Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh  Four stars   In the city there are eight million stories. Edinburgh being Edinburgh, it would probably like to boast it has a fair few more. Given the Athens of the North’s Jekyll and Hyde style credentials, whereby it puts on a pretty facade for the tourists, while the real tall tales emerge from more intimate exchanges out of sight behind closed doors, this might well be the case.    So it goes with Lyceum at Home, an initiative spearheaded by the capital theatre’s artistic director James Brining, who commissioned four writers to create a quartet of thirty-minute monologues. With each set in Edinburgh, in a project led by outgoing associate director Zinnie Harris, these were then performed around town in people’s living rooms, where sofa bound audiences were unavoidably up close to the action. Now the mini tour is over, the quartet of new works were brought back home to the theatre that sired them, where they were performed on the s...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars    Electricity is in the air when Robin meets Iris at a 1990s student party for her 21st birthday. As opposites attract, the pair find common ground of sorts over a broken guitar displayed like a trophy. What might have ended up as one night of drunken passion becomes something else when the pair make a vow never to touch.    Thirty years later, and what was an unforgettable moment for him and one more rash promise for her brings Robin and Iris together once more. As their worlds collide in a courtroom cafe where both are involved in the consequences of actions not of their making, their criss-crossing lives catch up with each other across generations and wake up something in both of them.   What initially looks like an extended episode of what might be styled as This Mid Life in the first act of Douglas Maxwell’s emotionally ambitious play gradually evolves into something more expansively contemporary in the second.  R...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Three stars   Hear ye this. When a town crier and a court jester gather as one for the pleasure of the king, soothsaying and hilarity will ensue. Or sometimes not. Such is the way in Nay Dhanak’s mini epic, the latest comic extravaganza to grace A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s current lunchtime theatre season. Here we find our ad hoc double act both out of a job, and reduced to telling their respective stories with a little help from some life size puppets and framed as a comedy masterclass.    As they ply their past their sell by date wares with a stream of verbiage and well worn gags, the duo’s slapstick interplay becomes part of a mediaeval quest in search of a second sun to offset the unfortunate eclipse back home. Instead they find themselves thrown into the future, where the news is relayed in a million different hi-tech ways, punchlines are ten a penny, dragons aren’t so easily slain and Siri has an answer for everything.    Dhanak ...

When poet Roddy Lumsden died in 2020 aged 53, it called time on a mercurial figure, whose work impacted worlds beyond the rarefied literary circuit. This should be in evidence at Mischief Night, which commemorates what would have been Lumsden’s sixtieth birthday in the same venue he launched his first collection, Yeah Yeah Yeah, in 1997.   Named after Lumsden’s 2004 book, while Mischief Night will of course feature poetry, there will also be a focus on his other obsessions. This will come in the form of a quiz, and will feature a soundtrack drawn from his substantial collection of 7-inch singles. The latter will be played by those behind a weekly event called Sleepless Nights. This was a Thursday night vinyl only happening that took place at Edinburgh’s now long lost St. James Oyster Bar, and which featured the sort of left-field obscurities that fired Lumsden’s own musical tastes. Requests are being taken on the event website.   As unofficial writer in residence at St. J, Lum...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Five stars   The vintage microphone that hangs down centre stage may be designed for old school crooners in Linda McLean’s adaptation of Denise Mina’s true crime novel, but as it swings between those confessing not quite all, those behind it tell a far darker story.    It is 1958, and in a world where gangsterism and civic entrepreneurism rub shoulders in spit and sawdust bars and after-hours members clubs, William Watt has been released from prison after being tried for the murder of his wife, daughter and sister-in-law. Determined to clear his name, the Lanarkshire businessman ends up on a twelve-hour bender with Peter Manuel, who will later be convicted and hanged for these and other killings.    Over two intense hours, Mina’s story flits between the trial and a speculative dramatisation of what may or may not have happened during Watt and Manuel’s epic session. The result in Dominic Hill’s main stage production is a slow burnin...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars    Love hurts in D.C. Jackson’s potty-mouthed sitcom writ large. This is something to do with the succession of studiedly adolescent one-line gags peppered throughout as much as the growing pains of impending adulthood, not to mention the hangovers that go with both. Either way, it’s complicated.    This is how it rolls for Tom and Amy, the terminally feckless thirty something duo whose drunken one-night office amour helps stave off grown up responsibilities. Until, that is, they have no choice. Inbetween, Jackson has his sort of happy couple rewind on assorted teenage romances that left their mark like a bad home made tattoo. With Tom and Amy’s messy story told by each in turn as they narrate their own unreliable memoirs, we get to see their warts and all destiny from all sides until they become entwined forever.    Johnny McKnight’s revival of Jackson’s 2010 mini series in waiting stays true to its overriding ridiculousnes...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   Don’t mess with the Hens in Debbie Hannan’s new play, the latest lunchtime epic to grace A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s current season. As Jade, Amber and Lilac gather for their best pal Coral’s weekend extravaganza, they are already a force to be reckoned with. Once Coral’s so called cousin and unexpected guest Luna checks in with the WhatsApp group, however, by the end of their 48 Hours of regimented fun in the Athens of the North, they will have become goddesses.    This is brought to mercurial life by three of the finest female acting talents of their generation, with Danni Heron as Jade, Laura Lovemore as Lilac and Anna Russell-Martin as Amber joining forces as a chorus to end them all on Heather Grace Currie’s celestial looking set. As the trio double up as Coral and Luna in this co-production with Assembly Roxy in Edinburgh, the level of female energy on show goes stratospheric in its mix of ancient...

