Coffee-Table Notes

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   When Taylor Swift released her epic 2025 single, The Fate of Ophelia, it possibly did more to introduce the work of William Shakespeare to Swift’s school age audience than an entire term of English Lit classes. One suspects something similar has occurred with the History syllabus over the last decade since Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s poptastic celebration of Henry VIII’s six wives was performed by a bunch of Cambridge undergraduates on the 2017 Edinburgh Festival Fringe before conquering the world.    The premise is simple. Each of Henry’s exes who have been magicked together like a manufactured girl band from the grave take it in turns to tell the story of their respective wedded bliss with the king in a bid to prove who was the best queen, divorces, beheading or plain old everyday deaths notwithstanding.    The first of two sextets for this latest tour already look and sound like a stadium-sized headline act in Moss and...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars In every dream home there is heartache for the couple at the centre of Amy Conway’s play, the latest in A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s current season of lunchtime theatre. Henry is almost caught with his pants down when the buzzer goes at the door of his flat, but it’s nothing compared to what happens next.    The woman at the door may look like the spitting image of Henry’s ex girlfriend Liz, but behind the belted raincoat and the hyper efficient persona is the sort of all access dream girl that initially at least seems even better than the real thing. When things don’t go to programme, however, Henry’s actions are a whole lot more extreme than simply pulling the plug. And when the buzzer goes again, reality bites in disturbingly similar ways in the flesh.    The all-encroaching rise of AI is very much on the agenda just now, as it has been long before science fiction became fact. The humanisation and sexualisation of robots too has bee...

Edinburgh’s festival season may be over, but there is still plenty going on across Scotland’s stages as autumn seasons kick off in earnest with a series of big plays with big ideas. Wiping My Mother’s Arse Pitlochry Festival Theatre until 5 September. Last chance to see this long overdue revival of Iain Heggie’s rewritten sit-com style dark farce first seen at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in 2001. Set in a care home, Heggie’s play navigates what follows when long-term patient Andrene’s son, Derek, turns up to see her with his gobby new girlfriend Kath in tow. With Andrene being looked after by nurse Larry, a not so merry go round of secrets and lies ensues in a play that is revealed as a Scottish heir to Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloan, as well as revealing Heggie as a writer way ahead of his time.      Irvine Welsh’s PORNO Albany, Greenock, 5 September; Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, 12 September; Tivoli Theatre, Aberdeen, 14 September; Macrobert Arts Centre, Stirling,...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   Life takes two people by surprise in this debut work by LC Stephens for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest lunchtime theatre season. Stephens’s play focuses on Clare and Barry, habitués of Glasgow’s West End who find themselves in the same student friendly boozer one night trying to offload their respective baggage to each of their ill suited companions. Through a series of alternating monologues, we discover that both Clare and Barry’s worlds have been turned upside down by very different matters of life and death. We also learn that both parties feel like bit part players in their own story to the point of invisibility. Oh, and as Barry realises, even if Clare doesn’t, they already have history with each other.    There is a lovely sense of everyday mid life longing in Stephens’ script, brought charmingly and wittily to life in Graham McLaren’s elegant production on Gillian Argo’s simple but effective tables and chairs set. This is ide...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars   Matthew Zajac’s now almost twenty-year-old solo play has had a journey almost as remarkable as its subject matter. Opening for previews in Glasgow’s now long lost Arches venue back in 2008 prior to a successful Edinburgh Festival Fringe run, Zajac’s autobiographical tale of his father’s flight from his homeland in the then Polish area of Galicia and everything that followed has travelled the world several times over.   This latest tour of Scotland is the biggest for some time, and chimes with the publication of a new edition of Zajac’s play that also charts his own quest to find his roots. The result in this revival of Ben Harrison’s production for the Highland based Dogstar Theatre Company is a show that retains its original intimacy as it explores Zajac’s deeply personal story about fathers and sons. Through this backdrop it becomes a far bigger universal tale that lays bare the unintended consequences of war in terms of migration...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Five stars   Imagine a world where truth doesn’t matter anymore. Then imagine someone who held on to old truths is spied on, hounded and tortured until they kow-tow to the official version and fall in line with everyone else. Welcome to Chris Hannan’s searing new stage version of George Orwell’s visionary novel, which sets out its dystopian store with major resonances of so called democracy now in terms of how dissent on all sides is dealt with.    From the opening bombardment of electronic noise, Dominic Hill’s production brings home the mix of mundanity and terror in Hannan’s adaptation. This comes in the regulation utilitarian blue uniforms worn by Winston Smith and his regimented peers as much as it does from Winston’s final submission to the system following a relentless series of rapid-fire torture scenes. In-between comes the frightening realities of masked men turning up at meetings to remove deviants, and the collective release of a bayi...

