Coffee-Table Notes

Òran Mór , Glasgow Four stars   Eyes are very much down for a full house in this new play by Marc Pye and Gayle Telfer Stevens, the latest lunchtime extravaganza as part of the current A Play, a Pie and a Pint season. Angie and Linda are pretty much addicted to the allure of the bingo hall, which offers some kind of lifeline, as well as potentially sorting out their respective financial woes. If Angie doesn’t get to call ‘House’, chances are she’ll lose hers.    Linda and Angie’s daughters Stacey and Amy, meanwhile, have other plans, and perish the thought of following in their mothers’ footsteps. With a cool 40k a winning number away, however, Stacey could bankroll her online influencer lifestyle and get some work done on herself, while Amy could kick-start her dog grooming business in style. All it takes to change their lives is one stolen membership card.    There is a lot more going on than meets Kelly’s Eye in Pye and Telfer Stevens’ sit-com style affair. ...

One could be forgiven for thinking that Alan Cumming has been in post as artistic director of Pitlochry Festival Theatre longer than he has. Such has been Cumming’s public profile of late, be it hosting events, starring in a stage musical of his and Forbes Masson’s 1980s sitcom, The High Life, or being interviewed on these pages after being named the most influential person in Scotland's art scene for 2026, his ubiquity goes before him. As it is, Cumming’s first season that he’s programmed for the Perthshire based theatre actually only opens this month. This will also mark the 75th anniversary of PFT, when visionary impresario John Stewart first put on theatre in a tent. Cumming’s programme celebrates in spectacular style. This comes with Once, a new production of the hit musical that reunites the original creative team led by director John Tiffany for this multiple Tony winning show. This is followed by Inexperience, a new studio play by Douglas Maxwell, while Maureen Beattie will...

Òran Mór , Glasgow Four stars   What happened one sunny day in 2021 on Glasgow’s south side when agents of the UK Home Office were thwarted from removing two Sikh men of Indian descent from their homes has become an inspiration for our times. The spontaneous show of mass solidarity that rose up that day has already been documented in Felipe Bustos Sierra’s film, Everybody to Kenmure Street. Playwright Simon Jay has here picked up the baton with a verbatim approach to his new play drawn from the day’s events. The result in this latest lunchtime production for A Play, a Pie and a Pint mixes interviews and anecdotal accounts with a little old school polemic to tell the story.    Key to this is the song by Kenmure Street residents Craig and Rachel Smillie written within days of the event, and which here acts as a folksy refrain as actors Nesha Caplan, Kal Sabir and Betty Valencia replay what happened. This moves from the initial response to the eventual release of the men fro...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars   For those on side, Cowdenbeath Football Club may never have been premiere league material, but they have always occupied a field of dreams. This is made clear in Gary McNair’s wonderful new stage adaptation of Ron Ferguson’s 1993 book, ostensibly a love letter to the club that becomes a funny and profound meditation on the collective power of football fandom as a form of everyday devotion.   So it goes with McNair’s version, which sees Cowdenbeath native Sally make a reluctant prodigal’s return to the Fife mining town following the death of her football daft dad. The deal is that Sally is to scatter her old man’s ashes onto the pitch at CFC’s home ground of Central Park, but only after they win a game. As historical statistics show, alas, the 1991/92 season when Sally made her promise wasn’t exactly a walk in the park in terms of getting a resuls, which is why she finds herself spending more weekends than she bargained for on t...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh  Four stars   Everybody wants a piece of Jenna in Jessie Horton and Sara Bareilles’ smash hit musical, which celebrates its tenth anniversary on its latest UK tour. Based on the late Adrienne Shelly’s film of the same name, writer Horton and composer Bareilles’ confection is a bittersweet affair served up in Abbey O’Brien’s all singing, all dancing restaging of Diane Paulus’ original production with all the trimmings.    Jenna is the waitress of the show’s title, who may bake the best pies in the American South in Joe’s Pie Diner, but who remains stuck in a dead end marriage with abusive husband Earl. With a baby on the way, Jenna looks set to be even more trapped. Also working in the diner are Becky and Dawn, with whom Jenna forms an unbreakable trio in the face of assorted men folk. While Jenna finds Dr. Pomatter has an impeccable bedside manner, geeky Dawn does a whole lot of re-enacting with oddball Ogie, while Becky gets behind the ...

