Coffee-Table Notes

Scotland’s theatres are well and truly open to all manner of shows in February. Here are some that shouldn’t be missed.     When Billy Met Alasdair Theatre Royal, Dumfries, 7 February; Macrobert Arts Centre, Stirling, 13 February; Eastgate Theatre, Peebles, 21 February; Adam Smith Theatre, Kirkcaldy, 27 February; Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, 28 February; Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, 28 March. Alan Bissett’s speculative conversation between Billy Connolly and Alasdair Gray  at the launch of Gray’s novel, Lanark, in 1981 at Glasgow’s original arts lab, the Third Eye Centre was a hit on the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Bissett brings two artistic greats to life with the sort of imagination used in his novels alongside a fearless performative flair. Bissett fans might also want to head over to the Memorial Theatre, Arbroath on February 20th for the last ever performance of Moira in Lockdown, the third and final part of The Moira Mon...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   Birth, sex and death are pretty much the driving forces in one form or another behind most human drama as we know it. They are the heart of the matter too in the life cycle of a puppet as laid bare in absurdist maverick Mamoru Iriguchi’s latest creation, which previewed in the Citz Studio over the weekend prior to a forthcoming short run at Edinburgh’s Manipulate festival of visual theatre.    Here, Iriguchi and fellow performer Julia Darrouy are Tangerine and Sunshine, a pair of life size puppets playing versions of each other. Introduced by a much smaller narrator puppet that then proceeds to keel over, Tangerine and Sunshine are then taken under the wing of the narrator’s now fully proportioned ghost, who takes them on a trip in which they get to explore all puppets great and small by way of different size versions of themselves.    As opposites attract and one size most definitely does not fit all in certain situations,...

Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh  Four stars   When Iddo Oberski  suffered a stroke in 2009, his whole world was turned upside down. While he could now only walk with two sticks, this didn’t stop the then academic from exploring notions of freedom stemming from the ideas of nineteenth century spiritual guru and author of The Philosophy of Freedom, Rudolf Steiner. Oberski also began to explore the history of his own family in the Netherlands who were victims of the Nazi Holocaust.   Seventeen years on since his accident, Oberski has channelled his various experiences and researches into a deeply personal meditation that fuses memoir, history lesson, puppetry, music, and film in a slow burning line of enquiry that suggests emancipation comes in many forms. Over the seventy minutes of a production co-directed by Oberski and collaborator Mark Kydd, this evolves into a one man philosophical cabaret that takes in card tricks, live flute interludes and an ongoing dia...

Leith Depot, Edinburgh Four stars   When Dan the man left his Edinburgh home for Iceland in 2015 to study graphic design, it was the beginning of a great adventure. Here he was, out on his own and off the leash with his whole life in front of him, and his cheeky Scottish charm seemingly a passport to anywhere. Reykjavik was buzzing, and so was he, and for a giddy moment, Dan was truly living the dream. Unfortunately in Heidi Docherty’s new short solo play performed by herself, it doesn’t last.    What follows is an unflinching portrait of how a fun loving cheeky chappie has his already fragile confidence dented by the voices in his head who over the next few years mark out Dan’s struggles - with money, his course, his numerous jobs, his love life, his family, and ultimately with himself - until he can’t take anymore.    The result is a tragic indictment on the perils of young people overwhelmed by anguish even before you realise that for Docherty this is painful...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow  Four stars   Old ghosts are everywhere in this latest tour of the late Stephen Mallatratt’s ingenious staging of Susan Hill’s best selling 1983 gothic horror novel, in which an ageing solicitor called Arthur Kipps attempts to lay those ghosts to rest. He does this by telling his story of what happened years before after he was dispatched to a marshy godforsaken landscape to sort out a deceased recluse’s affairs. Here, the spectral figure of the woman who gives the show its title haunts the town into submission, with portents of doom at her every fleeting appearance, as Kipps learns to his cost.    Back in 1987, Mallatratt took Hill’s already spooky yarn and set it in an empty theatre, where Kipps has hired a young actor to play out his past in an attempt to exorcise his demons. Originally intended as a low key entertainment performed in the theatre bar, in director Robin Herford’s hands, Mallatratt’s creation took on a life of its own, and up ...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   When Stephen King set out to write an old time prison break yarn in the early 1980s, the result was Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,. This hard boiled novella about life on the inside for ex banker Andy Dufresne after being convicted for murdering his wife and her lover was narrated by Ellis ‘Red’ Redding, a lifer who has become the go-to guy for anything his fellow inmates might need to make the time inside a little easier. With Andy thrown in the deep end of a corrupt late 1940s institution led from the top by prison warden Stammas, what follows over almost thirty years is a story of finding freedom against all the odds.   Much of this will be familiar from Frank Darabont’s 1994 sleeper hit film version, but it was to King’s original that Owen O’Neill and Dave Johns returned to when they adapted it for the stage back in 2009. This return of David Esbjornson’s fleshed out production for this latest UK tour sees Joe McFadden ...

