Coffee-Table Notes

Leith Depot, Edinburgh Four stars   When Dan the man left his Edinburgh home for Iceland in 2015 to study graphic design, it was the beginning of a great adventure. Here he was, out on his own and off the leash with his whole life in front of him, and his cheeky Scottish charm seemingly a passport to anywhere. Reykjavik was buzzing, and so was he, and for a giddy moment, Dan was truly living the dream. Unfortunately in Heidi Docherty’s new short solo play performed by herself, it doesn’t last.    What follows is an unflinching portrait of how a fun loving cheeky chappie has his already fragile confidence dented by the voices in his head who over the next few years mark out Dan’s struggles - with money, his course, his numerous jobs, his love life, his family, and ultimately with himself - until he can’t take anymore.    The result is a tragic indictment on the perils of young people overwhelmed by anguish even before you realise that for Docherty this is painful...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow  Four stars   Old ghosts are everywhere in this latest tour of the late Stephen Mallatratt’s ingenious staging of Susan Hill’s best selling 1983 gothic horror novel, in which an ageing solicitor called Arthur Kipps attempts to lay those ghosts to rest. He does this by telling his story of what happened years before after he was dispatched to a marshy godforsaken landscape to sort out a deceased recluse’s affairs. Here, the spectral figure of the woman who gives the show its title haunts the town into submission, with portents of doom at her every fleeting appearance, as Kipps learns to his cost.    Back in 1987, Mallatratt took Hill’s already spooky yarn and set it in an empty theatre, where Kipps has hired a young actor to play out his past in an attempt to exorcise his demons. Originally intended as a low key entertainment performed in the theatre bar, in director Robin Herford’s hands, Mallatratt’s creation took on a life of its own, and up ...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   When Stephen King set out to write an old time prison break yarn in the early 1980s, the result was Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,. This hard boiled novella about life on the inside for ex banker Andy Dufresne after being convicted for murdering his wife and her lover was narrated by Ellis ‘Red’ Redding, a lifer who has become the go-to guy for anything his fellow inmates might need to make the time inside a little easier. With Andy thrown in the deep end of a corrupt late 1940s institution led from the top by prison warden Stammas, what follows over almost thirty years is a story of finding freedom against all the odds.   Much of this will be familiar from Frank Darabont’s 1994 sleeper hit film version, but it was to King’s original that Owen O’Neill and Dave Johns returned to when they adapted it for the stage back in 2009. This return of David Esbjornson’s fleshed out production for this latest UK tour sees Joe McFadden ...

Frank Dunlop – Theatre and opera director   Born February 15, 1927; died January 4, 2026     Frank Dunlop, who has died aged 98, was a maverick theatre director, whose seven-year stint as director of Edinburgh International Festival between 1984 and 1991 brought major world theatre to the festival. Work by international heavyweights such as the Berliner Ensemble, Ingmar Bergman, Andrzej Wajda and Yukio Ninagawa was programmed alongside major revivals of Scottish classics. The latter included Tom Fleming’s epic staging of Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaites, Sydney Goodsir Smith’s version of The Wallace, and James Bridie’s Holy Isle. Dunlop brought both strands together in his own 1987 production of Schiller’s Mary Stuart, which featured a large Scottish cast led by Hannah Gordon as Mary.     Dunlop’s first year as director also featured a ten-day Samuel Beckett season at the Churchill Theatre, Morningside. The latter included works by New York’s Harold Clurman...

The Georgian House, Edinburgh Four stars   The sins of rhyme, as Robert Burns calls his craft in this new dramatisation of the bard’s words, have much to answer for. Burns himself was an all too familiar bundle of contradictions in his output. On the one hand, he had a common touch that tapped into the collective consciousness enough to take poetry into the mainstream. On the other, his feckless shagabout ways left much domestic mess in his wake. This is before the one about the slave trade the cash-strapped people’s poet almost signs up with to help escape his lot.   All of this and more is addressed in James Clements’ hour long compendium of words and music which returns to the Georgian House’s Robert Adam designed Edinburgh New Town des-res in the run up to Burns Night following last year’s Fringe run and recent tour. With the audience seated the length of a dinner table laid out with all the accoutrements, the traditional Burnsian gathering is duly upended by Clements...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   The world is full of Basil Fawltys these days. Half a century after John Cleese and Connie Booth’s savagely funny portrait of middle aged male neuroses was unleashed kicking and screaming onto prime time Sunday night TV, Basil walks among us once more, as pompous, repressed and set to spontaneously combust as he ever was.    Cleese’s hit stage version of his creation has already proven to be far more than the pension plan nostalgia fest it might initially look like, with the series of note perfect impressions from director Caroline Jay Ranger’s young cast capturing every madcap nuance of his creations as they reboot them with new life.   For those for whom what has been designated to be TV’s greatest sitcom may have passed them by, Basil and his wife Sybil run a sleepy hotel in Torquay, where maid Polly keeps things together as Basil, Sybil and Spanish waiter Manuel attempt to serve a series of increasingly unwelcome guests. ...

Now panto season is more or less over, the year begins with some big hitters on the touring circuit as well as a couple of more intimate affairs before the theatrical floodgates fully open in February.   MAMMA MIA! The Playhouse, Edinburgh until January 4; His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, January 27-February 7. As reviewed on these pages only last week, Catherine Johnson’s ABBA powered dramady sired in the girl powered 1990s is now more than a quarter of a century old. This makes for several layers of nostalgia in Johnson’s marriage of Benny and Bjorn’s greatest hits to Brit-flavoured prime time drama in a yarn about ex pat Donna and her daughter Sophie as they prepare for a Greek wedding that causes Sophie to ant to find out who her dad is. Cue three gentlemen callers from Donna’s past showing up in a show with women’s independence at its heart and some of the best ever 1970s pop bangers thrown in. Following its last few days in Edinburgh to see in the new year, Phyllida Lloyd’s p...