...

Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock Four stars   Alan Spence’s study of the shifting fortunes of a father and son in working class Glasgow was first produced at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in 1982, arriving on a wave of new Scottish voices creating poetry out of the everyday. Spence became better known as a novelist and poet, while Sailmaker went on to become a fixture and favourite of the school curriculum. It was last seen on a professional stage in 1990.    This long overdue revival by director Liz Carruthers reminds us of what a fine dramatist Spence is. His play is a masterpiece that fuses rites of passage and working class ambition with a portrait of poverty and grief in a rapidly disappearing Glasgow. At times it feels like a piece of European neo realism that in any other country would have long seen it adapted for film. As it is, this tour heroically produced by Ayr’s Gaiety Theatre and Greenock’s Beacon Art Centre can’t even get a gig in the city where it is...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   The sun may be shining at the start of Kathy McKean’s devastating version of Euripides’ tragedy, but it doesn’t last in this revival of Bard in the Botanics production, originally seen in 2022 in the up-close confines of the Kibble Palace. This tour of more formal theatres unleashes the full fury of McKean and Euripides’ heroine whilst retaining the play’s sense of intimacy amidst the emotional fallout.   Under lighting designer Benny Goodman’s Mediterranean skies hanging over the mix of the monumental and the domestic on Carys Hobbs’ set, Isabelle Joss’s Nurse picks up the pieces of the break up of her mistress and her former squeeze Jason, who is about to wed a younger and more local model. When Medea finally swishes and simmers into view, despite her anguished noises off, she is a sunkissed vision about to explode into gold coloured flames.   What follows in Gordon Barr’s production is an extraordinary depiction of a woman left ...

When Franz Ferdinand sang of going to a party at Glasgow’s Transmission gallery in their 2005 hit single, Do You Want To? the libidinous lyric was not only a cheeky nod to the band’s roots in the city’s underground art scene. It was also an example of how that DIY scene had flourished enough to go global by way of several Turner Prize winners as well as Franz Ferdinand themselves.   Back then, Transmission’s King Street home was one of a cluster of artist led spaces occupying rough and ready premises on and around Trongate in the Merchant City. As is the way with areas that become a home for artists, cheap rents had attracted a natural influx of artistic activity that worked from the ground up in a self-made cultural village – please, let’s not call it a hub.   In September 2009, following around £8 million worth of long-term public investment, what had originally been a series of three six storey B listed former Edwardian warehouses opened as Trongate 103. This took the idea ...

The arrival in Adelaide of French acting legend Isabelle Huppert’s solo performance as Mary, Queen of Scots in American visionary Robert Wilson’s production of Mary Said What She Said is a major event. Touring intermittently since 2019, Wilson’s production taps into the doomed Scottish monarch’s inner world via a remarkable fusion of word, image, movement and music.   “The feeling is comparable to being in Mary's head in the moments before she was beheaded,” explains Charles Chemin, the show’s dramaturg, co-director, and long-term collaborator of Wilson. “ One can witness a whirlpool of thoughts and memories in a very direct and immediate way. The experience is then focused on the intensity of the emotions, rather than on their theatricality. It allows a freedom to Isabelle to also act as herself, while being traversed by the poetics, a process that Wilson was particularly fond of, maybe with Isabelle even more than with other actors.”   Mary’s three Adelaide da...