Frank Dunlop – Theatre and opera director   Born February 15, 1927; died January 4, 2026     Frank Dunlop, who has died aged 98, was a maverick theatre director, whose seven-year stint as director of Edinburgh International Festival between 1984 and 1991 brought major world theatre to the festival. Work by international heavyweights such as the Berliner Ensemble, Ingmar Bergman, Andrzej Wajda and Yukio Ninagawa was programmed alongside major revivals of Scottish classics. The latter included Tom Fleming’s epic staging of Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaites, Sydney Goodsir Smith’s version of The Wallace, and James Bridie’s Holy Isle. Dunlop brought both strands together in his own 1987 production of Schiller’s Mary Stuart, which featured a large Scottish cast led by Hannah Gordon as Mary.     Dunlop’s first year as director also featured a ten-day Samuel Beckett season at the Churchill Theatre, Morningside. The latter included works by New York’s Harold Clurman...

The Georgian House, Edinburgh Four stars   The sins of rhyme, as Robert Burns calls his craft in this new dramatisation of the bard’s words, have much to answer for. Burns himself was an all too familiar bundle of contradictions in his output. On the one hand, he had a common touch that tapped into the collective consciousness enough to take poetry into the mainstream. On the other, his feckless shagabout ways left much domestic mess in his wake. This is before the one about the slave trade the cash-strapped people’s poet almost signs up with to help escape his lot.   All of this and more is addressed in James Clements’ hour long compendium of words and music which returns to the Georgian House’s Robert Adam designed Edinburgh New Town des-res in the run up to Burns Night following last year’s Fringe run and recent tour. With the audience seated the length of a dinner table laid out with all the accoutrements, the traditional Burnsian gathering is duly upended by Clements...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   The world is full of Basil Fawltys these days. Half a century after John Cleese and Connie Booth’s savagely funny portrait of middle aged male neuroses was unleashed kicking and screaming onto prime time Sunday night TV, Basil walks among us once more, as pompous, repressed and set to spontaneously combust as he ever was.    Cleese’s hit stage version of his creation has already proven to be far more than the pension plan nostalgia fest it might initially look like, with the series of note perfect impressions from director Caroline Jay Ranger’s young cast capturing every madcap nuance of his creations as they reboot them with new life.   For those for whom what has been designated to be TV’s greatest sitcom may have passed them by, Basil and his wife Sybil run a sleepy hotel in Torquay, where maid Polly keeps things together as Basil, Sybil and Spanish waiter Manuel attempt to serve a series of increasingly unwelcome guests. ...

Now panto season is more or less over, the year begins with some big hitters on the touring circuit as well as a couple of more intimate affairs before the theatrical floodgates fully open in February.   MAMMA MIA! The Playhouse, Edinburgh until January 4; His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, January 27-February 7. As reviewed on these pages only last week, 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 ant 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. Following its last few days in Edinburgh to see in the new year, Phyllida Lloyd’s p...

Holly Howden Gilchrist had yet to graduate from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland when she was cast as Catherine in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge at the Tron Theatre in February this year. By that time, the then twenty-year-old had already won both the Donald Dewar Award and the Pauline Knowles Scholarship at RCS.     As the daughter of actors Kathryn Howden and Gilly Gilchrist, Howden Gilchrist comes from a strong pedigree.   Since A View from the Bridge, Howden Gilchrist has toured in Sylvia Dow’s play, Blinded by the Light, and appeared in Small Acts of Love, Frances Poet and Ricky Ross’s play that was the first production to play at the reopened Citizens Theatre in Glasgow.   Howden Gilchrist returns to the Gorbals for the Citz’s festive production of Beauty and the Beast. All of which makes for quite a start for what looks like a bright future ahead. The List, December 2025   ends

Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow Four stars   “We’re Saving Grace,” says a playful Robert Plant midway through a set of lesser known folk, blues and rock-pop covers presented with the superlative quintet the former Led Zeppelin vocalist turned global village explorer has been playing with for more than half a decade. “We’ve come to help.”   By this time in the Glasgow leg of what has been dubbed the Ding Dong Merrily tour to accompany the release of the band’s eponymous named album, Plant and co have sauntered through Kentucky blues, English trad, contemporary Americana and more. This wide reaching songbook has been brought to life by way of a meticulously arranged mix of Tony Kelsey’s acoustic and electric guitars, Matt Worley’s banjo, Barney Morse-Brown’s cello and Suzi Dian’s accordion, all powered by Oli Jefferson’s skittering drums.   The heart of this on versions of Addie Graham’s The Very Day You’re Gone and English folk song The Cuckoo is Plant’s vocal duets with Dian,...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Five stars    A wing and a prayer are everything in Morag Fullarton’s ingenious reimagining of one of the festive season’s most loved feelgood films. Celestial interventions aren’t just the order of the day for George Bailey, the small town saviour about to throw himself off a bridge at the start of the play as life gets too much to bear. They are there too for the show itself, which Fullarton confesses to the audience prior to its first night curtain hasn’t had a proper dress rehearsal due to assorted technical glitches. This is all done in mutual good humour, but Fullarton needn’t have worried, as what follows on Oran Mor’s tiny stage is one of the most joyously inventive theatrical experiences on show anywhere just now.    The can-do attitude of Fullarton and her company of four actors is a reflection of the show itself, which opens as a quartet of old school cinema usherettes attempt to pick up the pieces after a screening of Frank Capra’s 1946 ...