Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh  Four stars   In the city there are eight million stories. Edinburgh being Edinburgh, it would probably like to boast it has a fair few more. Given the Athens of the North’s Jekyll and Hyde style credentials, whereby it puts on a pretty facade for the tourists, while the real tall tales emerge from more intimate exchanges out of sight behind closed doors, this might well be the case.    So it goes with Lyceum at Home, an initiative spearheaded by the capital theatre’s artistic director James Brining, who commissioned four writers to create a quartet of thirty-minute monologues. With each set in Edinburgh, in a project led by outgoing associate director Zinnie Harris, these were then performed around town in people’s living rooms, where sofa bound audiences were unavoidably up close to the action. Now the mini tour is over, the quartet of new works were brought back home to the theatre that sired them, where they were performed on the s...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars    Electricity is in the air when Robin meets Iris at a 1990s student party for her 21st birthday. As opposites attract, the pair find common ground of sorts over a broken guitar displayed like a trophy. What might have ended up as one night of drunken passion becomes something else when the pair make a vow never to touch.    Thirty years later, and what was an unforgettable moment for him and one more rash promise for her brings Robin and Iris together once more. As their worlds collide in a courtroom cafe where both are involved in the consequences of actions not of their making, their criss-crossing lives catch up with each other across generations and wake up something in both of them.   What initially looks like an extended episode of what might be styled as This Mid Life in the first act of Douglas Maxwell’s emotionally ambitious play gradually evolves into something more expansively contemporary in the second.  R...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Three stars   Hear ye this. When a town crier and a court jester gather as one for the pleasure of the king, soothsaying and hilarity will ensue. Or sometimes not. Such is the way in Nay Dhanak’s mini epic, the latest comic extravaganza to grace A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s current lunchtime theatre season. Here we find our ad hoc double act both out of a job, and reduced to telling their respective stories with a little help from some life size puppets and framed as a comedy masterclass.    As they ply their past their sell by date wares with a stream of verbiage and well worn gags, the duo’s slapstick interplay becomes part of a mediaeval quest in search of a second sun to offset the unfortunate eclipse back home. Instead they find themselves thrown into the future, where the news is relayed in a million different hi-tech ways, punchlines are ten a penny, dragons aren’t so easily slain and Siri has an answer for everything.    Dhanak ...

