Coffee-Table Notes

King’s Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars    When the Bay City Rollers toured America for the first time at the height of 1970s Rollermania, Edinburgh’s tartan trewed boy band made quite a splash. When the fab five heralded the U.S. release of their early anthem, Saturday Night, by playing to an audience of 30 million people on live TV, it did not go unnoticed in more underground circles.  The result, so it is said, saw Saturday Night’s opening football terrace chant translated by proto punks The Ramones into their own defining call to arms of ‘Hey! Ho! Let’s Go!’ on their song, Blitzkreig Bop. Both the Rollers and the Ramones also covered pop classics from the Jeff Barry/Ellie Greenwich/Phil Spector canon originally recorded by the Ronettes, so the umbilical links go even further.   While none of the above is mentioned in Danny McCahon's Bay City Rollers inspired jukebox musical, the band’s American trip becomes the drive behind the play’s second half. McCahon's fo...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   The streets on the TV screens are burning, the country is at war over disputed territorial land grabs, and the squaddies victory dance sees them waving their Union Jacks to Come on Eileen, missing the point entirely of a Celtic rooted song. Welcome to this early 1980s set Othello, where the fallout of the Falklands War and the UK’s inner city riots that preceded it add a new dimension to Shakespeare’s tale of tough guys trying to outdo each other in a white man’s world.   Central to this in Shakespeare’s play is General Othello’s secret marriage to Desdemona, the army brat who falls in love and ends up being caught in the crossfire of boys’ games. These are initiated by Iago, who is here a barrack room wide boy with ideas above his station. His slyness in playing everyone off against each other brings about everybody’s downfall, including his own.    Anthony Almeida’s production makes full use of its late twentieth century histo...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   Stormy weather abounds both on and off stage in Kenny Boyle’s new Halloween themed play for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s ongoing lunchtime theatre season. Sorcha and Evander find themselves seeking shelter in a highland bothy inbetween reaching the summit they are aiming for. Just what that is remains to be seen as they cosy in around the table to share ancient stories of a decidedly spooky kind.    For the first half of Ben Harrison’s production, out-scaring each other seems to be the aim for MJ Deans’ Sorcha and Boyle himself as Evander. The series of yarns they spar with fall somewhere between those in Conor McPherson’s 1997 village pub bound play, The Weir, and a seasonal volume of ancient myths. The second half of the play lurches into less certain waters, as Evander and Sorcha seem to be in the midst of some elaborate role play exercise or else are taken over by something far darker.    As the pair slip in and out of speaking G...

Aberdeen Five stars   Storms Boelo may have blown in to Aberdeen with biblical intent this weekend, but the most seismic events came by way of this year’s sound festival , north east Scotland’s festival of adventurous new music. Nowhere was this more evident than in Single Drop, Raydale Dower’s explosive sound work that saw a recording of a solitary drop of water looped, slowed down and stretched out to epic proportions. In just over five minutes, what begins as a guileless plop morphs with each play into a rolling thunder drawn from the deep.    Initiated with the recently formed OFFBEAT organisation, whose aim is to present one-off arts events in neglected buildings, hearing Dower's 2013 work in Aberdeen’s now sadly unused Bon Accord Baths gave it an extra resonance. Here, after all, is one of the city’s great monuments to civic life now devoid of all the everyday noise of those who swam, bathed and dived its waters, with only echoes of that past remaining. As its magni...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars    A good night out at the theatre comes with a minefield of expectations. Most of these are confirmed as much as they are upended and reimagined in Flemish mavericks Ontroerend Goed’s latest wheeze investigating the felicities of human behaviour and the everyday performance that goes with them. This is done here in Alexander Devriendt’s typically playful production in a way that charms and disarms as the spotlight is turned on the audience.    Fret not, however. No one has to do anything, even as we find ourselves staring back at each other as we are cast as the show’s main protagonists and silent partners in everything that follows. Forget any ideas about audience participation. This is a partnership in telling a different story every time.    First seen on the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, as with all their shows, Ontroerend Goed’s gentle exploration of ways of being relies on the complicity and trust of those who have ...

The Studio, Edinburgh Three stars   If property is theft, there are few better illustrations of legitimised greed in action than a good game of Monopoly. As otherwise unassuming friends and family cosplay ruthless toy town billionaires on the backs of their nearest and dearest who land on their ever expanding empires, there is a wannabe landlord, it seems, within us all.    Beyond the game itself, there is a tale to tell of the real life rip-off merchant who stole a once egalitarian idea and took it to the highest bidder. This is the story shown off here in Jordan & Skinner’s playful pop culture history lesson, in which we learn how early twentieth century free thinking games designer and political activist Lizzie Magie devised what she called The Landlord’s Game. This was to be an educational tool to explain the progressive economic ideas of economist Henry George and the perils of monopolisation. When fellow games designer Charles Darrow stumbled on Magie’s creation...

Òran Mór, Glasgow        Five stars    When a young woman turns up on the steps of the Brussels courthouse intent on putting the state on trial for crimes against women, the odds of victory look hopeless. The woman’s name is Lune, and as her determination makes clear as she sets herself in for the long haul, she isn’t going anywhere.    We are initially told this retrospectively in Belgian writer Pamela Ghislain’s play by Gabriel, the high flying alpha male lawyer who took on her case pro bono. As Lune comes up against the system in the form of the court’s initially officious administrator Darya, her refusal to budge from the steps turns her into a cause celebre. She also becomes a target for the sort of male violence she quietly rails against. This is something the play’s harrowing central monologue in Katherine Mendelsohn’s forensically clear translation makes agonisingly clear.   Wils Wilson’s searing production for A Play, a Pie and a Pin...

