Coffee-Table Notes

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh  Four stars    Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you. Joseph Heller’s deadpan maxim from Catch 22 could easily apply to Alec Leamas, the down at heel anti hero of John le  Carré ’s 1963 best selling novel. Set two years earlier, le  Carré ’s forensic study of secret agents shot by both sides of the Berlin Wall remains a darkly unsentimental piece of Brit-noir pulp fiction.   David Eldridge’s stage version heightens the light and shade of Leamas’ plight in Jeremy Herrin’s stiff-backed production. Played out by a cast of twelve on designer Max Jones’ array of black painted walls, this is where Leamas’s handlers in the below radar organisation known as The Circus pull the strings. As Ralf Little’s pugnacious Leamas sets out the story’s historical context, he is revealed as the ultimate burnt out cannon fodder this side of Harry Palmer. Whisky laced, tobacco stained and heavy coated, Leamas is forever caught...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Three stars   Maggie is going round in circles. It’s the morning of her thirtieth birthday, and she has somehow found herself on a slow train to Aberdeen. As she reflects on how she got here, a series of brief encounters forces her to go beyond her original destination and make connections with what has been on her doorstep all along.    Maggie thinks she is on a one-way trip to  Norway in her search for some kind of sanctuary where she can be alone. From hen parties to handsome himbos to wise old sages, alas, all life seems to be amongst these strangers on a train, as each arrival and departure bestows their unique brand of wisdom on Maggie as they go.    So much for the quiet carriage in Stephanie MacGaraidh’s new solo mini musical, which she performs as part of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest lunchtime theatre season. Part of this, of course, is that Maggie’s story is told largely through MacGaraidh’s canon of indie-folk-pop song...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars    Things have changed in the thirty-odd years since Stephan Elliott’s flamboyant road movie, The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, helped liberate Australia from the Fosters and Castlemaine XXXX swilling hordes and dragged up the world. In the two decades since Elliott first transposed his pink neon vision to the stage and added the campest soundtrack on the planet, the culture depicted therein has become even more ubiquitously mainstream.    None of this stands in the way of director Ian Talbot’s new touring reboot, which explodes with colour even as it stays true to its show bar backdrop. For those living in a closet for the past two decades, the story concerns a cross-country road trip undertaken by drag queens Tick and Felicia and transgender woman Bernadette. While ostensibly the trip is to play a residency at Tick’s ex wife’s casino, it is really an excuse for him to be reunited with his young son.  ...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh  Four stars   Ally is a woman pregnant with possibilities as much as with child throughout Jess Brodie’s new play, a solo piece wonderfully performed by Jessica Hardwick. As Ally prepares to be a first time mum, she feels like she is about to burst on several levels. As well as navigating her way through an increasingly stifling home life with her husband Kevin, this woman’s work also includes an illicit date with a female sex worker in a Cambuslang hotel.    What follows in Ally’s monologue is an exploration of her sexuality that liberates her even as it leads her into temptation beyond her humdrum home life. This sees Brodie’s script tap into the erotic psychology of a woman whose body has been taken over, but which has left her with a deep rooted yearning that needs to be acted on.    The sound of a heart beating pulses the opening of Becky Hope-Palmer’s production. On stage alone for the play’s seventy-five minute duration,...

Òran Mór , Glasgow  Four stars   Coming up for air isn’t always easy for Michael and Pat, the cross generational duo at the heart of Séan O'Neil’s new play, the latest lunchtime offering at A Play, a Pie and a Pint. If Michael can hold his breath in a bucket of water, he’ll get into the Guinness Book of Records. As his coach, Pat can share in some of the glory. The people from Guinness, alas, are running late. While this doesn’t prevent Pat from necking down several cans of the black stuff, when Pat’s daughter Grainne shows up at the pool, it becomes clear that all concerned are drowning in a mire of grief from which they will never fully surface.   What begins as a comedy fused by Michael and Pat’s deadly exchanges in Fraser Scott’s production gradually morphs into a meditation on loss, guilt and the extremes one pushes oneself to in order to try and get beyond the absence. Michael and Pat’s pursuits may seem trivial, but at the heart of their endeavours t...

‘The Royal Scottish Academy,’ as captioned by way of explanation at this group show curated by its former president, Arthur Watson, ‘is made up by artists and architects elected by their peers and is in essence a collective.’ As the caption also points out, George Wyllie, in whose honour the building we are in was created, was considered an anomaly. As a     customs officer and jazz musician turned late blooming sculptor, he was a wild card and joker in the pack who was nevertheless welcomed into the RSA club with open arms.     For all Wyllie’s bunnet and overalls bonhomie that came with his work, it must never he forgotten that his environmental sculptural interventions are some of the greatest public artworks of recent times. He is also  probably the only RSA member to have a purpose built museum created in their honour.   This show was brought together by Watson to celebrate the RSA’s 200th anniversary with something of a greatest hits compendium that j...

