Coffee-Table Notes

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Five stars   The Club of the Unloved is already in full swing as the audience enter for this touring revival of Emma Rice’s twenty-first century reboot of the mediaeval love story that refuses to lie down. As Les Baxter’s lush lounge core sounds are swapped for Wagner on the vintage record player at the side of the stage, the mini mob of geeky ‘love spotters’ and the live junkyard band above them usher in a romp of all romps that turns to tragedy within a broken heartbeat.    In short, when John Leader’s French speaking knight has a dangerous liaison with Nandi Bhebe’s Irish princess Yseult after fetching her for Edward Rowe’s good King Mark following an altercation with her country's comedy gangster invaders, a heady brew of emotions burst forth. The ill fated pair cavort gymnastically throughout choreographer Etta Murfitt’s routines on a circular stage in Bill Mitchell’s original set design. Refreshed by Vicki Mortimer for this latest iteration...

Òran Mór, Glasgow  Three stars   When the Reverend John Home’s play, Douglas, first appeared in 1757, its romantic verse drama was a sensation. Arriving at the vanguard of the Scottish Enlightenment, Home’s play was hailed as the future by those hanging on to its commercial coat tails, while at the same time outraging those who saw any theatre at all as the Devil’s work.    Probably Douglas’s greatest gift to popular culture is the phrase called out by a fired-up audience member that gives Brian Logan’s new play its title. Several centuries on, history has largely forgotten Home’s opus, with the last professional Scottish production dating back to 1989, when Robert David MacDonald directed it at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre.    This is a useful marker for Logan’s back stage romp, which charts Douglas’s irresistible rise through the eyes of Home, his play’s champions who think they are about to hit the big time, and the naysayers who effectively had him chucke...

Perth Theatre Four stars   The writing is on the wall for Alanah, the sparky young woman in Matthew McVarish’s solo play, receiving its first revival since it was seen in 2012. Alanah is living the high life after a fashion, that fashion being in a twenty-storey tower block  in a concrete jungle where she moved when her husband dumped her after just three months of wedded bliss.    That was after Alanah dropped out of uni and pretty much everything else besides to make someone else’s dreams come true. Now she’s chief bridesmaid for her neurotic best mate Zoe’s forthcoming nuptials while holding down a job in the family planning drop in centre. Other people’s private lives, it seems, are demanding her attention at the expense of anything resembling a life of her own.     Just to cap things off, some would-be street poet has started graffitiing bon mots on the wall next to the lift. The fact that she can trace each phrase back to things said to her ...

The Pavilion, Glasgow Four stars   Once upon a time, history books were full of heroes, who helped sex up the humdrum realpolitik of what actually happened enough to bring it off the page and into the hearts and minds of those who might be led to take sides. So it goes with the much lauded story of William Wallace, Scottish knight, scourge of English marauders and, in Mel Gibson’s blue paint smeared eyes, Hollywood’s idea of a nation’s saviour.    Writer Rob Drummond and composer/lyricist Dave Hook take a different approach in this scaled up hip hop take on Wallace, developed out of its bite size original that first appeared at A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s lunchtime theatre initiative in 2025. Back then, it was done as a three-way pub debate between a Scotsman, a Wummin and a Sassenach. This time out there are six people in Orla O’Loughlin’s production for the Raw Material company, which takes place on Neil Haynes’ set of steps that looks somewhere between the epic courtroo...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Five stars   When a half buried Winnie asks a barely visible Willie if he still finds her loveable mid way through the first act of Samuel Beckett’s tragicomic study of still lives, it as if they are on a second honeymoon. As Winnie attempts in vain to rekindle lost passions that long gave way to the daily torpor of their routines, Willie can only hide behind a newspaper to barricade himself from her incessant chatter. In her attempts to find some kind of spark, Winnie’s free associating babble flits between everyday mundanities and half remembered moments that defined the way things once were. Unable to spell out her inner yearning, she is literally being buried alive, swamped by the sands of time as the pair go on living apart together.    Siobhán  Redmond captures the full brittleness of Winnie’s desperation as she  comes to life on designer Emma Bailey’s sand hill set in Roxana Silbert’s pitch perfect production. All dressed up in ...

