Coffee-Table Notes

Duncan Hendry – Producer, theatre manager, promoter Born November 9th 1951; died March 2 nd  2023     Duncan Hendry, who has died aged 71, was a producer, promoter and theatre manager who steered major venues to success in Aberdeen and Edinburgh. This followed Hendry’s tenure running Aberdeen Alternative Festival, which at one time was the second most popular arts festival in Scotland, with only Edinburgh Festival Fringe attracting bigger audiences.   A major coup for AAF saw Hendry bring soul legend James Brown to Scotland for the first time. This 1993 show was a one-off date that required Hendry to apply his considerable negotiating skills to the max. He continued to pioneer new ventures when he became the first chief executive of Aberdeen Performing Arts, which also oversaw the Music Hall.   A major venture saw Hendry produce a trilogy of Scottish literary classics for His Majesty’s Theatre. A restaging of Alastair Cording’s adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel, Sunset Song, a

Piers Haggard – Film, television and theatre director and campaigner   Born – March 18, 1939; died January 11, 2023     Piers Haggard, who has died aged 83, was an award-winning director, who moved from theatre into television and film with a can-do sense of craftsmanship and getting the job done. This was the case both behind the camera on works such as Pennies From Heaven (1978), and The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970), and as a campaigner for freelance directors’ pay and conditions.   The latter saw Haggard at the centre of several organisations, which latterly included Stage Directors UK. As he explained in an interview with the Herald in 2016, SDUK had more members from Scotland than any other part of its geographical constituency. His voice of experience was an inspiration, and it was for this he was awarded an OBE.   On screen, Pennies From Heaven and The Blood on Satan’s Claw were probably Haggard’s best-known works. The Blood on Satan’s Claw was a seventeenth-century set affair i

Dan McCafferty – Singer, songwriter   Born October 14, 1946; died November 8, 2022     Dan McCafferty, who has died aged 76, was for more than forty years the lead singer of Dunfermline sired rock group, Nazareth. McCafferty’s rasp-laden voice defined a sound that came of age in the first half of the 1970s, with the likes of Led Zeppelin’s Robert  Plant and Free’s Paul Rodgers clear vocal peers. Weaned on first generation rock and roll, Nazareth took backwoods blues into spit and sawdust inner city barroom territory.    This was evidenced on a spate of cover versions that included rock reinventions of Joni Mitchell’s This Flight Tonight (1973), from Mitchell’s 1971 album, Blue, and especially on their U.S. hit, Love Hurts (1975). The latter appeared on the American edition of Hair of the Dog (1975), the sixth Nazareth album, which saw the band cross over into the big league. Originally intended as a B-side, the Boudleaux Bryant penned ballad had previously been recorded by The Everly B

I only ever met Robbie Coltrane once. That was in 2005, when I interviewed him for the Herald newspaper a week or so before he opened in Peter McDougall’s short play, The Brother’s Suit. We met in the top floor games room of the now long closed BBC Club, a stone’s throw from BBC Scotland’s then HQ on Queen Margaret Drive in Glasgow. Oran Mor, the former church turned pub on the corner of Byres Road and Great Western Road, was also close. The production of The Brother’s Suit would form part of David MacLennan’s trailblazing lunchtime theatre initiative, A Play, A Pie and A Pint, which made the venue a new home for West End bohemian types.   At one time, it seemed like the by now globally recognised regular of what was then four Harry Potter films, and a James Bond villain twice over in GoldenEye (1995) and The World is Not Enough (1999) might have been a regular on that sort of scene. As it turned out, this was Coltrane’s first visit to the BBC Club since he took over from Richard Stilg