A Glasgow theatre forced to close after the owners of their premises decided to develop the space into student flats has found a new home. Theatre 118, named after the company’s former premises at 118 Osborne Street in Glasgow’s city centre, looks set to reopen in a former office block in Port Dundas. With the venue set to launch in November, an opening programme of theatre, comedy and live poetry is already in place.   The volunteer run company has also secured a ten-year lease for the 4,500 square foot Payne Street building, enabling it to be able to plan ahead while providing a long-term home for what they describe as a growing community of artists and audiences.   With an emphasis on affordability, Theatre 118 aims to provide cheap access to the space for artists. For audiences they will operate a pay what you want scheme, with ticket prices starting from £3 for events at the 100 seat theatre the company is in the process of building.   Rehearsal space and offices wil...

Few areas of Glasgow have been photographed as much as the Gorbals. From Bert Hardy in the 1940s and Oscar Marzaroli in the 1960s through to Steven Berkoff  during the same era, each photographer has marked the changes of the once notorious area from tenement slum to high rise life and beyond. A new book of images from the archive of the late Peter Christopherson forms something of a missing link, drawing as it does from the mid to late 1970s, when Christopherson was commissioned by the Citizens Theatre to provide images for posters pasted across the city.   Published in a lavish hardback by Timeless editions, the French based imprint that specialises in underground art, GORBALS showcases a vast array of Christopherson’s images over more than 200 pages. The book also features interviews with two of the Citizens Theatre’s former artistic directors, Giles Havergal and Philip Prowse by writer Nick Soulsby that puts the photographs in context. With Prowse the design genius wh...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow  Four stars    There has already been one stage play and a major documentary in the last six months about what happened on Kenmure Street on Glasgow’s South Side one sunny day in 2021. That was when UK Home Office officials attempted to remove two men from their homes.    Presumably these tactics would have seen the men detained and ultimately deported, never to set foot on Glasgow soil again. History, on the other hand, had other plans. As we know, a spontaneous show of strength that began on the men’s doorstep ended with an entire community standing up to protect its own.    Katharine Williams’s new play for RUPTURE Theatre Company and Company of Wolves tells all this through the words and actions of three performers who become a kind of Greek chorus of locals bearing witness. They do this in-between being on the frontline of the action, be it as protestors, policemen, or the woman watching from her window who finally c...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh  Four stars   As any armchair radical knows, if you can’t dance to the everyday insurrection you’re at the vanguard of, it’s not a real revolution at all. This grade A manifesto is taken to the max in Kate Prince’s smash hit musical based around the figure of Sylvia Pankhurst, the real life suffragette who campaigned in the UK during the early years of the twentieth century for votes for women. As the daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, who might be regarded as one of the mothers of the women’s movement, Sylvia is a chip off the old block. Later, alas, she finds herself at odds with her family for not taking a by any means necessary approach to her activism, but gets the vote anyway.    If all that sounds rather dry, think again. With music by Josh Cohen and DJ Walde to go with Prince’s lyrics and a book penned with Priya Parmar, this is history told in the form of a non-stop mash up of hip hop, soul, funk and gos...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   If a working class hero is something to be, then why does so much theatre still sideline the so-called lower orders as servants, sidekicks or light relief doing the dirty work or else playing the donkey for their masters and mistresses ad nauseam? While lead stage roles are left to the posh boys and girls, the common people remain cast as criminals and crooks.   Or maybe that was just William Shakespeare, who gets caught bang to rights in Martin O’Connor’s ingenious peek behind the curtain in A Play, a Pie and a Pint's latest edition of lunchtime theatre. Here we find A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Rude Mechanical and wannabe thespian Nick Bottom, who seems condemned to play the fool forever.    Debbie Hannan’s production begins with Bottom the jobbing actor auditioning for the play within a play that features in Shakespeare’s play when Bottom gets to live the high life for a while. By turns nervous, apologetic and desperate to impres...

The Studio, Edinburgh Four stars   Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but when an out of work actor is approached by a mysterious stranger to role play some dark past in Tim Foley’s play, the experience awakens subterranean forces that rise from the grave in a terrifying display of nocturnal psychic terrorism.    No, this ingenious bite size production by the Wigan based ThickSkin company isn’t a reboot of The Woman in Black or any of the other hammy horrors doing the rounds over the last few years. Rather, Neil Bettles’ production of Foley’s late night yarn is an altogether more up to date take on supernaturally inclined pulp fiction.   Our host Joe wears baggy jeans and works in a bar to make ends meet. His posh boy ex represents everything Joe hates in the cliquey theatre scene, so when even posher local David hires Joe to pretend to be a ghost to scare David’s nieces holed up in his country pile, it looks like a pretty lucrative gig. Once Joe gets on site, ...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars    A school reunion opens the National Theatre of Scotland’s suitably monumental looking twenty-first century reboot of Muriel Spark’s classic novel. Beside a semi circular coliseum style staircase that dominates the stage, a grown up Sandy Stranger and her less likely peers from the girl gang once known as the Brodie Set rewind on their between the wars adolescence that shaped them. This, as we know, was down largely to the mercurial figure of Jean Brodie, the self mythologizing libertine whose every inspirational utterance in David Harrower’s simmering new adaptation sounds like a victory speech.   Gayle Rankin’s chic and sensual Brodie first appears striding down the steps of Chloe Lamford’s epic set looking part Hollywood diva, part demagogue. Her students follow, initially looking more St. Trinian’s than Edinburgh’s Marcia Blaine School for Girls. This is a fleeting pre-cursor in Vicky Featherstone’s production for when they...