When the Citizens Theatre reopened its doors in August 2025, the spruced up Gorbals based emporium promised much for what lay beyond its new glass frontage. Here, after all, was a Glasgow institution that was back after seven years following the building’s first ever major redevelopment since the building first opened as a theatre in 1878. This new makeover was to make it fit for purpose for twenty-first century audiences and artists alike.   Starting as it meant to go on, the Citz’s opening statement on stage came with Small Acts of Love, Frances Poet’s epic drama that looked at the aftermath of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Poet’s script was developed out of interviews with survivors and families of those whose lives were changed by the tragedy forever. Created in association with the National Theatre of Scotland, and featuring new songs by Ricky Ross, the result was a big, ambitious production, full of heart.   After seven years without a stage to call his own, artistic direc...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   You never met bored teenagers quite like Antigone and Ismene, the two self-mythologising sisters at the centre of Lulu Raczka’s audacious twenty-first century reboot of Sophocles’ Ancient Greek classic. First seen in 2020, Raczka’s reimagining of the original is revived here by director Finn den Hertog in an appropriately bold production that sees Eilidh Loan and Holly Howden Gilchrist bring the two girls to life in devastating and dervish-like fashion.    Stuck in their living room and caught in the crossfire of the epic family fallout turned civil war the play is hinged upon, Loan’s Antigone and Howden Gilchrst’s Ismene play at being wannabe grown ups in a sleepover like scenario. Sex, booze, older men and all the other things they can only pretend about are all on the agenda before they end up doing karaoke instead of actually indulging in such japes.    It is Antigone’s attitude problem that does for them, as she makes out ...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   Some stories should never be told. This is made clear by matriarch Marion in Izzy Gray’s new play for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s autumn season of lunchtime theatre. Given the Orkney set backdrop of Gray’s drama, one might say secrets revealed here are best left buried at sea.    So it goes with Marion, Elsie and Bess, three of the women left behind in the seaport of Hamvenroe - the ancient Viking name of what is now Stromness - when their men folk disappear for months on end on whaling expeditions. As the trio go on with the daily grind despite the absence, a communal anxiety simmers to the surface. Beyond it, unexplained mysteries on their own doorstep have a seismic effect that erupts into view, only for it to die down once more in a conspiracy of silence, as if nothing ever happened.    There is a brooding fire of unspoken dissent at the heart of Gray’s play, written in a rich Orcadian Scots that in the mouths of the three women...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   When Taylor Swift released her epic 2025 single, The Fate of Ophelia, it possibly did more to introduce the work of William Shakespeare to Swift’s school age audience than an entire term of English Lit classes. One suspects something similar has occurred with the History syllabus over the last decade since Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s poptastic celebration of Henry VIII’s six wives was performed by a bunch of Cambridge undergraduates on the 2017 Edinburgh Festival Fringe before conquering the world.    The premise is simple. Each of Henry’s exes who have been magicked together like a manufactured girl band from the grave take it in turns to tell the story of their respective wedded bliss with the king in a bid to prove who was the best queen, divorces, beheading or plain old everyday deaths notwithstanding.    The first of two sextets for this latest tour already look and sound like a stadium-sized headline act in Moss and...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars In every dream home there is heartache for the couple at the centre of Amy Conway’s play, the latest in A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s current season of lunchtime theatre. Henry is almost caught with his pants down when the buzzer goes at the door of his flat, but it’s nothing compared to what happens next.    The woman at the door may look like the spitting image of Henry’s ex girlfriend Liz, but behind the belted raincoat and the hyper efficient persona is the sort of all access dream girl that initially at least seems even better than the real thing. When things don’t go to programme, however, Henry’s actions are a whole lot more extreme than simply pulling the plug. And when the buzzer goes again, reality bites in disturbingly similar ways in the flesh.    The all-encroaching rise of AI is very much on the agenda just now, as it has been long before science fiction became fact. The humanisation and sexualisation of robots too has bee...

Edinburgh’s festival season may be over, but there is still plenty going on across Scotland’s stages as autumn seasons kick off in earnest with a series of big plays with big ideas. Wiping My Mother’s Arse Pitlochry Festival Theatre until 5 September. Last chance to see this long overdue revival of Iain Heggie’s rewritten sit-com style dark farce first seen at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in 2001. Set in a care home, Heggie’s play navigates what follows when long-term patient Andrene’s son, Derek, turns up to see her with his gobby new girlfriend Kath in tow. With Andrene being looked after by nurse Larry, a not so merry go round of secrets and lies ensues in a play that is revealed as a Scottish heir to Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloan, as well as revealing Heggie as a writer way ahead of his time.      Irvine Welsh’s PORNO Albany, Greenock, 5 September; Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, 12 September; Tivoli Theatre, Aberdeen, 14 September; Macrobert Arts Centre, Stirling,...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   Life takes two people by surprise in this debut work by LC Stephens for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest lunchtime theatre season. Stephens’s play focuses on Clare and Barry, habitués of Glasgow’s West End who find themselves in the same student friendly boozer one night trying to offload their respective baggage to each of their ill suited companions. Through a series of alternating monologues, we discover that both Clare and Barry’s worlds have been turned upside down by very different matters of life and death. We also learn that both parties feel like bit part players in their own story to the point of invisibility. Oh, and as Barry realises, even if Clare doesn’t, they already have history with each other.    There is a lovely sense of everyday mid life longing in Stephens’ script, brought charmingly and wittily to life in Graham McLaren’s elegant production on Gillian Argo’s simple but effective tables and chairs set. This is ide...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars   Matthew Zajac’s now almost twenty-year-old solo play has had a journey almost as remarkable as its subject matter. Opening for previews in Glasgow’s now long lost Arches venue back in 2008 prior to a successful Edinburgh Festival Fringe run, Zajac’s autobiographical tale of his father’s flight from his homeland in the then Polish area of Galicia and everything that followed has travelled the world several times over.   This latest tour of Scotland is the biggest for some time, and chimes with the publication of a new edition of Zajac’s play that also charts his own quest to find his roots. The result in this revival of Ben Harrison’s production for the Highland based Dogstar Theatre Company is a show that retains its original intimacy as it explores Zajac’s deeply personal story about fathers and sons. Through this backdrop it becomes a far bigger universal tale that lays bare the unintended consequences of war in terms of migration...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Five stars   Imagine a world where truth doesn’t matter anymore. Then imagine someone who held on to old truths is spied on, hounded and tortured until they kow-tow to the official version and fall in line with everyone else. Welcome to Chris Hannan’s searing new stage version of George Orwell’s visionary novel, which sets out its dystopian store with major resonances of so called democracy now in terms of how dissent on all sides is dealt with.    From the opening bombardment of electronic noise, Dominic Hill’s production brings home the mix of mundanity and terror in Hannan’s adaptation. This comes in the regulation utilitarian blue uniforms worn by Winston Smith and his regimented peers as much as it does from Winston’s final submission to the system following a relentless series of rapid-fire torture scenes. In-between comes the frightening realities of masked men turning up at meetings to remove deviants, and the collective release of a bayi...