Perth Theatre Four stars   Everyone is a star in Morag Fullarton’s latest remake of a Hollywood classic. Following Casablanca The Gin Joint Cut and It’s a Wonderful Life… Mostly, this reimagining of Billy Wilder’s 1950 showbiz noir  is scaled up to something more suitably epic after being  first seen back in 2015 as a lunchtime show at Oran Mor.    The appeal of putting it back on stage isn’t hard to fathom. Here, after all, is a big picture that mythologises its own world by way of what happens to screenwriter Joe Gillis. Gillis has become the accidental toy boy of faded silent movie queen Norma Desmond after being drafted in to write her back into the spotlight. While Norma is watched over by her devoted butler, Max, Joe teams up with script reader Betty Schaefer, who has her own plans for Joe.    As if such a tangled web wasn’t already a multi-tiered potboiler, Fullarton gift-wraps her production by framing it with Wilder casting his new opus, and t...

Water is at the centre of Sarah Calmus’s world in Right to Roam, as the Edinburgh based artist follows up on her recent multi-screen intervention, Uisge, viewable on Potterow in Edinburgh, with a full-on immersive experience. Calmus’s exhibition takes its title from the internationally recognised notion of a public right to access public and privately owned land. Focusing on the River Forth, she utilises moving image, sculpture, sound and screenprints to take a deep dive into environmental pollution, climate change and how the natural landscape is threatened.   “I wanted to talk about this idea within the lens of water,” Calmus says of an exhibition that has its roots in a residency in Sweden. “I swim in the Forth quite a lot, and I also row, and because of where I live in Newhaven I see the river every morning, so I'm all about the water, so I thought I would hone in on this conversation about the right to roam and really focus on water. We're all made of water, and the tides ...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars   A big blood red spotlight engulfs the stage as an eerie underscore plays while the lights go down on this trimmed down version of Shakespeare’s Scottish play. Arguably the bard’s best-known saga has been seen in many forms over the last few centuries. His is tale of doomed ambition and men who would be king probably hasn’t been seen that often with such rapid fire brevity as this new version by the Hove based Out of Chaos company. Perhaps with latter day low attention span in mind concerning this set text friendly epic, director Mike Tweddle here oversees a version featuring just two actors who manage to fast forward through the Macbeths rise and fall in a speedy eighty minutes.    Hannah Barrie and Paul O’Mahoney may be centre-stage much of the time as the fortune hunting Macbeths, but they also double up as a full supporting cast of assorted monarchs, thanes and soldiers in arms without missing a beat. They also do a turn as the wei...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Five stars    Sparks fly on the factory floor at the start of Joanna Bowman’s explosive revival of Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, first seen in 2015, but looking more pertinent than ever. As a portent of things to come, this opening image is as telling as the fact that the sides of Francis O’Connor’s set look like a cage, inside which, some kind of combat takes place. This is how it is, not just in the factory, but in the bar where the workers splash their wages around, and almost certainly in the prison the two young men at the heart of the play have just been released from.    The time moves between the turn of the century when it felt like people could get by, to eight years later when the world has changed. The place is Reading, Pennsylvania, a blue-collar heartland fired by iron and steel. Here, Tracey, Cynthia and Jessie spend their down time getting hammered, as do Tracey’s son Jason and Cynthia’s boy Chris. The...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   Hannah Howie has something to get off her chest. The clue is in the title of the actress and singer’s new cabaret style show, the latest mini musical to grace A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s ongoing lunchtime theatre season. Howie’s extravaganza is founded on the life changing diagnosis that she had an 85 per cent chance of contracting cancer. She subsequently turned her decision to have a double mastectomy into something she can have a song and dance about.    Howie does this with the aid of her two little helpers who each represent her Left Breast and her Right Breast, aka Georgia and Freda. As Howie struts her stuff all dressed up in suitably funereal black, G and F are brought to life by Kirsty Malone and Gregor John-Owen, who back her up as assorted comedy doctors as well as busting some moves in step with their mistress. Given that each has a personality of their own - Georgia is the feisty one, Freda the smaller of the two - it is only rig...