When poet Roddy Lumsden died in 2020 aged 53, it called time on a mercurial figure, whose work impacted worlds beyond the rarefied literary circuit. This should be in evidence at Mischief Night, which commemorates what would have been Lumsden’s sixtieth birthday in the same venue he launched his first collection, Yeah Yeah Yeah, in 1997.   Named after Lumsden’s 2004 book, while Mischief Night will of course feature poetry, there will also be a focus on his other obsessions. This will come in the form of a quiz, and will feature a soundtrack drawn from his substantial collection of 7-inch singles. The latter will be played by those behind a weekly event called Sleepless Nights. This was a Thursday night vinyl only happening that took place at Edinburgh’s now long lost St. James Oyster Bar, and which featured the sort of left-field obscurities that fired Lumsden’s own musical tastes. Requests are being taken on the event website.   As unofficial writer in residence at St. J, Lum...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Five stars   The vintage microphone that hangs down centre stage may be designed for old school crooners in Linda McLean’s adaptation of Denise Mina’s true crime novel, but as it swings between those confessing not quite all, those behind it tell a far darker story.    It is 1958, and in a world where gangsterism and civic entrepreneurism rub shoulders in spit and sawdust bars and after-hours members clubs, William Watt has been released from prison after being tried for the murder of his wife, daughter and sister-in-law. Determined to clear his name, the Lanarkshire businessman ends up on a twelve-hour bender with Peter Manuel, who will later be convicted and hanged for these and other killings.    Over two intense hours, Mina’s story flits between the trial and a speculative dramatisation of what may or may not have happened during Watt and Manuel’s epic session. The result in Dominic Hill’s main stage production is a slow burnin...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars    Love hurts in D.C. Jackson’s potty-mouthed sitcom writ large. This is something to do with the succession of studiedly adolescent one-line gags peppered throughout as much as the growing pains of impending adulthood, not to mention the hangovers that go with both. Either way, it’s complicated.    This is how it rolls for Tom and Amy, the terminally feckless thirty something duo whose drunken one-night office amour helps stave off grown up responsibilities. Until, that is, they have no choice. Inbetween, Jackson has his sort of happy couple rewind on assorted teenage romances that left their mark like a bad home made tattoo. With Tom and Amy’s messy story told by each in turn as they narrate their own unreliable memoirs, we get to see their warts and all destiny from all sides until they become entwined forever.    Johnny McKnight’s revival of Jackson’s 2010 mini series in waiting stays true to its overriding ridiculousnes...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   Don’t mess with the Hens in Debbie Hannan’s new play, the latest lunchtime epic to grace A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s current season. As Jade, Amber and Lilac gather for their best pal Coral’s weekend extravaganza, they are already a force to be reckoned with. Once Coral’s so called cousin and unexpected guest Luna checks in with the WhatsApp group, however, by the end of their 48 Hours of regimented fun in the Athens of the North, they will have become goddesses.    This is brought to mercurial life by three of the finest female acting talents of their generation, with Danni Heron as Jade, Laura Lovemore as Lilac and Anna Russell-Martin as Amber joining forces as a chorus to end them all on Heather Grace Currie’s celestial looking set. As the trio double up as Coral and Luna in this co-production with Assembly Roxy in Edinburgh, the level of female energy on show goes stratospheric in its mix of ancient...

Big grown up plays are very much the order of the day in Scottish theatre’s homegrown summer seasons throughout June. Significantly, perhaps, only two of these are musicals, demonstrating that it is still possible to create powerful theatre without making a song and dance about it.    Stand & Deliver: The Lee Jeans Sit-In Cumbernauld Theatre, 6 June; Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock, 9-10 June.  Final dates for Frances Poet’s musical play about the 1981 strike by women workers in the Greenock Lee Jeans factory in what should be a powerful return home to the place where it all happened. This co-production between the National Theatre of Scotland, and the Tron Theatre, Glasgow was developed out of conversations with some of the 240 women involved in the strike, the play looks at how they stood up for themselves and each other over the seven-month dispute. The Herald called it ‘a spirited tribute to the power of the people’.     Sweat Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburg...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   As Scotland’s latest World Cup hopes come into view over the next few weeks, Joe McCann’s debut play is a timely look at one of the country’s lesser-spotted footballing greats. Back in the nineteenth century, Andrew Watson arrived in the UK from Demerara, British Guiana, the mixed race son of a wealthy sugar plantation owner father and a Guianese mother. While at university in Glasgow, Watson discovered football, and went on to become the first black player in association football at international level, who became star striker and captain of Queen’s Park. Watson also captained Scotland’s national team in three games that saw them hammer England twice, with the first game, a 6-1 victory for Watson’s team, remaining a record home defeat for England.   This is more than enough to get the faithful rallying behind Watson in McCann’s play, performed with heart by a solo Dayton Mungai, who begins with a question to the audience. Several others fol...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars    Relocation, relocation, relocation is the order of the day in this new stage adaptation of Barbet Schroeder’s 1992 schlocky horror psycho-sexual thriller. Drawn from John Lutz’s novel from two years earlier, SWF Seeks Same, the story imagines what happens when a woman’s new flatmate turn out to be mad, bad and very dangerous to know.    Moving house is not only theprime drive for Lisa Faulkner’s Allie as she and her teenage daughter Bella move into a building with seriously shonky electrics after Allie finally ditches Bella’s feckless dad, Sam. Nor is it just about Allie’s new lodger, Hedy, played by Kym Marsh as a Yorkshire sired cuckoo in the nest.    Writer Rebecca Reid has taken the steamy stateside des-res of the film and moved it lock, stock and homicidal kitchen knife to what appears to be a collapsing British suburban tower block. Not only that, Reid has whooshed things forward a few decades from the angsty and ...

