Coffee-Table Notes

Exile is at the heart of Heritage, Nicola McCartney’s tragedy set in 1920s Canada, in which Ulster emigres in search of some bright new tomorrow discover that the past isn’t easily left behind. Coming from Northern Ireland, McCartney’s roots as a writer were steeped in such themes when her play premiered at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in 1998. In an interview during the run-up to the play’s opening, the then twenty-something writer described herself as a ‘voluntary exile’, who had left Belfast to study English and Theatre Studies at Glasgow University. Heritage was the play McCartney said she said she’d never write, yet the love across the barricades story in Heritage proved irresistible, as the hand-me-down mythologies depicted in the play are romanticised to the characters’ terminally destructive downfall.     Written in a spare poetic demotic that was a key form for many of McCartney’s generation of writers, Heritage arrived in the thick of what now looks like ...

Marguerite Duras became a tabloid sensation by default on the back of Jean Jacques Annaud's 1992 big-screen adaptation of her 1984 novel, The Lover, or L'Amant in its original French. For those who associated this most singular of writers with the post Second World War European avant-garde, it was something of a surprise. The headlines may have been going after actress Jane March, the so-called 'sinner from Pinner' who played the teenage girl who embarks on an affair with an older man in 1920s French Indo-China, but for Duras watchers, it was an accidentally telling illustration of the contrary relationship the writer had between her public and private self.  On the one hand, Duras' deeply personal canon chimed with the sort of experiments with form and content beloved of intellectual seekers of truth. On the other, Duras possessed a hard-nosed ambition to get her work out there. It was like when she rang publisher John Calder, champion of Samuel Beckett, William...

Imagine tempting eight of the most unpleasant people in the world to an isolated house on uninhabited island. Then imagine wining and dining them into a false sense of security before methodically and mercilessly bumping them off one by rotten one as an act of poetic justice for the crimes they've escaped punishment from. This is effectively what happens in And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie's novel long regarded as her masterpiece since it was first published in 1939. And it is a trademark set-up of her murder-mystery oeuvre, whether putting her characters in a country house drawing room for the big reveal or else decamping them to the middle of nowhere. The allure of taking characters out of their comfort zone and throwing them to the metaphorical lions may be sated these days by the mass appeal of reality TV, but Christie got there first. More significantly, perhaps, the mind games she plays are a whole lot subtler, shot through as they are with a hardcore sens...

Everybody loves an outsider. In literature and film, it's the oddball, the geek and the troublesome, the shyly intelligent but socially awkward or emotionally damaged anti-hero who readers and audiences identify with. If such protagonists are teenagers angrily coming to terms with a world that seems to be against them, the appeal is even greater, whether it's James Dean's sensitive tough guy in Rebel Without A Cause or an entire coterie of misfits in John Hughes' ultimate teen angst flick, The Breakfast Club. In books, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye has itself become a rites of passage for young readers who can identify with the book's narrator, Holden Caulfield, while Jay McInerny did something similar for teenage girls in his 1988 novel, Story of My Life. All of which goes some way to explaining the phenomenal and enduring success of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ever since Mark Haddon's novel was first published i...

If the 90s were just the 60s turned upside-down, as some wag once suggested, then such a notion  confirmed what cultural commentator Michael Bracewell described in his book on the era as an age 'when surface was depth'. What this appeared to mean by the time Stephen Greenhorn's play, Passing Places, appeared in 1997, was a definition of a decade that had already spawned Brit Pop, Girl Power, New Laddism and Cool Britannia. Here, then, was a shallow pool of pop without politics, Barbie Doll feminism in a Union Jack mini dress and sexism with an apparently ironic twist. The Berlin Wall had come down in 1989, and, after a decade of class and civil war by way of the Miners Strike and the Poll Tax, Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had been forced to resign from office after an eleven year reign of terror. Tony Blair's landslide New Labour victory in 1997 suggested  that things could only get better, but suddenly, with no pricks to kick against, it...

I'd been waiting for Suspect Culture to happen for a very long time. By the time I walked down Leith Walk in Edinburgh on August 27 th 1997 to spend my thirty-third birthday watching the company's Edinburgh International Festival contribution, Timeless , at the now derelict Gateway Theatre, it already felt like we shared the same world. By the time I walked back up the Walk, towards town and late night celebrations, that world had been rocked forever. As inarticulate as I felt in my immediate responses to the play, it was clear from this treatise on friendship, loss and the pains of shared experience that the company weren't just talking about my generation, even though they were a few crucial years younger than me. Graham Eatough, David Greig, Nick Powell, Ian Scott, their cast of four and the quartet of musicians that soundtracked Timeless weren't even just in tune with contemporary mores. Rather, to a greater or lesser degree, they were attempting to navigate...

Matthew Lenton has never directed Shakespeare before. At first glance, Lenton's visually rich magical-realist imaginings with his Glasgow-based, internationally acclaimed Vanishing Point company don't really fit with the bard's poetically dense flights of fancy. Peel back the layers, however, and the two worlds that collide in his new production of one of Shakespeare's most revisited rom-coms may have more in common with Lenton's world than you might think. “ It's the Shakespeare play which as a kid I always found the most accessible,” Lenton says of the Dream. “I've always been interested in the magic and the darkness and the beauty of it, and it's nice to be able to spend time in such a different place. I've always had a difficult relationship with Shakespeare. It was certainly not something I loved as a kid, and not something I found easy. It's still not something I find easy to watch on a stage, and not something I find easy ...