Coffee-Table Notes

Tom Stoppard – Playwright Born July 3, 1937; died November 29, 2025   Tom Stoppard, who has died aged 88, was a playwright of linguistic verve, wild theatricality and an inherent sense of intellectual playfulness that blew the mainstream British stage wide open following the success of his play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Stoppard’s work continued to dazzle right up to what turned out to be his final and infinitely more personal work, the 41-actor epic, Leopoldstadt.   Inbetween came a vast catalogue of work. This ranged from the intellectual riot of Travesties (1974), which looked at the possibilities that might have ensued from the fact that Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara had all spent time in Zurich during World War One. With Joyce in the midst of writing Ulysses, Tzara in the thick of Dada’s rise, and Lenin at the vanguard of the Russian Revolution, Stoppard depicted a world about to explode on every level. More overtly politically, perhaps, Rock’n’Roll (...

  Ian McKenzie Smith – 1935-2025   Ian McKenzie Smith, who has died aged 90, was a visionary curator, whose leadership in Aberdeen’s artistic and civic society saw the city’s art collection transformed. As director of Aberdeen Art Gallery from 1968 to 1989, then as Aberdeen’s City Arts Officer and Director of the Arts until 1996, McKenzie Smith married his historical artistic knowledge and forward thinking sensibilities to focus on constantly reinventing the institution with contemporary work by living artists.    McKenzie Smith gave quietly determined support to young artists across all disciplines, doing so with an understated Zen-like calm that betrayed his own influences as an artist. This made for a bold programme that was rooted in the North East of Scotland, but which looked outwards in a way that made for the basis of a world-class collection in a transformed artistic landscape.   Ian McKenzie Smith was born in Montrose, the younger of two brothers to Ma...

Terry Lane – Theatre director, writer   Born September 7, 1937; died August 7, 2025     Terry Lane, who has died aged 87, was a theatre director who inadvertently changed the theatrical lexicon forever. As one of the co-founders of Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in 1962 in its original home in a former brothel off the High Street, it was Lane whose misreading of what was actually ‘transverse’ theatre – an auditorium with seating either side of the performing area – gave this new home of the radical and avant-garde its name. By the time anyone realised, the name had stuck, and a theatre legend was born.   The first night of Lane’s opening Traverse production in January 1963 of Jean Paul Sartre’s play, Huis Clois provided another legend, when actress Colette O’Neil was accidentally stabbed on stage by fellow performer Rosamund Dickson – also Lane’s fiancé and future wife. While O’Neil thankfully survived, the headlines the incident made attracted audiences, and the Trave...

Ella Wildridge – Translator, dramaturg   Born  December 27 1945: died August 26, 2025   Ella Wildridge, who has died aged 79, was one of Scottish theatre’s great unsung heroines. As a translator and dramaturg fluent in German and French, and who read in Russian, Italian, Spanish, and later Farsi, Wildridge brought a sense of internationalism to the Scottish stage that included translations of writers from Germany, Quebec and France. Working alongside her partner, playwright Tom McGrath, and then at the Traverse Theatre, Wildridge also helped foster a new generation of Scottish playwrights throughout the 1990s and beyond.   Ella Muriel Wildridge was born  at Clover Hill Farm in Broughton, Peeblesshire,  the youngest of four sisters to  Gilbert Johnson Wildridge and Constance Lila Wildridge (née Hooper). Her father was a Cambridge graduate and farmer who encouraged his daughters’ intellectual pursuits. Her mother studied at the Central School of Speech a...

