Coffee-Table Notes

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Three stars    When French poet Jean Cocteau was told of singer Edith Piaf’s death in 1963, he is said to have declared the words ‘I can die too’, and duly had a heart attack in solidarity. This possibly apocryphal yarn concerning such a grand gesture says much about offstage drama, making it an ideal title for this new chamber musical presented by an amalgam of international producers with Pitlochry Festival Theatre.   A vehicle for West End and Broadway star Frances Ruffelle, who wrote it with Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s artistic director Alan Cumming along with Sally George, Ruffelle is Lily, the leading lady of a production of Cocteau’s 1930 play, La voix humaine (The Human Voice). One of the great monologues for women, Cocteau’s solo piece puts its star on the telephone throughout, as her long-term lover prepares to marry a younger model.   As she emerges from a cage-like construction made out of walls of hanging down phones, Lil...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   The dustsheets are covering the furniture and the paintings have been taken down in the family home where Lear holds court in Finn Den Hertog’s brutal and bloody version of Shakespeare’s all too human tragedy of power and loss. The chandelier too that will later resemble something between a wrecking ball and a guillotine is all wrapped up as the ageing matriarch indulges a last gasp chance to lord it over her three daughters. As the sisters gather, it looks for all the world like their mother is about to be carted off to what these days might be euphemistically be called a retirement home.    As Lear’s cry for attention seeks only flattery from her offspring, her oldest and middle daughters Goneril and Regan tell her what she wants to hear, and are duly awarded a slice of the queendom as their inheritance. Her youngest, Cordelia, alas, is having none of it. This not only drives Lear mad, but kicks off a full on war, while Cordelia p...

Botanic Garden, Glasgow Four stars   The seven seas are rocking at the start of Bard in the Botanics’ main stage flagship production to mark the stalwarts of outdoor Shakespeare’s silver jubilee year. Once the storm subsides, twins Viola and Sebastian are all washed up on a strange island, with Viola landing in what by way of Heather Grace Currie’s design appears to be the beer garden of the sort of docklands boozer where men are very much men. In the whirligig of dressing up box cosplay that follows, for a while at least, so are some of the women.    While her new pal Feste mainlines feelgood karaoke hits, Viola dons cap and trews like a sailor ashore, attracting the unwarranted attention of all comers. This includes handsome himbo Orsino, who treats his new sidekick like one of the boys, despite the pretty obvious truth staring him in the face.    The boozer’s regulars led by Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, meanwhile, belie their aristocratic origins ...

The workers have been out in force in Scottish theatre of late. On stage, at least, there seems to have been a dramatic rediscovery of working class culture and blue-collar history. This could be seen in the National Theatre of Scotland and Tron Theatre production of Stand & Deliver: The Lee Jeans Sit-In, Frances Poet's musical inspired by the v1981 strike in Greenock. Then there was Sweat, a co-production between the Citizens Theatre Glasgow and Royal Lyceum Edinburgh of Lynn Nottage's dramatisation of what happens to a small town when the industry that sustained it pulls out. Dundee Rep’s revival of Educating Rita, Willy Russell’s modern classic about a working-class hairdresser who enrols in an Open University literature course, is also indicative of a prevailing class divide. Offstage, meanwhile, in a reflection of sorts of the themes of these plays, it is getting harder to sustain a career in theatre. This isn’t just the case for the actors who are the public face of S...

As July sees the theatre season wind down into something of a calm before the August Edinburgh storm, there is nevertheless a fair bit of on stage action on offer. Bard in the Botanics and Pitlochry Festival Theatre lead the charge with at least one show that will feature a storm, so not that calm at all, really.   Twelfth Night  Botanic Gardens, Glasgow, Until 11 July. Lovers and Madmen is the theme for Bard in the Botanics’ silver jubilee summer season of outdoor Shakespeare. This new production of the bard’s contrarily sunny comedy probably falls very much in the former camp, as shipwrecked twins Viola and Sebastian are separated on the island of Illyria, embarking on assorted mistaken identity sired adventures until the inevitable happy ending brings them and their respective squeezes together once more. All this is likely to be upstaged, in Jennifer Dick’s production, mind you, by the figure of the yellow stocking clad Malvolio in a production featuring some Bard in the B...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Three stars   Arriving fashionably late is probably to be expected of a turn of the century clique of teen princess throwbacks. This is why  Tuesday night’s twenty minute delay to showtime for Tina Fey’s musical stage version of her 2004 film can be forgiven. Conceptually speaking, such divaish timekeeping is kind of in keeping with the classroom and cafeteria shenanigans new girl Cady lands in at the start of the show, but, y’know, whatevs.    Cady has just jetted in from Kenya, and after a girlhood in the wild, has a lot of catching up to do in terms of making friends. She soon falls in with Janis and Damian, the outsider duo who become Cady’s guide through the social minefield of high school, as well as our narrators. As for who rules the school, cue The Plastics, the drop dead gorgeous trio led by the divine Regina George, who appears to be the ultimate Queen Bee until Cady comes along.  What follows in this UK tour of Casey...

Botanic Garden, Glasgow Four stars   The Union Jack may not be everywhere in Gordon Barr’s new look at Shakespeare’s tragedy of jealousy and deceit, but it certainly makes its presence felt. This is the case whether on the camouflaged shoulders of the men of action who either engineer or become victims of macho power plays, or on the locker room doors where all their inner secrets are kept.   This is the world in which Manasa Tagica’s Othello has made it big, a black migrant success story who leads his men to victory, but who is never quite one of the gang. His marriage to Desdemona, Esme Bayley’s well to do white girl whose parents expected more of her, only serves to ramp up an inherent institutionalised racism even more. This is the thin line that provokes Adam Donaldson’s Iago to manipulate his way to destruction as he feeds misinformation, gossip and rumour to his boss, driving him demented enough to seek revenge of his own while Iago pulls the strings.    Perfo...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars    Life is one great big cabaret for Allegra, the woman of a certain age cast as the life and soul of Peter Quilter’s play. Allegra may live on her own, but her world is full of colour, as well as occasional song. The latter is something the shopkeepers of her village know only too well, used as they are to being serenaded by showtunes on any given afternoon whenever Allegra graces their premises.    Dotty eccentric she may be, but Allegra’s fondness for doing a number concerns her brother Ronan enough to bring in Czech cleaner Anna to keep her company. And when Officer Rogers from the local nick turns up at the door, the game would appear to be up. If only they all knew where she left her umpteen bottles of pills, everyone could have a quiet life.    As pro Palestine supporters gathered outside the Theatre Royal prior to the show to protest its star Maureen Lipman's appearance following attempts to cancel its Aberdeen run...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars   As gossipy Magic Circle members might tell you, Derren Brown’s feats of mental skulduggery he bamboozles his fan base with aren’t anything new. Brown himself admits in the second half of his latest theatrical extravaganza that the hardest thing for him to do during his two and a half hour performance is to keep an eye on a deck of cards to see which way one lands. The fact that he tells us this via subtitles on a screen that covers the Playhouse stage’s entire back wall while those cards are shuffled speaks volumes about Brown’s exemplary shtick. And while those self same Magic Circle members may be correct in their professional observations, if they ever let slip how Brown’s tricks actually worked, chances are such a breach of protocol would see us all have to do a disappearing act.    Things begin quietly enough with pre show phone footage testimonies from a stream of satisfied but bewildered customers about how Brown appears t...

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 ...