Kevin Rowland has never been shy of exposing himself emotionally in song. From his early incarnations of Dexys Midnight Runners almost half a century ago, Rowland has driven a restless musical potpourri of Celtic white Soul that has veered between euphoric and mournful in its mercurial brilliance. Now here he is with the latest edition of his newly rechristened group after a decade as just Dexys with what is hinted as being the grand finale to Rowland’s musical quest.   What we get in this David Holmes produced affair is a Proustian trawl through Rowland’s personal back pages awash with purging and redemption. This forms a companion piece of sorts to Rowland’s candid memoir, Bless Me Father (2025) and accompanying in conversation shows.   From the opening remembrance of the dead end kids he ran with as a Wolverhampton tearaway in ‘My Life in England Pt.1’, Rowland casts himself as an old sage reflecting on his lot by way of well-worn shaggy dog stories of times past. Inbetween...

Òran Mór, Glasgow  Three stars   The double edged sword in the title of Éimi Quinn’s new comedy gradually becomes apparent through the three women at the heart of this opening salvo from A Play, a Pie and Pint’s latest season of lunchtime theatre. Set in the pungently scented lift of a Glasgow high rise, the play pits Lauren as our guide and narrator as she introduces us to her neighbours while preparing for a hen do with her pals.    First up is Pat, who’s been in the block for years, and has an opinion on everyone and everything. Behind her potty-mouthed pontificating, Pat has something precious in her bag she carries with her all the time. Then there is Aaliyah, a heavily pregnant Mother Earth migrant whose devotion to her offspring inspires Lauren to keep an ever-expanding list of exactly why motherhood isn’t for her.    Lauren says she wants a quiet life, though her PVC outfit and the bottles of sticky blue booze she necks beg to differ. As Lauren does...

Dundee Rep Five stars   Like a Busby Berkeley of the Barras, Tony Roper knows how to make a memorable routine. This is why his comic masterpiece set in a 1950s Glasgow washhouse on Hogmanay where four working class women banter the night away has survived almost forty years and umpteen productions since it first appeared in 1987. Since then, it has become a bona fide contemporary classic, with bums on seats guaranteed wherever it plays.    So it goes in this big new touring production led by cast member Louise McCarthy and Ryan Alexander Dewar’s Rerr Terr company in association with Neil Laidlaw Productions, Selladoor and Dundee Rep. With Roper back in the director’s chair, it isn’t hard to see why his celebration of women, community and the collective power of both retains its rapport with audiences, many of whom are likely to be as familiar with the play as the brilliant cast are here.    One mention of Galloway’s mince by old Mrs Culfeathers is enough to sign...