Alan Wilkins – Playwright, teacher   Born July 6, 1969; died September 7, 2022     Alan Wilkins, who has died aged fifty-two, was a playwright and teacher, whose boundless curiosity fed into several acclaimed works. He also led countless drama workshops in schools and prisons, where his natural sense of empathy saw him enable those from less privileged backgrounds to thrive creatively.   Much of Wilkins’ writing explored facets of his own world. This was probably most apparent in The Nest (2004), which looked at the hillwalking community gathered in a Highland bothy. He later fed his experiences working as a barman in a Wester Ross hotel into Offshore (2008), produced by the Birds of Paradise company. He wrote Can We Live With You (2008), produced by Lung Ha Theatre Company in Edinburgh, the same year.   While these possessed a warmth and a self-deprecating wit that marked Wilkins’ own personality, it was the play he wrote inbetween, Carthage Must Be Destroyed (2007) that was his maste

Ross Stenhouse – Actor, Writer   Born November 18, 1961; died August 5, 2022   Ross Stenhouse, who has died aged sixty, was an actor and writer of tremendous heart, who lit up Scotland’s stages from his early years as a key member of the original Arches Theatre Company, as well as with Hopscotch Theatre, the children’s  company he co- founded in 1988 with Grant Smeaton. With Stenhouse writing original scripts and Smeaton the songs to go with them, the company toured schools in and around Glasgow, and is still going strong today. Regarded as the life and soul of the company, Stenhouse’s work on and off stage had an outrageous comic glee possessed with a depth that could see his tone switch to pathos in an instant.    Ross Stenhouse was born in Glasgow, the elder of two sons to Sheena (nee Clarke Campbell), a comptometrist, and Alexander Stenhouse, an accountant, and grew up in Cardonald and Crookston. He attended Cardonald  Primary School and Penilee Secondary School, where he played gu

Andrew Leigh – Theatre manager   Born February 17 1941; died July 28 2022     Andrew Leigh, who has died aged 81, was a theatre manager who helped make things happen in some of the UK’s key producing houses. From his early days at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, and the Traverse, Edinburgh, Leigh continued his association with Scotland by way of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and latterly with Fringe regulars Pleasance theatre, with whom he was a board member. Inbetween, he was instrumental in the founding of the Duke’s Playhouse, Lancaster, and the Paines Plough company. He also helped shape the relationship between subsidised and commercial theatre, and had a lengthy tenure at the Old Vic, London.   Throughout his sixty year career, Leigh navigated organisations through what were sometimes turbulent times with a level headed and good humoured approach while always remaining a champion of forward thinking ideas.   Andrew Leigh was born in Ottawa, Canada, where his mother Marion (nee Bl

Joyce Laing – Art therapist   Born April 1939; died July 17 2022     Joyce Laing, who has died aged around 83, was a pioneer of art therapy, whose work with psychiatric patients and long term prisoners helped unlock means of creative expression that transcended lives. In the 1970s, she played a key role at Barlinnie Special Unit, the experimental Glasgow prison wing where violent hardmen were liberated by Laing’s techniques. The best known of these was Jimmy Boyle, the convicted murderer who went on to became a successful sculptor.   “He was suspicious,” Laing told the Glasgow Times in 2017 of Boyle’s initial response to her. “He thought this was too good, it couldn’t be happening. He thought ‘this woman must be a spy’.”   Laing was speaking prior to an exhibition at Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow of work from the Special Unit drawn from her own collection of sketchbooks, newspaper cuttings and photographs, as well as paintings and sculptures by inmates.   prior to Laing

“Justify yourself! Go on. Justify yourself…”   These are the words I associate most with Dom Phillips, the investigative reporter who disappeared on June 5 th in a remote part of the western Amazon. Phillips was travelling with Indigenous advocate and guide Bruno Pereira while researching a book about sustainable development in a region where criminal activity at the expense of both the environment and the Indigenous population is paramount.    The disappearance of the two men and the seemingly lacklustre initial response from the Brazilian government caused international outrage. A tireless search by the Indigenous community working with police has seen two fishermen arrested, with the inquiry reclassed as Homicide. One of the fishermen has confessed to murder, and two bodies have been found. Whatever happens next, some hard questions need to be asked, about how such a tragedy happened, and why it was allowed to happen. But who will be doing the asking?     Dom Phillips’s demand for o