Coffee-Table Notes

Smile! was one of the hits of the 2025 Adelaide Fringe. Marcel Cole’s solo homage to Hollywood’s great silent movie clown Charlie Chaplin returns to tell Chaplin’s story by way of a mix of mime based routines drawn from Chaplin’s films, biographical material taken from Chaplin’s memoir, and audience interaction The result brings Chaplin’s prevailing image of the little guy in the baggy suit with the moustache, hat and umbrella to vital new life.   “I was already a Chaplin fan after seeing his films, and I loved his book,” Cole says of the roots of Smile! “I never knew he had made talkie films and full length feature films as well as the silent movies, so I was very inspired by that.”   Cole came to Chaplin after training as a ballet dancer before switching to mime based comic performance after studying under legendary French clown Philippe Gaulier. Smile! follows his first self-penned show, Ukulele Man, about English music hall star George Formby.   Cole’s fascination wit...

The Poetry Club at SWG3, Glasgow Four stars   A giant inflatable heart leftover from Valentine’s hangs down in the Poetry Club bar prior to the performance of Kathryn Mincer’s bite size new play in the main room next door. While the audience are encouraged to write down what they wish they had asked their ex, it is perhaps worth considering that the trouble with inflatable hearts is they either burst or else slowly deflate and lie limp.    One or the other appears to be what has happened to Alexa and Thomas, the not so happy couple driving each other crazy in Mincer’s play, brought to life in Dominique Mabille’s production by a young international company with their sights clearly set on something bigger.    Alexa and Thomas aren’t crazy the way they were on their first date, nor when one of them told the other they loved them for the first time, and the other one loved them right back. After just shy of seven years together, alas, it might just have someth...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow  Five stars   The stage curtain creaks as it rises with painstaking slowness on the barren twilight zone occupied by Samuel Beckett’s most forlorn of duos in Dominic Hill’s moving new production for the Citz. Here, George Costigan and Matthew Kelly embody Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s mould breaking piece of mid twentieth century existential vaudeville with a tragicomic rapport that comes through a lifetime of shared experience.    All dressed down and wildly bearded, the pair look more like redneck hobos living in the woods than the silent movie double act they are often presented as. Only through the terminal sense of tragicomic pathos that they hold on to throughout all the brilliant bickering Beckett has concocted for them do they find some kind of accidental salvation.    Jean Chan’s set looks like some battle scarred lower depths, with Costigan and Kelly guarding it through the night like long lost casualties of a war no...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Three stars   When Paul McCartney decided to get his head together in the country in the aftermath of the Beatles splitting up, this took him and his then wife Linda to the wilds of his Campbeltown farm. This eventually sired their band Wings’ 1977 Christmas number one, Mull of Kintyre.    Before all that, however, Fab Macca had Kathy and Jack to contend with. As the now seventy-something grandparents to Molly explain to her for an oral history project in Milly Sweeney’s new play, it was Beatles daft Jack’s idea for the couple to go on holiday to Campbeltown. It was the long hot summer of 1976, and Jack had a vague but determined notion of meeting his pop idol. What happens instead is a series of more everyday epiphanies that force the young couple to navigate their often fractious relationship while making a set of memories that will last a lifetime.    Sally Reid’s production for this first show in a new season of lunchtime theatre prese...

Tramway, Glasgow Four stars   Sex and the disabled has long been considered by some as a taboo topic, with presumptions that those with disabilities don’t have sexual feelings, let alone act on them, still prevailing in some quarters. Such ideas should have been put to bed after the screening of The Skin Horse, an impressionistic 1983 Channel Four documentary on the subject that was co-scripted by the late Nabil Shaban, who also appeared in it prior to becoming a familiar presence on Scotland’s stages later in his career.    More than four decades on, the subject is still hot property, as this new play from disabled based theatre company Birds of Paradise demonstrates in a work co-written by Hana Pascal Keegan, Gabriella Sloss, and BOP artistic director Robert Softley Gale.   The play’s main focus is Ben, a nineteen-year-old wheelchair user who has barely left his parents house for six months following an incident in a Liverpool nightclub. With his only real human co...

