Coffee-Table Notes

The day Edinburgh photographer Sandra George’s vast archive landed on the doorstep of the then recently set up Craigmillar Now organisation changed things for everyone who was there. With one eye on the neighbourhood’s past in the form of Craigmillar Festival Society, the globally recognised community arts organisation that paved the way for everything that followed, Craigmillar Now opened in 2020, and had just established a weekly archiving initiative.   A chance encounter with George’s former partner Jimmy Hewitt saw her archive rescued from a garden shed where it had sat since her death in 2013 and put into Craigmillar Now’s care. As  thousands of negatives were digitised, a vital portrait of Edinburgh life in the 1980s and 1990s seen from the frontline of George’s lens was revealed.   Also there that day was Lee McCormack, another photographer tending to her own neglected archive after working as a photographer around the same time as George. Where George worked ...

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow Four stars     Blood is very much thicker than water in John Webster’s 17th century Jacobean revenge tragedy, in which a merry widow Duchess marries beneath her station in the form of her steward, Antonio. This is much to the chagrin of her brothers, with her twin Ferdinand and their Cardinal elder using their respective power bases to keep an eye on their sister’s most intimate exchanges through the eyes of their spy, Bosola. As the Duchess and Antonio’s cross class love story evolves into a domestic bliss that should be for life, Webster dismisses any prospect of a happy ending by killing off pretty much everyone in sight.    This is brought home in scintillating close up in Jennifer Dick’s five-actor version for Bard in the Botanics’ silver jubilee season. With assorted pairs of boots laid out at the altars that mark out the space in the Kibble Palace Glasshouse, Dick’s own production sees the Duchess’ passion for Manasa Tagica’s Antonio b...

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow Three stars   When Jane Austen wrote in 1815 of how the heroine of the novel she was about to begin was a woman ‘whom no one but myself will much like’, one might presume she was about to create a monster. As it turned out, and as was established in the book’s first line, Emma Woodhouse turned out to be ‘handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition’. She may have been the sort of beauteous untouchable who breezed through life in a way that leaves the rest of us swooning, but she’s a nice girl, really, even if she is the sort of person for whom the phrase ‘check your privilege’ was invented.   So it goes with Jennifer Dick’s new stage adaptation of Austen’s yarn, which in Gordon Barr’s open air production for this year’s Bard in the Botanics season stays true to its posh frock roots to make for a delightful summer confection.    Esme Bayley’s Emma is a thoroughly modern young woman who burls through the nineteent...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Three stars    When French poet Jean Cocteau was told of singer Edith Piaf’s death in 1963, he is said to have declared the words ‘I can die too’, and duly had a heart attack in solidarity. This possibly apocryphal yarn concerning such a grand gesture says much about offstage drama, making it an ideal title for this new chamber musical presented by an amalgam of international producers with Pitlochry Festival Theatre.   A vehicle for West End and Broadway star Frances Ruffelle, who wrote it with Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s artistic director Alan Cumming along with Sally George, Ruffelle is Lily, the leading lady of a production of Cocteau’s 1930 play, La voix humaine (The Human Voice). One of the great monologues for women, Cocteau’s solo piece puts its star on the telephone throughout, as her long-term lover prepares to marry a younger model.   As she emerges from a cage-like construction made out of walls of hanging down phones, Lil...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   The dustsheets are covering the furniture and the paintings have been taken down in the family home where Lear holds court in Finn Den Hertog’s brutal and bloody version of Shakespeare’s all too human tragedy of power and loss. The chandelier too that will later resemble something between a wrecking ball and a guillotine is all wrapped up as the ageing matriarch indulges a last gasp chance to lord it over her three daughters. As the sisters gather, it looks for all the world like their mother is about to be carted off to what these days might be euphemistically be called a retirement home.    As Lear’s cry for attention seeks only flattery from her offspring, her oldest and middle daughters Goneril and Regan tell her what she wants to hear, and are duly awarded a slice of the queendom as their inheritance. Her youngest, Cordelia, alas, is having none of it. This not only drives Lear mad, but kicks off a full on war, while Cordelia p...

Botanic Garden, Glasgow Four stars   The seven seas are rocking at the start of Bard in the Botanics’ main stage flagship production to mark the stalwarts of outdoor Shakespeare’s silver jubilee year. Once the storm subsides, twins Viola and Sebastian are all washed up on a strange island, with Viola landing in what by way of Heather Grace Currie’s design appears to be the beer garden of the sort of docklands boozer where men are very much men. In the whirligig of dressing up box cosplay that follows, for a while at least, so are some of the women.    While her new pal Feste mainlines feelgood karaoke hits, Viola dons cap and trews like a sailor ashore, attracting the unwarranted attention of all comers. This includes handsome himbo Orsino, who treats his new sidekick like one of the boys, despite the pretty obvious truth staring him in the face.    The boozer’s regulars led by Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, meanwhile, belie their aristocratic origins ...