Big grown up plays are very much the order of the day in Scottish theatre’s homegrown summer seasons throughout June. Significantly, perhaps, only two of these are musicals, demonstrating that it is still possible to create powerful theatre without making a song and dance about it.    Stand & Deliver: The Lee Jeans Sit-In Cumbernauld Theatre, 6 June; Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock, 9-10 June.  Final dates for Frances Poet’s musical play about the 1981 strike by women workers in the Greenock Lee Jeans factory in what should be a powerful return home to the place where it all happened. This co-production between the National Theatre of Scotland, and the Tron Theatre, Glasgow was developed out of conversations with some of the 240 women involved in the strike, the play looks at how they stood up for themselves and each other over the seven-month dispute. The Herald called it ‘a spirited tribute to the power of the people’.     Sweat Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburg...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   As Scotland’s latest World Cup hopes come into view over the next few weeks, Joe McCann’s debut play is a timely look at one of the country’s lesser-spotted footballing greats. Back in the nineteenth century, Andrew Watson arrived in the UK from Demerara, British Guiana, the mixed race son of a wealthy sugar plantation owner father and a Guianese mother. While at university in Glasgow, Watson discovered football, and went on to become the first black player in association football at international level, who became star striker and captain of Queen’s Park. Watson also captained Scotland’s national team in three games that saw them hammer England twice, with the first game, a 6-1 victory for Watson’s team, remaining a record home defeat for England.   This is more than enough to get the faithful rallying behind Watson in McCann’s play, performed with heart by a solo Dayton Mungai, who begins with a question to the audience. Several others fol...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars    Relocation, relocation, relocation is the order of the day in this new stage adaptation of Barbet Schroeder’s 1992 schlocky horror psycho-sexual thriller. Drawn from John Lutz’s novel from two years earlier, SWF Seeks Same, the story imagines what happens when a woman’s new flatmate turn out to be mad, bad and very dangerous to know.    Moving house is not only theprime drive for Lisa Faulkner’s Allie as she and her teenage daughter Bella move into a building with seriously shonky electrics after Allie finally ditches Bella’s feckless dad, Sam. Nor is it just about Allie’s new lodger, Hedy, played by Kym Marsh as a Yorkshire sired cuckoo in the nest.    Writer Rebecca Reid has taken the steamy stateside des-res of the film and moved it lock, stock and homicidal kitchen knife to what appears to be a collapsing British suburban tower block. Not only that, Reid has whooshed things forward a few decades from the angsty and ...

Factories have been working overtime in my mind of late. As the Herald’s theatre critic, I recently watched the National Theatre of Scotland and the Tron Theatre’s production of Frances Poet’s new play, Stand & Deliver, take a musical look at the 1981 sit-in at Greenock’s Lee jeans factory.  A week later, I saw Sweat, the Citizens Theatre Glasgow and Royal Lyceum Edinburgh’s revival of Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize winning 2015 play about what happens to a mid American steel town when the plug is pulled on the factory that gave that town its economic lifeblood.   My more personal interest in factories just now is to do with The Machine Stops. This is a project I'm part of that is set to take place as part of Hidden Door, the grassroots Edinburgh arts festival that takes over abandoned buildings and transforms them into unique temporary venues.   This year’s Hidden Door returns to The Paper Factory, the vast former cardboard packaging plant close to Edinburgh Airp...