Big plays of all kinds abound on Scotland’s stages this month, with some but by no means all of the wonders opening highlighted here in the hope that readers will try and see as much of this as possible.     Waiting for Godot Citizens Theatre, Glasgow until 14 March. Samuel Beckett’s twentieth century classic is brought to life by Matthew Kelly and George Costigan in the Citz’s brilliant new main stage production. Beckett’s darkly comic piece of existential vaudeville has long attracted major actors to playing his double act, and Kelly and Costigan’s longstanding friendship and working relationship going back half a century sees them spark off each other in tragicomic fashion in this co-production between the Citz, Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre and Bolton Octagon.   Saint Joan Perth Theatre, 7 March; Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, 12-14 March; Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 18-21 March. George Bernard Shaw’s 1923 play about Joan of Arc, was probably last seen on the Citizens’ Theatre...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Five stars   World Book Day arriving on the same day as the official Edinburgh opening of the latest tour of Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin’s epic stage musical of Roald Dahl’s 1988 novel was a perfect piece of synchronicity. Matilda, after, all, features one of the most bookish heroines ever imagined.    Inexplicably born into a family of knockabout telly addicts, five-year-old Matilda Wormwood buries herself in books, with her precocious intellect channelling increasingly fantastical tales of acrobats and escapologists that she tells to Esther Niles’ librarian, Mrs Phelps. At school, meanwhile, Matilda is caught between the nurturing hand of Tessa Kadler’s angelic Miss Honey and the brutal regime of Richard Hurst’s monstrous Miss Trunchbull. Somehow Matilda quietly inspires her fellow pupils to rise up as she discovers the value of defiance early on.   Dahl’s tale of a damaged little girl who finds salvation through a mix of knowledge, i...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Three stars    Life is one great big action movie for Davie and Sean. It’s always been that way, ever since they met across a garden fence when they were wee. Davie reckons he’s seen every film ever made, so it’s only right that he calls the shots, and they become Butch and Sundance to the end. Or at least until their playacting leads the pair down a darker road, and they end up in the same prison.    It is Davie who ends up being the first of the gang to die, alas, prompting a still incarcerated Sean to give his best friend the legendary send off he deserves. He even has the dearly departed around in celestial form to tell him what to do as he always has. For now, anyway.    Stephen Christopher and Graeme Smith’s new play for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s lunchtime theatre season follows their success with The Scaff and Dancing Shoes with a fantastical rites of passage that takes Sean on a wild goose chase from prison cell to funeral pa...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars  A night at the theatre never quite works out as planned if you are Inspector Morse. So it goes with what thus far remains the sole stage play drawn from characters created by the late Colin Dexter’s series of thirteen novels based around the man who went became telly’s most cultured copper in the small screen adaptations made between 1987 and 2000.   House of Ghosts was scripted by Alma Cullen, the Liverpool born Edinburgh émigré who penned four episodes of Morse’s TV adventures. Her original play first appeared in 2010, around the same time she was writing some of her final works for the Oran Mor based A Play, a Pie and a Pint lunchtime theatre initiative in Glasgow.   As a theatre writer immersed in Morse’s DNA, Cullen sets her play on the stage, where a co production of Hamlet acts as the prologue to what turns out to be an accidental Oxford University reunion between Morse and his peers. While he signed up with the police after...

Smile! was one of the hits of the 2025 Adelaide Fringe. Marcel Cole’s solo homage to Hollywood’s great silent movie clown Charlie Chaplin returns to tell Chaplin’s story by way of a mix of mime based routines drawn from Chaplin’s films, biographical material taken from Chaplin’s memoir, and audience interaction The result brings Chaplin’s prevailing image of the little guy in the baggy suit with the moustache, hat and umbrella to vital new life.   “I was already a Chaplin fan after seeing his films, and I loved his book,” Cole says of the roots of Smile! “I never knew he had made talkie films and full length feature films as well as the silent movies, so I was very inspired by that.”   Cole came to Chaplin after training as a ballet dancer before switching to mime based comic performance after studying under legendary French clown Philippe Gaulier. Smile! follows his first self-penned show, Ukulele Man, about English music hall star George Formby.   Cole’s fascination wit...

The Poetry Club at SWG3, Glasgow Four stars   A giant inflatable heart leftover from Valentine’s hangs down in the Poetry Club bar prior to the performance of Kathryn Mincer’s bite size new play in the main room next door. While the audience are encouraged to write down what they wish they had asked their ex, it is perhaps worth considering that the trouble with inflatable hearts is they either burst or else slowly deflate and lie limp.    One or the other appears to be what has happened to Alexa and Thomas, the not so happy couple driving each other crazy in Mincer’s play, brought to life in Dominique Mabille’s production by a young international company with their sights clearly set on something bigger.    Alexa and Thomas aren’t crazy the way they were on their first date, nor when one of them told the other they loved them for the first time, and the other one loved them right back. After just shy of seven years together, alas, it might just have someth...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow  Five stars   The stage curtain creaks as it rises with painstaking slowness on the barren twilight zone occupied by Samuel Beckett’s most forlorn of duos in Dominic Hill’s moving new production for the Citz. Here, George Costigan and Matthew Kelly embody Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s mould breaking piece of mid twentieth century existential vaudeville with a tragicomic rapport that comes through a lifetime of shared experience.    All dressed down and wildly bearded, the pair look more like redneck hobos living in the woods than the silent movie double act they are often presented as. Only through the terminal sense of tragicomic pathos that they hold on to throughout all the brilliant bickering Beckett has concocted for them do they find some kind of accidental salvation.    Jean Chan’s set looks like some battle scarred lower depths, with Costigan and Kelly guarding it through the night like long lost casualties of a war no...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Three stars   When Paul McCartney decided to get his head together in the country in the aftermath of the Beatles splitting up, this took him and his then wife Linda to the wilds of his Campbeltown farm. This eventually sired their band Wings’ 1977 Christmas number one, Mull of Kintyre.    Before all that, however, Fab Macca had Kathy and Jack to contend with. As the now seventy-something grandparents to Molly explain to her for an oral history project in Milly Sweeney’s new play, it was Beatles daft Jack’s idea for the couple to go on holiday to Campbeltown. It was the long hot summer of 1976, and Jack had a vague but determined notion of meeting his pop idol. What happens instead is a series of more everyday epiphanies that force the young couple to navigate their often fractious relationship while making a set of memories that will last a lifetime.    Sally Reid’s production for this first show in a new season of lunchtime theatre prese...

