Coffee-Table Notes

Scottish theatre has eight million stories. Some of them can be heard in A History of Scottish Drama in Six Plays, theatre critic Fergus Morgan’s boldly named six-part podcast that starts this week. Developed from a bursary from the Scottish Society of Playwrights’ SSP @50 Fellowship Awards, Morgan’s take comes from a desire to discover for himself the sometimes lost history of the world he is now steeped in as The Stage’s Scottish theatre critic.   ‘ The idea,’ says Morgan, ‘was to tell a history, not the history. Obviously you can't tell a definitive history when there are so many different strands to each story, but I wanted to try and tell a hopefully fairly comprehensive history of Scottish drama, principally from the point of view of playwrights, but weaving in all sorts of things along the way.’   To this end, Morgan bookends his series with A Satire Of The Three Estates (1540) - or Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaites if you will - and Black Wa...

When Kirsty Findlay finishes up playing the lead role in The Sound of Music at Pitlochry Festival Theatre at the end of December, it will be the end of a very special year for the Glasgow based actress. Prior to becoming the solution to the problem of Maria, Findlay appeared in three Pitlochry productions over the Perthshire theatre’s  summer season.  While Findlay shone in both Sense and Sensibility as Elinor, and as small town bad girl Ariel in Footloose, it was her magnificent embodiment of singer/songwriter Carole King in Beautiful that showed off Findlay’s full range as actress, singer and musician. Findlay was on stage throughout in Sam Hardie’s production of Douglas McGrath’s play, and despite playing piano in front of an audience for the first time ever, rarely has an actor looked so at ease with what she was doing in a bravura performance that might just be the best of the year.   ‘ I never thought in a million years I would get to do all the shows I’ve done over...

When it was announced that Alan Cumming was set to become the new artistic director of Pitlochry Festival Theatre, the wow factor of having such a high profile figure take on such a job instantly raised the Perthshire theatre’s cache, garnering attention at an international level. Not that PFT was shy of having acclaim heaped on it for its annual summer rep seasons it has been entertaining both locals and tourists with since being founded in a tent in 1951. This has been as much the case with outgoing director Elizabeth Newman as her predecessors as they worked through different times.   Aberfeldy born Cumming’s appointment, however, has raised the bar considerably in terms of ambitions for what a rural theatre outside the central belt can potentially achieve. One of Newman’s many achievements during her six-year tenure at PFT since being appointed in 2018 has been to forge links with theatres beyond its immediate locale.   ‘The world has moved on pretty substantially since Pi...

Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me was the final single to be released by The Smiths, the mercurial Manchester band who for a certain breed of sensitive young men helped define life in the 1980s. One of these was Ben Harrison, who went on to become the co artistic director of the Edinburgh based Grid Iron Theatre Company. Growing up in a small English town, for Harrison, the Smiths, and Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me in particular, became a soundtrack to his life.   Harrison was a hopelessly romantic middle class teen who undertook a very quiet rebellion against his background by way of the trappings of Cold War communism and radical chic. He also fell for the Smiths just as he fell for girls at bus stops and older women at the local am-dram group who offered some kind of salvation in a humdrum town.   It should come as no surprise, then, that Harrison has co-opted the title of the Smiths swan song for his autobiographical look back at the decade in which h...

Hyperpop was first used as both a word and a pop concept in 1988 in an article about the Cocteau Twins. More recently, hyperpop as a micro genre of electronic music is more related to artists such as Charli XCX and the late SOPHIE, with Dazed magazine hailing the music’s futuristic maximalist rush as ‘the sound for a post pandemic world’. A use of vocoder and Autotune based voice modulation in particular has allowed hyperpop performers to play with different voices and identities in a way that chimes with a gender fluid zeitgeist.  The hyperpop scene forms the backdrop to HYPER, a new play by Ois O’Donoghue for Ireland’s Jaxbanded Theatre, co-founded in 2020 by O’Donoghue, who also directs, and the show’s composer/sound designer Ruairi Nicholl.  A mini hit at the 2023 Dublin Fringe, HYPER focuses on hyperpop duo Conall and Saoirse, whose forthcoming gig in a gay bar is given an extra frisson of anxiety by Saoirse’s recent transition. A bathroom incident prompts an interve...

Gary McNair has never been shy about putting his heroes in the spotlight. This has been the case both with the Glasgow based writer and performer’s masterful solo shows, as well as works penned for others. As far as his self performed works go, McNair has paid tribute to an unholy trinity of poets of one form or another.  McGonagall’s Chronicles (Which Will Be Remembered for a Very Long Time) saw McNair hail Dundee rhymester William McGonagall, while Letters to Morrissey dissected McNair’s fandom of the mercurial former vocalist of The Smiths. More recently, Dear Billy was McNair’s loving homage to the man who is arguably Scotland’s greatest comic talent, Billy Connolly.   ‘Talk about the perfect dinner party,’ says McNair, who will be appearing on stage in Edinburgh for the first time in seven years in the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Dear Billy. This comes following a sell out tour that included dates at Glasgow’s Pavilion Theatre.   ‘Juliet Cadzow was t...