Factories have been working overtime in my mind of late. As the Herald’s theatre critic, I recently watched the National Theatre of Scotland and the Tron Theatre’s production of Frances Poet’s new play, Stand & Deliver, take a musical look at the 1981 sit-in at Greenock’s Lee jeans factory.  A week later, I saw Sweat, the Citizens Theatre Glasgow and Royal Lyceum Edinburgh’s revival of Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize winning 2015 play about what happens to a mid American steel town when the plug is pulled on the factory that gave that town its economic lifeblood.   My more personal interest in factories just now is to do with The Machine Stops. This is a project I'm part of that is set to take place as part of Hidden Door, the grassroots Edinburgh arts festival that takes over abandoned buildings and transforms them into unique temporary venues.   This year’s Hidden Door returns to The Paper Factory, the vast former cardboard packaging plant close to Edinburgh Airp...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   You know the craic. You step into a late night music bar, the joint is jumping, and you walk out with your life turned upside down. Or at least this is what happens to the Dublin troubadour at the heart of Enda Walsh’s musical stage version of John Carney’s hit big screen romance. The catalyst for this wake up call is a turbo charged Czech pianist who tunes into his sad eyed laments and decrees they make an album together. Rounding up a group of misfits Commitments style, an all night burst of creativity sees them set down a classic before everything has to change once more.   As those who have seen either the film or John Tiffany’s Tony award winning Broadway production will already know, beyond the pair’s obvious chemistry, it’s complicated. For one unrepeatable moment, however, the international language of music and the emotional sparks that fly from it are the only things that matter.    As an opening gambit for Alan Cummi...

Dundee Rep Four stars   When Willy Russell's Pygmalion like tale of a working class hairdresser’s getting of wisdom by way of an Open University literature course run by a pickled ex poet first appeared in 1980, social mobility and education for all was still a possibility. If set today, lecturer Frank would have long been made redundant, while Rita’s thirst for knowledge would likely have been thwarted by fees that would have left her in debt forever. More recently, Rita’s spirit has been brought bang up to date in Jade Franks’ Edinburgh Festival Fringe hit, Eat the Rich (but maybe not me mates x), and it is only a matter of time before Franks slips into Rita’s scuffed shoes and plays her dramatic ancestor for real.    In the meantime, we should be grateful for this latest incarnation of what is now a period piece that remains a glorious riff on the old adage of how a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, be it for better or worse. Debbie Hannan’s production sees Frank ...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Three stars   When two lesbian bikers of a certain age walk into an island bar, it’s no joke for teenage Ruari in Ryan Hay’s new play for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s ongoing lunchtime theatre season. Helen and Jane have been around the block together, a high-speed double act of Harley Davidsons, leather jackets and war stories about seeing Joan Jett and the Runaways at Glasgow Apollo. Things are changing, however, not least for Ruari, who runs the bar in their dad’s seemingly permanent absence, and is doing a lot of growing up beyond serving whisky after hours.    There is a lot going on in Hay’s play, set over three years when Helen and Jane drop in to the bar for weekend breaks. While much is left unsaid, the late night debates that eventually cut loose sound at points like textbook guides to dealing with the growing pains of becoming who you want to be.    Caitlin Skinner’s low-key slow burn of a production brings this rites of passage p...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   When idealistic young aid worker Samira leaves Glasgow for Jordan in 2010 in the wake of the Arab Spring, she is on a mission to change the world she thinks she understands. As a mixed race Muslim abroad, however, bearing witness from afar may be one thing, but squaring up to frontline atrocities on a daily basis as she moves rapidly from one crisis to another is traumatic enough to leave her profoundly affected by the events around her.    The world may have moved on since Mariem Omari’s solo play inspired by her own experiences first appeared in 2021, but in terms of the fall out of what has happened in the Middle East since then, things have only changed for the worse.    A vibrant performance from Olivia Hemmati forms the heart of Shilpa T-Hyland’s production for the Citizens’ Theatre’s associate company, Bijli Productions, which steps out for a full tour in this redeveloped version of the play. As Samira becomes engulf...

