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 production decamps to Aberdeen. Don’t worry, Glasgow. It’s coming to you in August.
The Rocky Horror Show
The Playhouse, Edinburgh, January 6-10.
A speedy Edinburgh return for Richard O’Brien’s glamtastic cult fiction trash musical writ large, as Jason Donovan slips into a basque and high heels as Frank-N-Furter, a role he first played back in the 1990s. Now more than half a century old, O’Brien’s indulgence of intergalactic camp jumps the time warp once more with its Frankenstein’s monster of sci-fi B-movie pastiche, first generation rock and roll nostalgia and post swinging sixties libertine spirit that looks set to be immortal. Now take a jump to the left…
Fawlty Towers The Play
King’s Theatre, Glasgow, January 13-17; His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, January 20-24; The Playhouse, Edinburgh, January 27-31.
John Cleese and Connie Booth’s hotel set sitcom may have only ran for two series’ in 1975 and 1979, but its madcap depiction of Cleese’s manic hotel owner Basil Fawlty and his increasingly chaotic encounters with staff and guests has long become the stuff of pop culture legend. Cleese’s stage version was first seen in Australia in 2016 prior to a West End run and this subsequent tour, in which Basil, Sybil, Polly and Manuel are resurrected for a new generation. Just don’t mention the war.
The Shawshank Redemption
Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, January 20-24.
Owen O’Neill and Dave Johns’ stage version of Stephen King’s 1982 prison set novella, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, was first seen on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe run in 2013 during the Fringe’s brief vogue for putting on modern classics with casts of comedians. Scaled up a couple of years later for a commercial tour, the production’s sourcing of King’s fiction rather than the 1994 film version worked to its advantage. This latest outing sees Joe McFadden star as Andy Dufresne, a 1940s banker banged up for a long stretch after being convicted for killing his wife and her lover in a tense tale of surviving the penal system despite the odds being stacked against you.
The Woman in Black
Theatre Royal, Glasgow, January 20-24.
Anyone looking for genuine jump scares should brave the spine tingling delights of this long running stage version of Susan Hill’s novel concerning a mysterious woman who haunts a small English town. This adaptation by the late Stephen Mallatratt adds even more spooky drama by having the play’s chief protagonist hire an actor play out his story in a production that uses a haunted theatre trope alongside pretty much every trick in the hammy horror playbook to chilling effect. First seen back in 1987, Mallatratt’s dark creation went on to become the second longest running non-musical show on the West End. It remains an irresistibly creepy draw.
The Rhinestone Cowboy
Leith Depot, Edinburgh, January 28.
Brand new play by Leith based poet and spoken word artist Heidi Docherty, aka Hjarta, and based on a real life incident following the suicide of a young Scot living in Iceland. Working with her composer/musician son Harry Docherty, aka Harry Bongo, Docherty’s solo play looks at the ravaging effects of schizophrenia by way of an epic road trip that moves between Edinburgh and Iceland in a moving and unflinching tribute from a mother to her lost son.
Size Matters
Citizen’s Theatre, Glasgow, January 30-31.
Vanishing Point theatre company have long supported artists making their own work outwith the company’s main stage productions. As part of a winter residency at the Citizens Theatre, the company hosts two preview performances of Memoru Iriguchi’s wildly inventive fusion of puppetry, science and surrealism en route to the Manipulate festival of visual theatre in Edinburgh. Working with collaborator Julia Darrouy, Iriguchi pitches up their puppet doubles to explore time and perception, and how they shift with size in a dimension-hopping leap into matters large and small.
A Play for Torry
Aberdeen Arts Centre, January 31. Nigg Bay Golf Club, Torry. February1.
Brand new community play created with local residents of Torry, just outside Aberdeen, which gives voice to a community whose home has become the target of assorted industrial land grabs over the years. This includes the town’s Bay of Nigg now turned a concrete industrial harbour, its only green space in St Fittick’s Park surrounded by a landfill and waste incinerator, and proposals to bulldoze the park to make way for something called an Energy Transition Zone. Put together by directors Emer Morris and Annabel Lunney, writers Mae Diansangu and Shane Strachan and various composers and musicians, with input from locals in the frontline, this impassioned work goes beyond the corporate spin to get to the grassroots of a community that has remained resilient in the face of attempts to destroy it.
The Herald, January 3rd 2026
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