By the time Elizabeth Blackadder (1931-2021) became the first woman to be elected to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1972, the Falkirk born painter and printmaker had already carved out a unique oeuvre of vibrant landscapes and still lives focused on flowers and  objects. Some of this was channelled into the tapestries and rugs contained in Elizabeth Blackadder: A Life in Colour, a new exhibition of Blackadder works that puts the textiles in dialogue with paintings and drawings drawn from the RSA collection. Marking five years since Blackadder’s death, the exhibition at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh, where the textile works were made, aims to show off Blackadder’s vivid use of colour in her visual language. Blackadder’s relationship with Dovecot dates back to 1966, when Still Life, Tulips (1966) was her first tapestry work. Since then, Dovecot has collaborated with Blackadder on a total of thirty-one tapestries and five rugs. These include Eastern Still Life (1980)...

Royal Lyceum Theatre Four stars    The drums beat loud in this mighty rendering of a 14th century epic Middle Eastern narrative poem. Passed down the centuries in various guises, it is reimagined here from a Syrian version by Palestinian writer/director Bashar Murkus and dramaturg Khulood Basel of their Haifa based Khashabi Theatre. With the seven performers already on stage and welcoming audiences as they arrive, the result over the next life affirming three hours is a gorgeous mash-up of storytelling, dance and a wonderful live score led by drummer Rami Nakhleh and singers Rana Baransi and Abed Zoabi.    The story they tell in Arabic with English surtitles - The Epic of Bani Hilal  or السّيرة الهلاليّ - is an awfully big adventure that takes in battles of love, war and an eternal quest for new lands to call home. Out of this comes a contrary beauty that comes from a joyful and playful delivery by the cast as they act out each chapter o...

King’s Theatre Four stars    Roll up! Roll up! America may not be the greatest show on earth in Geoff Sobelle’s tragicomic depiction of a big top in free fall, but oh, what a night. The acrobats have somersaulted off into the distance, the ringmaster has gone west, and with only the clowns left behind and left to their own devices, the lunatics appear to have take over the asylum, But at least they have an audience, so of course they’ll provide the entertainment, albeit in all its shambolic, falling apart glory.    There’s nothing subtle in Sobelle’s latest work, an Edinburgh International Festival commission following the American physical auteur’s previous visits in 2018 with HOME and 2023 with FOOD. What there is in Clown Show’s 100-minute construction is a meticulously madcap series of ensemble routines that take familiar gags only to upend them beyond the regular pratfalls to self destruct on a grand scale.  Lined up in search of approval from the lifesize ...

Church Hill Theatre Four stars    The title of Greek auteur Mario Banushi’s devastating meditation on death, family and the baggage left behind comes from the Albanian restaurant his father ran, and which translates as Restaurant of Kindness. Kindness isn’t the first thing that comes to mind in the 70 minutes that follow, as Banushi lays bare the agony of a family’s grief in a series of set-pieces that become increasingly ritualistic.   On designer Sotiris Melan os’ tiled wall set, Banushi steps out of the shower having cleansed his sins for a funeral. Once suited and booted, he sits beside a row of grieving women. This is heightened by the remarkable singing voice of Savina Yannatou, whose improvised lament is a wracked howl that at points sounds drawn from the same guttural well as Greek/American virtuoso, Diamanda Galas.   A jacket torn from the earth where the body is buried hangs on the back of a chair. One of the women who has just attempted to f...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow  Four stars    Darkness becomes Gina Gionfriddo’s new stage version of Thomas’ Harris’ 1988 novel. The second in the author’s Hannibal Lecter quartet saw the most erudite of incarcerated cannibals gnaw his way into mass consciousness by way of Jonathan Demme’s 1991 film version. More than three decades on, Gionfriddo returns to the book to pick over the horrors anew. The fact that Lecter isn’t the villain of the piece but its conscience speaks volumes about the age in which he was sired.    In Harris’ tale of rookie FBI agent Clarice Starling’s search for a serial killer nicknamed Buffalo Bill who skins his victims, we enter a 1980s where the fallout of therapy culture has left a lot of psychological damage in its wake.    In Nikolai Foster’s touring production that began life at the Curve Theatre Leicester, John Partridge’s Lecter may initially lack charm as he is wheeled on like some caged exhibit, but his dangerous presen...