The workers have been out in force in Scottish theatre of late. On stage, at least, there seems to have been a dramatic rediscovery of working class culture and blue-collar history. This could be seen in the National Theatre of Scotland and Tron Theatre production of Stand & Deliver: The Lee Jeans Sit-In, Frances Poet's musical inspired by the v1981 strike in Greenock. Then there was Sweat, a co-production between the Citizens Theatre Glasgow and Royal Lyceum Edinburgh of Lynn Nottage's dramatisation of what happens to a small town when the industry that sustained it pulls out. Dundee Rep’s revival of Educating Rita, Willy Russell’s modern classic about a working-class hairdresser who enrols in an Open University literature course, is also indicative of a prevailing class divide. Offstage, meanwhile, in a reflection of sorts of the themes of these plays, it is getting harder to sustain a career in theatre. This isn’t just the case for the actors who are the public face of S...

As July sees the theatre season wind down into something of a calm before the August Edinburgh storm, there is nevertheless a fair bit of on stage action on offer. Bard in the Botanics and Pitlochry Festival Theatre lead the charge with at least one show that will feature a storm, so not that calm at all, really.   Twelfth Night  Botanic Gardens, Glasgow, Until 11 July. Lovers and Madmen is the theme for Bard in the Botanics’ silver jubilee summer season of outdoor Shakespeare. This new production of the bard’s contrarily sunny comedy probably falls very much in the former camp, as shipwrecked twins Viola and Sebastian are separated on the island of Illyria, embarking on assorted mistaken identity sired adventures until the inevitable happy ending brings them and their respective squeezes together once more. All this is likely to be upstaged, in Jennifer Dick’s production, mind you, by the figure of the yellow stocking clad Malvolio in a production featuring some Bard in the B...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Three stars   Arriving fashionably late is probably to be expected of a turn of the century clique of teen princess throwbacks. This is why  Tuesday night’s twenty minute delay to showtime for Tina Fey’s musical stage version of her 2004 film can be forgiven. Conceptually speaking, such divaish timekeeping is kind of in keeping with the classroom and cafeteria shenanigans new girl Cady lands in at the start of the show, but, y’know, whatevs.    Cady has just jetted in from Kenya, and after a girlhood in the wild, has a lot of catching up to do in terms of making friends. She soon falls in with Janis and Damian, the outsider duo who become Cady’s guide through the social minefield of high school, as well as our narrators. As for who rules the school, cue The Plastics, the drop dead gorgeous trio led by the divine Regina George, who appears to be the ultimate Queen Bee until Cady comes along.  What follows in this UK tour of Casey...

Botanic Garden, Glasgow Four stars   The Union Jack may not be everywhere in Gordon Barr’s new look at Shakespeare’s tragedy of jealousy and deceit, but it certainly makes its presence felt. This is the case whether on the camouflaged shoulders of the men of action who either engineer or become victims of macho power plays, or on the locker room doors where all their inner secrets are kept.   This is the world in which Manasa Tagica’s Othello has made it big, a black migrant success story who leads his men to victory, but who is never quite one of the gang. His marriage to Desdemona, Esme Bayley’s well to do white girl whose parents expected more of her, only serves to ramp up an inherent institutionalised racism even more. This is the thin line that provokes Adam Donaldson’s Iago to manipulate his way to destruction as he feeds misinformation, gossip and rumour to his boss, driving him demented enough to seek revenge of his own while Iago pulls the strings.    Perfo...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars    Life is one great big cabaret for Allegra, the woman of a certain age cast as the life and soul of Peter Quilter’s play. Allegra may live on her own, but her world is full of colour, as well as occasional song. The latter is something the shopkeepers of her village know only too well, used as they are to being serenaded by showtunes on any given afternoon whenever Allegra graces their premises.    Dotty eccentric she may be, but Allegra’s fondness for doing a number concerns her brother Ronan enough to bring in Czech cleaner Anna to keep her company. And when Officer Rogers from the local nick turns up at the door, the game would appear to be up. If only they all knew where she left her umpteen bottles of pills, everyone could have a quiet life.    As pro Palestine supporters gathered outside the Theatre Royal prior to the show to protest its star Maureen Lipman's appearance following attempts to cancel its Aberdeen run...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars   As gossipy Magic Circle members might tell you, Derren Brown’s feats of mental skulduggery he bamboozles his fan base with aren’t anything new. Brown himself admits in the second half of his latest theatrical extravaganza that the hardest thing for him to do during his two and a half hour performance is to keep an eye on a deck of cards to see which way one lands. The fact that he tells us this via subtitles on a screen that covers the Playhouse stage’s entire back wall while those cards are shuffled speaks volumes about Brown’s exemplary shtick. And while those self same Magic Circle members may be correct in their professional observations, if they ever let slip how Brown’s tricks actually worked, chances are such a breach of protocol would see us all have to do a disappearing act.    Things begin quietly enough with pre show phone footage testimonies from a stream of satisfied but bewildered customers about how Brown appears t...