The world may be about to descend on Edinburgh for its assorted festivals, but there is plenty happening elsewhere in the country in August, as a small army of powerful women on stage appear to be taking the lead. The first four shows have their final dates this weekend, so grab a ticket while you can.
Lear
Pitlochry Festival Theatre, until 1 August
Maureen Beattie takes the title role in Finn den Hertog’s new adaptation of Shakespeare’s saga of sanity, madness and the family in a very personal take on the play that nevertheless remains faithful to the original. As an ageing matriarch only wanting to be told by her daughters how special she is, while Goneril and Regan tell her what she wants to hear, Ailsa Davidson’s Cordelia is having none of it. The result sees Lear lose the plot and do a runner, tended to by Cordelia’s clown doctor Fool, while her big sisters embark on a war that looks like something Quentin Tarantino might have dreamt up if he’d gone cyberpunk. This is Beattie’s play, however, in a family affair gone rogue.
Emma
Botanic Gardens, Glasgow, until 1 August
Jane Austen was no slouch in putting thoroughly modern women to the fore in her novels. Emma was the last to be published in her lifetime in 2015, and focuses on the smart and beautiful heroine who breezes through life thinking herself above the emotional merry go round of the dating game, only to fall hard. Jennifer Dick’s new stage version takes Austen’s girl powered proto chick lit rom-com romp outdoors for this year’s Bard in the Botanics season and stays true to the story’s happy ever afters, with Esme Bayley as a suitably effervescent Emma. Incidentally, Amy Heckerling’s whipsmart teen movie, Clueless, which put Austen’s novel into an American high school setting, was released thirty-one years pretty much to the day that Gordon Barr’s production of Emma opened.
The Duchess of Malfi
Botanic Gardens, Glasgow, until 1 August
John Webster, as Echo and the Bunnymen observed in their Porcupine era song, My White Devil, was the author of two great tragedies. While Mac and co probably weren’t giving the 17thcentury playwright his due in terms of output, The Duchess of Malfi is the second of the two mentioned alongside the one that almost gives the song its title. Bard of the Botanics’ new five-actor version performed in the Kibble Palace Glasshouse allows audiences to see in close up Webster’s bloody tale of a not always merry widow who finds love beneath her, only for her scheming brothers to put their jealous oar in by getting their spy Bosola to do their dirty work. As the body count piles up, she is by far the most interesting character in Jennifer Dick’s production of her own stripped back adaptation, in which illicit surveillance culture has very serious consequences indeed.
I Can Die Too
Pitlochry Festival Theatre, until 2 August
Life imitates art for Tony award winning actress Frances Ruffelle’s character in this brand new musical play co written by her with actress Sally George and PFT artistic director Alan Cumming. The play is inspired by Jean Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine, one of the great monologues for actresses, which sees a woman hanging on the telephone as her lover on the other end of the line attempts to let her down easy. Here, Ruffelle plays an actress on the verge of a nervous breakdown as she rehearses the show in a back stage chamber musical where ghosts come calling in a way that enables Ruffelle’s character to deal with her hang-ups in song.
AHistory of Paper
Pitlochry Festival Theatre, 9 August-12 September
Alan Cumming finally graces the stage for the first time since he became artistic director of Pitlochry Festival Theatre, appearing opposite Shirley Henderson in this revival of Oliver Emanuel’s play with songs composed with Gareth Williams. Originally heard as a radio play in 2017, this intimate look at a love story in which every bus ticket and scrawled note becomes significant was first brought to the stage at Dundee Rep and the Traverse in 2024. By that time, Emanuel’s untimely death the year before gave the production an extra poignancy. While Andrew Panton’s original production featured a young cast, his revival should see Cumming and Henderson add weight and experience to a fitting tribute to Emanuel and his work. Dundee dates follow in September.
Operation Mincemeat
His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, 11-15 August
Theatrical success stories can come in many forms. Take this musical yarn that draws from already much mythologised events during the Second World War when Allied Forces duped the Germans by way of dressing up the dead body of a tramp as a fictitious officer and sending him out to sea with false documents. With the story having already been fictionalised as The Man Who Never Was, it was picked up by comedy theatre troupe SplitLip, who presented their version back in 2019. Since then, the show has been something of a smash hit on the West End and on Broadway, with the UK leg of its current world tour promising fun and intrigue aplenty.
MAMMA MIA!
King’s Theatre, Glasgow, 13-29 August
Reviewed on these pages in January, 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 want 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.
Wiping My Mother’s Arse
Pitlochry Festival Theatre, 15 August-5 September
Iain Heggie’s scurrilous comedy has long been overdue a revival since it first appeared way back in 2001. Johnny McKnight stars inPitlochry Festival Theatre’s new production alongside Anne Kidd in Heggie’s care home set work where Andrene has to deal with an overworked carer as well as her prodigal son finally showing his face with his new girlfriend in tow. As with the care home residents, Heggie’s play has no filter in its fearlessly funny look at aging that has been completely rewritten since it first appeared at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre. Given its themes of a matriarch slowly losing her faculties, one might see Heggie’s play as a companion piece to PFT\s recent production of Lear.
The Silence of the Lambs
Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 24-29 August
When Thomas Harris’ 1988 novel was brought to the big screen by Jonathan Demme in 1991, Anthony Hopkins’ depiction of incarcerated cannibal Hannibal Lecter became one of cinema’s great portrayals of evil (a version of Lecter had previously been played by Brian Cox in Michael Mann’s 1986 feature, Manhunter). This new stage version by Gina Gionfriddo sees former EastEnders star John Partridge step into Lecter’s cell, with Coronation Street’s Mollie Gallagher appearing opposite as young FBI agent Clarice Starling in what promises to be a darkly gripping experience in Nikolai Foster’s Curve Theatre, Leicester production. September dates in Aberdeen and Glasgow follow.
The Steamie
Dundee Rep, 27 Aug-12 September
Tony Roper’s comedy set on a 1950s Glasgow New Year’s Eve as four women do their laundry in the local washhouse has become a bona fide classic since it first appeared in 1987. As it returns for a brand new touring production directed by the play’s author, audiences old and new can revel in the banter, sense of community and out and out hilarity that has made the play such an irresistible smash hit. Its common touch too reaches audiences theatres across the land are crying out for. Younger theatre makers should attend en masse to see how it’s done. Dates in Ayr, Stirling, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Pitlochry, Dunfermline and Glasgow follow its opening Dundee run.
1984
Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, 29 August-26 September
George Orwell’s very British dystopian classic is brought to the stage in a new version by playwright Chris Hannan, whose work was last seen at the Citizens Theatre in 2013 with his brilliant adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel, Crime and Punishment. Like that production, Hannan’s look at Orwell’s glimpse at an increasingly familiar looking post truth future where group think reins will be directed by Citz artistic director Dominic Hill in this co-production with the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh and Dundee Rep. Hannan and Hill’s working relationship dates back to 2009 when Hannan’s play, The Three Musketeers and the Princess of Spain, was directed by Hill at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre. Forty years after his breakthrough play at the Traverse, Elizabeth Gordon Quinn, and with his most recent original play, What Shadows (2017), looking at Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech, Hannan’s voice remains as incisive and as dramatically daring as ever. Jack Tarlton plays Winston Smith, with Jessica Hardwick, who played Sonya in Crime and Punishment, as Julia. Dates in Dundee, Aberdeen and Edinburgh follow.
The Herald, August 1st 2026
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