Central Hall, Edinburgh Four stars   A community hall vibe percolates the room for this Mayday extravaganza put together by actress/director Cora Bissett and poet and playwright Hannah Lavery for the National Theatre of Scotland. This one night compendium of theatre, music and spoken word aims to be ‘Rapid Responses to Our Times’. With an election due in less than a week’s time, the rise of the far right, events in Gaza, institutionalised racism, historical revisionism and all points between are put on the frontline by way of a series of artistic responses to the volatile and divisive times we currently live in. The result is an old school political cabaret writ large.    This is kick-started in noisily unambiguous fashion by singer Declan Walsh with the punky oppositionist rage of his song, Nazi Boys, accompanied by a house band featuring guitarist Djana Gabrielle. Gabrielle later performs one of the night’s standout moments, when she sings Dala, written b...

As 1980s pop myths go, the story of Talk Talk is one of the most mysterious. Graeme Thomson’s new book, In Another World – The Four Seasons of Talk Talk, digs deep into the story of the Mark Hollis fronted group who went from glossy synth-pop chart botherers over their first two albums before creating some of the most sublime musical meditations of their era.   Over three albums – The Colour of Spring (1986), Spirit of Eden (1988) and Laughing Stock (1991) – Talk Talk’s core trio of Hollis, bassist Paul Webb and drummer Lee Harris, plus producer Tim Friese-Greene, created a series of lushly crafted and increasingly insular soundscapes before disappearing for good. An eponymous stripped back 1998 solo album by Hollis hinted at things to come. As it turned out, it was a last gift to the world before he withdrew from music entirely.   The silence of all band members increased the Talk Talk legend, while the death of Hollis in 2019 aged sixty-four put a full stop on a group that e...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh  Five stars   The seasons have shifted since Karine Polwart’s multi media elegy to a 200 year old Sabal palm tree about to be felled in Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden first blew in to the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Back then, in the heat of such a turbulent backdrop, Polwart’s elegant mix of storytelling and song stood out enough to be declared a masterpiece. Eight months on, Polwart’s meticulously realised immersive song cycle has blossomed enough for a countrywide tour that begins at the Lyceum, where an early workshop of the show was presented.    From the moment Pippa Murphy’s environmental soundscape rattles with the wind, this homecoming of sorts remains a monument to the power of the natural world and the glorious constructions that grow from it. As the tree is plucked from the wild, taken across oceans to foreign lands and kept in glasshouses that can barely contain it, it evolves into a magnificently plumed hybrid it tu...

Times of strife of various kinds take over Scottish stages this month, with working class lives very much to the fore as well as showbiz, spies and taking to the skies.   Windblown Byre Theatre, St Andrews, 2 May; Eden Court, Inverness,  6 May ; The Pavilion, Glasgow,  8-9 May ; Macrobert Arts Centre, Stirling,  14 May ; Perth Concert Hall,  16 May. Karine Polwart returns with her hugely successful fusion of storytelling and song inspired by a 200 year old tree at the Royal Botanic Garden. Featuring sound design by Pippa Murphy, stunning visuals by Jamie Wardrop and piano accompaniment by jazz pianist David Milligan, Polwart’s creation was described in The Herald’s five star review as ‘a work of monumental beauty’.      The High Life: The Musical – Still Living It! Eden Court, Inverness until 2 May; Dundee Rep,  6-9 May ; King’s Theatre, Glasgow,  12-23 May. More than three decades on from Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson’s short-lived Sco...