Òran Mór , Glasgow Four stars   Eyes are very much down for a full house in this new play by Marc Pye and Gayle Telfer Stevens, the latest lunchtime extravaganza as part of the current A Play, a Pie and a Pint season. Angie and Linda are pretty much addicted to the allure of the bingo hall, which offers some kind of lifeline, as well as potentially sorting out their respective financial woes. If Angie doesn’t get to call ‘House’, chances are she’ll lose hers.    Linda and Angie’s daughters Stacey and Amy, meanwhile, have other plans, and perish the thought of following in their mothers’ footsteps. With a cool 40k a winning number away, however, Stacey could bankroll her online influencer lifestyle and get some work done on herself, while Amy could kick-start her dog grooming business in style. All it takes to change their lives is one stolen membership card.    There is a lot more going on than meets Kelly’s Eye in Pye and Telfer Stevens’ sit-com style affair. ...

One could be forgiven for thinking that Alan Cumming has been in post as artistic director of Pitlochry Festival Theatre longer than he has. Such has been Cumming’s public profile of late, be it hosting events, starring in a stage musical of his and Forbes Masson’s 1980s sitcom, The High Life, or being interviewed on these pages after being named the most influential person in Scotland's art scene for 2026, his ubiquity goes before him. As it is, Cumming’s first season that he’s programmed for the Perthshire based theatre actually only opens this month. This will also mark the 75th anniversary of PFT, when visionary impresario John Stewart first put on theatre in a tent. Cumming’s programme celebrates in spectacular style. This comes with Once, a new production of the hit musical that reunites the original creative team led by director John Tiffany for this multiple Tony winning show. This is followed by Inexperience, a new studio play by Douglas Maxwell, while Maureen Beattie will...

Òran Mór , Glasgow Four stars   What happened one sunny day in 2021 on Glasgow’s south side when agents of the UK Home Office were thwarted from removing two Sikh men of Indian descent from their homes has become an inspiration for our times. The spontaneous show of mass solidarity that rose up that day has already been documented in Felipe Bustos Sierra’s film, Everybody to Kenmure Street. Playwright Simon Jay has here picked up the baton with a verbatim approach to his new play drawn from the day’s events. The result in this latest lunchtime production for A Play, a Pie and a Pint mixes interviews and anecdotal accounts with a little old school polemic to tell the story.    Key to this is the song by Kenmure Street residents Craig and Rachel Smillie written within days of the event, and which here acts as a folksy refrain as actors Nesha Caplan, Kal Sabir and Betty Valencia replay what happened. This moves from the initial response to the eventual release of the men fro...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars   For those on side, Cowdenbeath Football Club may never have been premiere league material, but they have always occupied a field of dreams. This is made clear in Gary McNair’s wonderful new stage adaptation of Ron Ferguson’s 1993 book, ostensibly a love letter to the club that becomes a funny and profound meditation on the collective power of football fandom as a form of everyday devotion.   So it goes with McNair’s version, which sees Cowdenbeath native Sally make a reluctant prodigal’s return to the Fife mining town following the death of her football daft dad. The deal is that Sally is to scatter her old man’s ashes onto the pitch at CFC’s home ground of Central Park, but only after they win a game. As historical statistics show, alas, the 1991/92 season when Sally made her promise wasn’t exactly a walk in the park in terms of getting a resuls, which is why she finds herself spending more weekends than she bargained for on t...