Giles Havergal – Theatre director, Actor, writer   Born June 9, 1938; died August 23, 2025     Giles Havergal, who has died aged 87, was a towering figure in Scottish theatre. As co-artistic director of Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre for thirty-three years, Havergal helped redraw the theatrical map of Glasgow, Scotland and the world. Working alongside writer/director Robert David MacDonald and designer/director Philip Prowse, from his arrival in the Gorbals in 1969 to his departure in 2003, Havergal blazed a trail of radicalism that reinvigorated the Citz as an international powerhouse.   The tone was set from the start with Havergal’s 1970 all male production of Hamlet that featured nudity, sex and swearing. With the press as outraged as some of the city high hid yins,  some schools cancelled their planned visit. The attention this brought to the production made it box office gold, with many school pupils going to see the show of their own volition.  ...

Paddy Higson – Film producer   Born June 2nd1941; died April 13th 2025     Paddy Higson, who has died aged 83, was a trailblazing film producer who was long regarded as the mother of the Scottish film industry. Over more than forty years she worked closely with several generations of directors, writers and fellow producers in Scotland. She helped foster a series of films that set the tone for a way of contemporary Scottish filmmaking that was witty, urbane and quietly aspirational.   Higson worked with director Bill Forsyth as associate producer on his debut feature, That Sinking Feeling (1979), was production supervisor on Gregory’s Girl (1980) and associate producer on Comfort and Joy (1984). She also worked as line producer on director Michael Hoffman and Ninian Dunnett’s Edinburgh set comedy, Restless Natives (1985).   While she played a crucial role in nurturing all those films, Higson’s first credit as a producer in her own right was Living Apart Together ...

  Jack Vettriano  -  1951–2025    Jack Vettriano, who has died aged 73, was one of the most successful contemporary Scottish artists ever. His often erotically charged studies of brooding figures posed in scenes that seemed to draw from pulp fiction book covers and film noir stills sold in huge amounts. His 1992 painting, The Singing Butler, went at auction in 2004 for £744,500, at the time a record amount for any painting by a Scottish artist, and any painting ever sold in Scotland. It went on to become the best selling art print in the UK.   Celebrity collectors of Vettriano’s work include Jack Nicholson, Sir Alex Ferguson, Terence Conran and Tim Rice. Other fans included actor Robbie Coltrane and Scotland’s former First Minister, the late Alex Salmond. In 2010, Salmond used Vettriano’s painting, Let’s Twist Again, as the image of his official Christmas card. When the original was sold a year later, it raised £86,000 for charity.   His 2013 exhibitio...

Marianne Faithfull – Singer, Actress.   Born December 29, 1946; died January 30 2025   Marianne Faithfull, who has died aged 78, was a mercurial singer, who transcended her status as a 1960s swinging London icon and weathered several personal storms to become an elder stateswoman of a very English kind of bohemianism. She became a pop face after scoring a hit with a jaunty rendition of As Tears Go By (1964), composed by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, who would later put out their own version of the song.    Faithfull released five albums between 1965 and 1967, living a high profile lifestyle exacerbated in part by her relationship with Jagger. As the peace and love hedonism of the 1960s gave way to something darker at the end of the decade, Faithfull dropped out of view. Following several years of homelessness and heroin addiction, she returned to music with a vengeance with Broken English (1979).    With Faithfull’s by now far huskie...

Joanna Tope – Actress Born May 14 th  1944; died December 19 th  2024    Joanna Tope, who has died aged 80, was an actress who combined glamour, sophistication and intelligence over a more than fifty-year career that saw her light up stage and screen. This came in two separate acts, with a ten-year gap between. The first saw her appear on stage alongside the likes of John Gielgud in Edward Bond’s play, Bingo (1973), play Adelaide in Guys and Dolls, and take the title role in Hedda Gabler.   On TV she had a regular role as Dr. Clare Scott in twenty-two episodes of what was then Emmerdale Farm (1973), and appeared in guest roles in Z Cars (1974) and children’s science fiction drama, The Tomorrow People (1975). Prior to her sabbatical, Tope also appeared in four episodes of Jack Gerson’s supernatural thriller, The Omega Factor (1979).   When Tope returned to acting in 1994, it was as Jocasta in a new version of Oedipus Rex at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, whe...