It was George Costigan’s idea that he and Matthew Kelly should do Waiting for Godot together as Vladimir and Estragon, the two men waiting for the title character who never comes in Samuel Beckett’s play that revolutionised twentieth century drama. Watching these two very different veterans of stage and screen spark off each other as they riff on Beckett’s piece of existential vaudeville in which ‘nothing happens twice’, you can see why it was such an inspired notion.   “This is a play about love,” says Kelly of Godot, in which the everyday chemistry between life long friends is laid bare in all its mundane glory. “For two people like us, who’ve known each other for fifty eight years – and I think Vladimir and Estragon have known each other for that long - it’s kind of an ideal time for us to do it. And we might get it right this time.”   Dominic Hill’s new production that opens at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre prior to dates in Liverpool and Bolton will be the fourth time Kelly ...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars    For almost three decades now, composer Jim Parker’s foreboding theremin waltz has been an oddly comforting prime time telly fanfare that has opened the door to millions of viewers on what may or may not be regarded as rural middle England’s answer to Twin Peaks. So it goes as well for Guy Unsworth’s stage version of Caroline Graham’s very first Inspector Barnaby novel that gets behind the hedgerows and into the deceptively sleepy killing fields of the fictional county of Midsomer.   As long term fans and subscribers to ITVx will already know, this involves the quietly determined Inspector Tom Barnaby and his wet behind the ears Sergeant Gavin Troy dispatched to the even sleepier hamlet of Badger’s Drift to investigate the death of an 80-something local called Emily Simpson.    In a village peopled by a roll-call of dotty eccentric spinsters, Freudian mummy’s boys, wannabe artists, posh girl gold diggers and illicit trysts th...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   When George Bernard Shaw dragged himself out of premature retirement in 1923, the great man’s late burst was inspired by Joan of Arc being made a saint. A decade on, Shaw was persuaded to write a screenplay based on his drama. As other filmmakers have shown, the story of the French teenager who made France great again after hearing holy voices in her head only to be burnt at the stake for her trouble was ripe big screen material. Shaw’s slimmed down version of his play, alas, remains unmade.    It is his screenplay, however, that is the source  of director/designer Stewart Laing’s remarkable rendering that sees Martin O’Connor’s malevolent Chorus speak the scenic directions as the action unfolds. At points his narration makes him sound like a frontline war correspondent in a way that recalls the historical reconstructions of Peter Watkins’s great documentary styled film, Culloden, by way of the voiceover disruptions of radical L...

The Studio, Edinburgh Four stars   Meet Joey. He’s just turned up at church for his best mate’s mum’s funeral looking and smelling like he’s spent the night in Sodom, and has a eulogy to give. Before all that, however, Joey has a story to tell, not just about what happened last night, but how a gay Catholic teenager like him growing up in Galway managed to navigate his way to who he is. And why not? As the great big cross at the centre of the stage makes clear, he’s in the right place to confess all.    Conor O'Dwyer performs his debut solo play with an unfettered brio in Jen McGregor’s production, which comes home following an Edinburgh Festival Fringe run and several years of development care of Capital Theatres and others. In what is clearly a labour of love for O’Dwyer, the play sees Joey bluff his way through school and embrace a few stereotypes en route to enlightenment beyond being a self styled ‘bad gay’.   While O’Dwyer’s writing makes clear there are still ...

When Queen Victoria granted what was about to become the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts its Royal Charter in 1896, the then thirty-five year old organisation was at the centre of Glasgow’s contemporary art scene. At various times, the likes of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and assorted Glasgow Boys and Scottish Colourists were all fully paid up members of an organisation that at one point hosted the biggest open exhibitions outside London.   130 years on, and after a few years off radar, the RGI is back with its largest exhibition in a decade. This comes with a bold new impetus to reclaim the organisation’s place at the heart of the Glasgow scene. This is most evident in RGI: Celebrating 130 Years of Royal Status, a major new group show at the Lillie Art Gallery in Milngavie.   This follows a series of small RGI exhibitions that have taken place since December 2024 at the John D Kelly Gallery, whose city centre presence on Douglas Street has literally provided a shop win...