‘What do we do about obscene phone calls?’ This was a question Harry Mould encountered while researching their debut play, The Brenda Line, which opens at Pitlochry Festival Theatre this month. The question came from some of the women manning the phones for the Samaritans, the charity set up in 1953 to provide a sounding board and emotional support for those in distress, feeling suicidal, or who just needed to talk. The answer to the question came in 1958, when the service that gives Mould’s play its title was set up. The Brenda Line (originally the Brent Line, until that district office objected) existed for the next three decades before being scrapped in 1987. For Mould, channelling its history onto the stage comes from a very personal place.   ‘ My mum was a Samaritan when she was very young,’ Mould says. ‘When she was about nineteen or twenty, she was the youngest Samaritan in Wales, and she had these funny little anecdotes she would tell us from around that time. One of these ...

A lot has happened since Apphia Campbell first performed the play that has become Through the Mud. Back in 2017, what was then a solo piece called WOKE saw Campbell and co-writer Meredith Yarbrough’s response to the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, USA, when black teenager Michael Brown was shot dead by a white police officer, become a Fringe hit. Developed and expanded to incorporate a second actress in the form of Tinashe Warikandwa, Through the Mud looks set to do much the same.  Adapted from writer and spoken word artist Altovise Laster’s Poems from the Underground, WOKE and now Through the Mud chart the lives of Black Panther Assata Shakur and a nineteen-year-old student called Ambrosia, who is enrolling at university as the events in Ferguson are kicking off. Forty-two years apart, the two women rise up.   As the killing of Brown and other black men, including George Floyd in 2020, helped foster the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Through the Mud’s co-production be...

When blind dates don’t work out, anything can happen. Just ask Van Badham, arguably Australia’s most provocative playwright and commentator, whose new show, The Questions, is one of the flagship productions of State Theatre Company South Australia’s Winter season. It was partly through Badham’s own dating adventures, after all, that led to her writing the play. It was also how she met Richard Wise, clinical psychologist by day, punk folk musician, lyricist and composer of the live score for The Questions by night.  'Richard and I met on Tinder,’ says Badham. ‘We were dating, but it just wasn’t working, and I couldn’t work out why, because we 're so into one another, had so much in common. and liked all the same stuff. We had a lot of friends in common,  and I was obsessed with Richard’s band, and Richard was into my writing, so we had this really profound connection, but as a relationship, it just didn't work.    ‘Then I had this moment of clarity where I realis...

When Anne Wood visited Pakistan to meet the father she had never known, the experience opened up another world that stayed with her. More than thirty years later, the renowned Scottish violinist tells her story in When Mountains Meet, a cross-cultural hybrid of storytelling and song that bridges continents and musical styles. Told as a conversation between Scottish and South-Asian music, a vibrant live score composed by Wood combines alap, raag, reel and strathspey, with vocals performed in a mix of English, Gaelic and Hindustani to tell Wood’s deeply personal story.   When Wood first wrote to her father, ‘He didn’t know I had been born, but replied quickly to my tentative letter introducing myself, completely accepting me into his life as we developed a fiery but loving father-daughter relationship. ’   Wood’s musical pedigree stems from her Sutherland roots, and as a founder member of folk/jazz fusion group, The Cauld Blast Orchestra up to her current tenure as a member of ‘...

A few weeks ago, artistic directors of Birds of Paradise Theatre Company past and present met up to take stock. It had been thirty years, after all, since the foundation of what has become Scotland’s premiere producers of theatre created and performed by disabled artists. With current company boss Robert Softley Gale gathering alongside his former co-director Garry Robson and their predecessors Morven Gregor and founding director Andrew Dawson on the eve of a tour of Rob Drummond’s dark comedy about the benefits system, Don’t. Make. Tea., this made for quite a summit meeting.   Among the many things discussed, Dawson reminded Softley Gale how he had visited Softley Gale’s school to present a workshop on the then freshly founded Birds of Paradise. Keen to get young people involved, Softley Gale was invited to take part, only to tell Dawson he was far too busy.   While Softley Gale’s interest in theatre developed while a student at the University of Glasgow studying Compute...

“Can you hear me, Deborah?’   Deborah Pearson looks like she’s lip-synching at the start of our conversation about The Talent, the Canadian writer/performer/director’s collaboration with Gemma Paintin and Jim Stenhouse, aka Action Hero, which plays at Summerhall for a week as part of the England based artist focused Horizon Showcase. As is the way of things these days, Pearson and I are attempting to talk over Zoom, the international video communications platform that rose to prominence during the pandemic induced lockdown.   As I shout into the silence, I’m conscious of sounding like Clem Fandango, one of the pompous hipsters directing arch thespian Steven Toast during the old luv’s voiceover gigs in Matt Berry and Arthur Mathews’ TV sit-com, Toast of London. This fits in all too well with The Talent’s focus on a voiceover artist taking direction for a variety of presentations in her recording booth limbo.   “I had this idea of how interesting it would be to see a show w...

According to Wikipedia, Fereydoun Farrokhzad was an Iranian pop sensation who, between 1962 and 1992, was a household name in his home country. His life as a TV star, showman and sex symbol saw him sell out a series of multiple shows at the Royal Albert Hall in London.   As a political activist not shy of speaking out against the Islamic government following the 1979 revolution, Farrokhzad was forced into exile, and latterly lived in Bonn, Germany. It was here his body was found in his apartment in 1992, having been stabbed repeatedly in the face and upper torso. While his killing was widely believed by many to have been sanctioned by the Islamic government, his murder has never been solved.     This is the starting point for Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Javaad Alipoor’s latest exploration of the relationship between real life and the digital world. Jumping down assorted online rabbit holes, Alipoor takes in Iranian pop music and the murder mystery pod...