Coffee-Table Notes

This weekend is the very last chance to see a welter of major productions, so if there are any tickets left, probably best get them now. While the next couple of weeks also see the last legs of assorted tours, midway through the month we start seeing the first of the season’s festive offerings. We’ll save full on panto season until next month (oh yes we will, etc), but remember, pantomime isn't just for Christmas.   1984 Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh until 7 November. There is something unmistakably now about Chris Hannan’s new stage adaptation of George Orwell’s very British dystopian classic, brought to life in Dominic Hill’s production with a sense of theatrical largesse on Tom Piper’s set. With Jack Tarlton and Jessica Hardwick leading the cast as Winston and Julia’s pair of rebels with a cause who rise up against the groupthink of a post truth future, Hannan frames the bleak and brutal meat of the play with an appearance by Orwell himself, who finds his views challenged whil...

Perth Theatre  Four stars   Life’s a scream for the young Governess at the centre of Henry James’ much adapted 1898 gothic novella, which lives again in Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s striking new stage version for Blackeyed Theatre, touring to Perth this week. As the Governess recounts to a strange and provocatively doubtful man, things took a strange turn the moment she was hired by an even stranger man to look after his niece and nephew, Flora and Miles, who have been holed up in a big old house since their parents died.    As the influence of others casts spectral shadows, hints of dark goings on behind closed doors have left young Miles with a surprisingly grown-up attitude to all who cross his path. And what fate befell the previous governess is anybody’s guess, the current one included. But will the men involved believe her fantastical story?    Nicky Allpress’s production is a suitably dark hearted affair, which ramps up Lloyd Malcolm’s reimagining of James...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   Life got cold for the three ice skating instructors in Lex Joyce’s play in the latest edition of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s lunchtime theatre season. What did it for them was a fatal accident in the rink that left the brilliant white ice stained scarlet. The effect this has on Noa, Donal and Gus is to open old wounds that have been too close to the surface for too long. It may be easy enough to resurface the ice with the machine that gives the play its title and make like it never happened, but there are some things that just can’t be swept away so lightly.    Joyce’s play flits between workplace banter and internal monologue that tells it how it is as the trio prepare for Christmas. Initially we see them having fun putting personalities on the skaters shoes or else preparing their Secret Santas. As things take a darker turn after the accident, visits home, driving lessons or even just doing their job become loaded with everyday trauma....

King’s Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars War stories come in many guises. Telling them in the form of musical theatre is a far from unheard of proposition, and has paid serious dividends for the SplitLip company in their multi award winning show that tells the stranger than fiction tale of one of World War Two’s most complex pieces of espionage, deception and military derring-do. This involved co-opting the corpse of an unknown vagrant, planting them with false documents regarding the allies next move and dumping the body off the coast of Spain where it fell into the about to be duped hands of the Germans.  SplitLips’ ingenious confection takes a story already long immortalised in print and on screen and translates it into a jolley-hockeysticks fusion of cabaret style show tunes and slickly conceived comic routines. These combine in Robert Hastie’s production to tell a story that takes in MI5 skulduggery, a bit part for a pre James Bond Ian Fleming, and one man’s curiously expert knowl...

When Raydale Dower visited the old Bon Accord Baths in Aberdeen, the memories came flooding back. Having grown up in nearby Ferryhill, the artist and composer had visited what is now one of the last surviving Art Deco pools in the UK as a child with his mum and grandmother. When he was shown one of the cubicles where people living nearby who didn’t have baths of their own came to wash, he suddenly recalled being there when he was three years old.  “I was standing in this room with a bath and this eight foot high wall, “Dower remembers, “and the person showing me round was laughing, saying how you had to turn the hot water on from outside. I suddenly remembered this whole setup as a young person, wondering why I was having a bath in a public place. Then you've got this backdrop of the noise of a swimming pool, with this cacophony of echo and people running around. It was all really vivid, and I honestly felt like I was in the exact same cubicle.”   Dower has channelled this int...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars   Survival is everything for Ella in German writer Manfred Karge’s play, making a prodigal’s return to Edinburgh with its original English language production’s creators after almost forty years. Don’t mistake this for a sentimental journey, mind, whatever the music in Stephen Unwin’s production might say to the contrary. For Unwin, the play’s late translator Anthony Vivis, designer Bunny Christie and especially its star Tilda Swinton, Man to Man – originally Jacke wie Hose – is an abstract confessional that teeters on the edge of mania. The result is something akin to Samuel Beckett’s tragicomic studies of aloneness brought to life by a shape shifting Mother Courage locked in the solitary confinement of her living room.    Back in 1930s Germany, Ella’s response to the death of her crane driver husband Max is to become him. As grief pushes her to extremes, Ella also needs a living wage to get by. Pulling on Max’s tackety boots a...

King’s Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars    When the Bay City Rollers toured America for the first time at the height of 1970s Rollermania, Edinburgh’s tartan trewed boy band made quite a splash. When the fab five heralded the U.S. release of their early anthem, Saturday Night, by playing to an audience of 30 million people on live TV, it did not go unnoticed in more underground circles.  The result, so it is said, saw Saturday Night’s opening football terrace chant translated by proto punks The Ramones into their own defining call to arms of ‘Hey! Ho! Let’s Go!’ on their song, Blitzkreig Bop. Both the Rollers and the Ramones also covered pop classics from the Jeff Barry/Ellie Greenwich/Phil Spector canon originally recorded by the Ronettes, so the umbilical links go even further.   While none of the above is mentioned in Danny McCahon's Bay City Rollers inspired jukebox musical, the band’s American trip becomes the drive behind the play’s second half. McCahon's fo...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   The streets on the TV screens are burning, the country is at war over disputed territorial land grabs, and the squaddies victory dance sees them waving their Union Jacks to Come on Eileen, missing the point entirely of a Celtic rooted song. Welcome to this early 1980s set Othello, where the fallout of the Falklands War and the UK’s inner city riots that preceded it add a new dimension to Shakespeare’s tale of tough guys trying to outdo each other in a white man’s world.   Central to this in Shakespeare’s play is General Othello’s secret marriage to Desdemona, the army brat who falls in love and ends up being caught in the crossfire of boys’ games. These are initiated by Iago, who is here a barrack room wide boy with ideas above his station. His slyness in playing everyone off against each other brings about everybody’s downfall, including his own.    Anthony Almeida’s production makes full use of its late twentieth century histo...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   Stormy weather abounds both on and off stage in Kenny Boyle’s new Halloween themed play for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s ongoing lunchtime theatre season. Sorcha and Evander find themselves seeking shelter in a highland bothy inbetween reaching the summit they are aiming for. Just what that is remains to be seen as they cosy in around the table to share ancient stories of a decidedly spooky kind.    For the first half of Ben Harrison’s production, out-scaring each other seems to be the aim for MJ Deans’ Sorcha and Boyle himself as Evander. The series of yarns they spar with fall somewhere between those in Conor McPherson’s 1997 village pub bound play, The Weir, and a seasonal volume of ancient myths. The second half of the play lurches into less certain waters, as Evander and Sorcha seem to be in the midst of some elaborate role play exercise or else are taken over by something far darker.    As the pair slip in and out of speaking G...