The last week has seen the sudden closure of one of Scotland’s most important arts venues. No, not the CCA, which had been an accident waiting to happen for years. Nor are we talking about Cumbernauld Theatre, which was eventually rescued after a rethink on funding previously denied them. Neither is it any of Edinburgh’s assorted festivals, nor the country’s national arts companies who have been on standstill funding since forever. This is about Theatre 118, a volunteer led DIY theatre company formed by a loose-knit collective of Glasgow based writers, directors, actors and other theatre makers less than a year ago. Set up with the aim of presenting new work at affordable prices, Theatre 118 also provided cheap rehearsal space for independent practitioners who might not be able to afford to hire anywhere else.   Up until last week, the company was based on one floor of Granite House, an empty office block at 118 Osborne Street in Glasgow city centre. Since moving in last ...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars   Christmas has either come early, late or is now an all year round thing judging by the title of the suitably named Mischief Theatre Company’s latest excursion into on and off stage chaos care of their perennially O.T.T. Cornley Amateur Drama Society. As it is, for fans of the, ahem, C.A.D.S. since their inception a decade and a half ago with the cunningly titled The Play that Goes Wrong, such out of season anomalies will be as predictably familiar as much as the show is a chance to catch up with old friends.   Cue Daniel Lewis’s dictatorial director Chris, Henry Lewis’s old ham Robert, Greg Tannahill’s nervous wreck Jonathan, Ashley Tucker’s stars in her eyes Sandra and the rest of a company with only a passing knowledge of Charles Dickens’ classic festive yarn, and even then only by way of the Muppets. With Chris casting himself as Scrooge, what follows beyond the Christmas jumpers, Jonathan’s fear of heights, young Dennis’ inabi...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   Two men stand peering at a large white screen made of paper. It is as if they are looking out on to some idyll-like landscape or a futuristic city that remains invisible to anyone without vision enough to build it. A printer at the side of the stage spews out sheets of paper with words on it that act as silent dialogue. Once the men move the screen to one side, a group of small tree trunk sized logs and some wooden pallets are revealed. For the next half hour, each man takes an axe to a log apiece and chops and chops and chopsuntil they splinter and break.   This audacious and compelling spectacle of hard graft sees the performers build up a percussive momentum that at times recalls the pounding rhythms of 1980s industrial music relocated to a forest. What happens over the next hour beyond their mini display of physical strength, however, is a remarkable study in renewal, recycling and transformation through a mix of imagination an...

Summerhall, Edinburgh Three stars   Auntie Empire has something to say. As  writer/performer Julia Taudevin’s creation holds court over a soundtrack of couthy Scottish classics, the audience enter to become both her subjects and a very, very, very extended family. The address that follows sees Auntie prepare to give her last will and testament as she slowly falls apart along with the last fetid gasps of British imperialism.   Taudevin’s new solo show premiered as part of the Manipulate festival this weekend after assorted showcases over the last few years. Clad in prosthetically enhanced twin set and joke shop teeth, Taudevin’s Auntie is the sort of toff so posh you can only understand one in ten words they say. A veneer of respectable authority manifests itself in cups of tea and Tunnock’s teacakes handed out to the audience, some of whom are forced on stage to do her bidding. Gradually, however, Auntie’s hectoring gives way to a bowel busting collapse of power.   U...

Lyra, Edinburgh Three stars   The studio of the former school transformed by the Lyra organisation into Scotland’s first dedicated theatre for children and young people resembles a playroom prior to Bruno Gallagher’s new show for this year’s Manipulate festival of visual theatre and animation. Young audience members try on masks and costumes that sit on hangars waiting to transform the wearers, who pose for dramatic selfies. Other props sit on tables waiting to be perused. Wild images of surreal characters line the walls, while all the while a package tour soundtrack compiled from sunnier climes plays with joyful abandon.   If this interactive pre-show spectacle allows a glimpse into what goes on in Gallagher’s head, it also acts as a trailer for what happens upstairs in the theatre by way of a quartet of what their creator calls ‘Absurdities’. These are bite-size vignettes inspired by Gallagher’s wanderings in Europe played out by an array of creatures that have effectively b...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Three stars    After more than fifteen years creating once in a lifetime musicals out of thin air and audience suggestions, the Olivier award winning, BBC Radio 4 friendly comic troupe The Showstoppers will know to always expect the unexpected. Even so, when on tour, they should always brush up on the local landmarks, lest someone throws out some serious googlies.    Such was the hilarious case on Friday during the first of the Showstoppers two-night run at the Citz, when co-director and mine host for the evening Adam Meggido was taken somewhat by surprise on several counts. Firstly, while asking for suggestions of a location for his company’s still unwritten opus, the suggestion of Haven Caravan Parks threw him. As the purveyors of static caravan summer breaks are a UK wide operation, his reaction probably says much beyond geography. More pertinently, perhaps, when the Barras was suggested, it was clear that  Glasgow's world famous mar...

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...