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Four stars   Election fever may feel somewhat tepid just now in these parts, but with populism on the rise from all sides and out and out crazy people in power, in terms of the future, the bigger picture continues to look increasingly scary. It is not, thank goodness, beyond satire, as Justin Skelton’s DIY construction proves in tuneful fashion with a full six-piece band delivering his song cycle.   Skelton is Beldon Haigh, a former spin-doctor thrown into the industrial prison complex somewhere in Midlothian at the behest of one President Blame. This suspiciously familiar looking demagogue may only want to Make Dystopia Great Again, but his one actual redeeming feature is that he probably plays saxophone better than Bill Clinton.   Like some fantasy latter day San Quentin concert, Beldon hooks up with some of his fellow inmates to form a supergroup of felons that includes a rhythm section of a chicken dancing Donald Trump on bass and a meaty...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   A decade has passed since Ken Loach and Paul Laverty introduced the world to Daniel Blake, the Geordie carpenter stymied into submission by a welfare system that sees his life degenerate into a Kafkaesque nightmare. We know this by the recorded voices speaking the words of former UK prime ministers that are beamed onto a battered billboard throughout this equally powerful stage version by Dave Johns, the original Dan on screen. Given the amount of ex PMs racked up over the last few years, Mark Calvert’s production has had his work cut out to updating their verbatim platitudes, which now includes missives from Downing Street’s latest incumbents. That the action on stage remains unchanged speaks volumes about the state we’re still in.    For those who haven’t seen it, Dan has been signed off work by his doctor after a heart attack. This isn’t good enough for the powers that be, however, who are adamant on cutting every benefit they can...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow  Four stars   Teenage dreams come dead on arrival in Simon Longman’s blistering study of wasted youth, first seen in 2018 and revived here in dynamic fashion by director Anna Whealing and producer Aila Swan. This is delivered by an electrifying trio of young actors who, over the production’s relentless eighty-minutes, don’t let up for a second.    As Longman’s title suggests, the scene is a town on a barely inhabited island where a population of dead end kids alleviate their dead end lives by getting out of it on cheap cider and whatever substances they can get their hands on. Kate, Sam and Pete also have each other, clinging on for life itself with a no holds barred gang mentality that sees them rage with unfocused energy in search of something better.    Having left school with what careers advisors would call no prospects, and with brutal family lives only offering violence of one sort of another, the unholy trinity form a kind of s...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars    When Scott meets Jess across a messy dancefloor on an Edinburgh night out, it is lust at first sight. A one-night stand before they both go off to university is all well and good, but what happens next turns both their lives upside down and binds them together forever.    Nathan Scott-Dunn’s new play for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s lunchtime theatre season taps into the well worn unplanned and often unwanted baby trope that pretty much fuelled the black and white world of so called kitchen sink drama in the 1950s and 1960s. Mercifully things have moved on considerably in Scott and Jess’s twenty first century world, and while the couple’s experience is no less of a shock to them, some kind of happy ending is very much on the cards.    Edoardo Berto’s production opens with Scott and Jess preparing a time capsule type video for their newborn. This framing allows them to rewind their story to its neon lit beginnings all the way up...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars   Heroines - or protagonists as Abigail Dooley and Emma Edwards would have it - don’t always wear capes in the duo’s mythological rummage through what it means to be a woman of a certain age. Sometimes they get to wear beige Marks & Spencer’s long length cardigans, better known here as the Cloak of Invisibility. As fashion tips go, such apparel may not be what every woman wants, but they do come in handy sometimes.     Dooley and Edwards arrive on stage from behind a set of ancient stones that appear to be made of cotton wool wearing costumes seemingly leftover from a low budget 1970s kids sword and sorcery serial. A three headed Hydra sees visages of Vivienne Westwood, Dolly Parton and Kathy Burke gift them an all purpose tongue sharpener for answering back with style, and a pair of glasses for seeing straight.    Kitted out with such luxurious accessories, the pair embark on a gloriously hand knitted comic ...