Tramway, Glasgow Four stars   Sex and the disabled has long been considered by some as a taboo topic, with presumptions that those with disabilities don’t have sexual feelings, let alone act on them, still prevailing in some quarters. Such ideas should have been put to bed after the screening of The Skin Horse, an impressionistic 1983 Channel Four documentary on the subject that was co-scripted by the late Nabil Shaban, who also appeared in it prior to becoming a familiar presence on Scotland’s stages later in his career.    More than four decades on, the subject is still hot property, as this new play from disabled based theatre company Birds of Paradise demonstrates in a work co-written by Hana Pascal Keegan, Gabriella Sloss, and BOP artistic director Robert Softley Gale.   The play’s main focus is Ben, a nineteen-year-old wheelchair user who has barely left his parents house for six months following an incident in a Liverpool nightclub. With his only real human co...

It was George Costigan’s idea that he and Matthew Kelly should do Waiting for Godot together as Vladimir and Estragon, the two men waiting for the title character who never comes in Samuel Beckett’s play that revolutionised twentieth century drama. Watching these two very different veterans of stage and screen spark off each other as they riff on Beckett’s piece of existential vaudeville in which ‘nothing happens twice’, you can see why it was such an inspired notion.   “This is a play about love,” says Kelly of Godot, in which the everyday chemistry between life long friends is laid bare in all its mundane glory. “For two people like us, who’ve known each other for fifty eight years – and I think Vladimir and Estragon have known each other for that long - it’s kind of an ideal time for us to do it. And we might get it right this time.”   Dominic Hill’s new production that opens at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre prior to dates in Liverpool and Bolton will be the fourth time Kelly ...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars    For almost three decades now, composer Jim Parker’s foreboding theremin waltz has been an oddly comforting prime time telly fanfare that has opened the door to millions of viewers on what may or may not be regarded as rural middle England’s answer to Twin Peaks. So it goes as well for Guy Unsworth’s stage version of Caroline Graham’s very first Inspector Barnaby novel that gets behind the hedgerows and into the deceptively sleepy killing fields of the fictional county of Midsomer.   As long term fans and subscribers to ITVx will already know, this involves the quietly determined Inspector Tom Barnaby and his wet behind the ears Sergeant Gavin Troy dispatched to the even sleepier hamlet of Badger’s Drift to investigate the death of an 80-something local called Emily Simpson.    In a village peopled by a roll-call of dotty eccentric spinsters, Freudian mummy’s boys, wannabe artists, posh girl gold diggers and illicit trysts th...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   When George Bernard Shaw dragged himself out of premature retirement in 1923, the great man’s late burst was inspired by Joan of Arc being made a saint. A decade on, Shaw was persuaded to write a screenplay based on his drama. As other filmmakers have shown, the story of the French teenager who made France great again after hearing holy voices in her head only to be burnt at the stake for her trouble was ripe big screen material. Shaw’s slimmed down version of his play, alas, remains unmade.    It is his screenplay, however, that is the source  of director/designer Stewart Laing’s remarkable rendering that sees Martin O’Connor’s malevolent Chorus speak the scenic directions as the action unfolds. At points his narration makes him sound like a frontline war correspondent in a way that recalls the historical reconstructions of Peter Watkins’s great documentary styled film, Culloden, by way of the voiceover disruptions of radical L...