As Scotland’s theatre season moves into spring, a mix of old and new works packs the schedules across the country, with a potent mix of comedy, tragedy, musicals and high drama at play to keep audiences enthralled.     The High Life: The Musical – Still Living It! Dundee Rep until 4 April; Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 7-11 April; His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, 14-18 April; Eden Court, Inverness, 29 April-May 2; Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 12-23 May. To some, putting a short-lived thirty-year-old sit-com onstage may not be the sort of classic fare one has in mind when one thinks of a national theatre’s repertoire. Then again, the National Theatre of Scotland’s staging of Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson’s camp in-flight fare has reunited Cumming, Masson and fellow original cast members Siobhan Redmond and Patrick Ryecart for what promises to be a mid-air romp in a show co-created with the mighty Johnny McKnight. Co-produced by the NTS with Dundee Rep in associat...

The Studio, Edinburgh Three stars    Raskolnikov is a man alone in Laurie Sansom’s new adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 750 page nineteenth century epic, which sees the ascetic student’s attraction to seemingly mindless violence usher him into a moral maze that becomes a dark investigation of his inner soul. In Connor Curren’s mercurial portrayal, Raskolnikov is what newspaper reports might call a loner, who lives largely in his own head, plotting and scheming the downfall of everyone who isn’t him. When he kills, it comes from a mixture of thinking he’s better than his victims that runs parallel with a pathological envy of those in high places he so craves to sit among even as he loathes them.    Performed by just three actors in Sansom’s own production for the Yorkshire based Northern Broadsides company, this is Dostoevsky stripped bare. This is the case both in the focus on Raskolnikov’s angry young man style sense of superiority, as well as the way it leaves its...

Dundee Rep Four stars As lost horizons go, Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson’s short-lived 1994 sitcom could hardly be bettered in terms of rediscovery. The original saw Cumming and Masson cast themselves as Sebastian Flight and Steve McCracken, the cabin crew and in-flight double act of Air Scotia, Scotland’s best - and only - airline, in a riotous camperama that took retro styled kitsch into the stratosphere. With Sebastian and Steve aided and abetted by Siobhan Redmond’s terrifying trolley dolly Shona Spurtle and Patrick Ryecart’s space cadet Captain Duff, the sky was the limit. So too, alas, was the limbo Cumming and Masson’s sitcom maiden voyage was left in just as it appeared to be going places.  More than three decades on, and with the show’s creators flying high, they have joined forces with their natural theatrical heir Johnny McKnight to create this box set size musical reboot that sees Sebastian, Steve and the gang reunited as they set the controls for the heart of the fun ...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Five stars    Matters of life and death are all part of the daily grind for Flora, the overworked nurse who comes blinking into the light in this remarkable theatrical collaboration between Glasgow’s Vanishing Point company and Teater Katapult of Aarhus, Denmark on a new play by Josephine Eusebius. Arriving in Glasgow after premiering in Aarhus, Matthew Lenton’s production opens with Flora on a strip lit hospital roof, where she is catching a moment’s solitude as she recovers from the stresses of her latest shift with a rare cigarette to get her through. This noirish image is heightened by the row of performers who sit at microphones behind her, speaking stage directions as well as the assorted voices off demanding her attention.    For much of the next sixty-five minutes it is only Flora, played by a tireless Lærke Schjærff Engelbrecht,  who occupies the main performing area, torn this way and that by an increasingly demanding ar...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   Love and marriage initially look like old school domestic bliss in Laura Wade’s reimagining of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1926 play. Beneath the all smiles surface and art deco interior, however, lies an unspoken world of infidelity and deceit. In wronged wife Constance, we also have one of the smartest fictional independent women of her time. As played in Tamara Harvey’s production by a luminescent Kara Tointon, Wade ramps this up considerably in a way that puts Constance’s modernity to the fore. While she defends Tim Delap’s philandering husband, John, in public, she nevertheless turns the tables on him by way of Alex Mugnaioni’s fawning ex suitor Bernard.   We first meet Constance as her mother and sister plan to reveal the discovery of her husband John’s affair with her best friend Marie-Louise, played by Gloria Onitiri. As it turns out in the subsequent flashback, however, Constance knew all along. She just chose to keep it to herself r...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Three stars   Margaret has lost her way. No, not in the geographical sense. The Glasgow gay bar this American émigré of a certain age has just landed in on a rainy Friday night is a place she specifically sought out. For what, though? Comfort? A friendly face? A cheeky cocktail as she bonds with strangers? Sure, Margaret gets all of these and more eventually in Bethany Tennick’s lunchtime mini musical for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest season, but the welcome she initially gets from bar manager Dove isn’t exactly warm.    Even so, Margaret’s lack of direction comes from somewhere else. As a workaholic whose grown up offspring have decamped all the way to Australia, she has an empty spot where some kind of love used to live. Dove, meanwhile, has issues of her own to deal with, some of which may or may not be solved by the contents of the mysterious package her sidekick Si has been despatched to collect. When Si attempts to cast a spell to pur...