Coffee-Table Notes

When it was announced that Karen Dunbar would be playing Lady Bracknell in Perth Theatre’s new production of The Importance of Being Earnest, it was clear that director Lu Kemp had something special in mind. How that turns out for Oscar Wilde’s fruity nineteenth century comedy of manners, which has become a staple of the commercial touring theatre circuit, remains to be seen.  As for Lady Bracknell, while Dunbar looks set to make the most of the cut-glass bullishness of this grandest of dames, whose eminent respectability masks a past kept as tucked away as the handbag that gives her the play’s most immortal line, she looks to be taking her somewhere beyond standard posh old lady fare. “She’s very Glaswegian,” says Ayr-born Dunbar of her take on Wilde’s ultimate society gate-crasher. “Very posh Glaswegian, but she’s coming on. I learnt quite a lot of the script before we started rehearsing the play, but I never settled on a voice. That’s interesting, because it’s not quite what I

By rights, Matthew Lenton and Vanishing Point theatre company should have already opened their new production of The Metamorphosis in Italy prior to a short tour of Scotland that begins in Glasgow next week at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow. As it is, the show’s run at the VIE Festival in Cesana in conjunction with their European partners, the Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione, had the plug pulled on it before anyone left Scotland.  The postponement of The Metamorphosis isn’t, however, an early casualty of Brexit, although such consequences are likely to affect international artistic exchanges soon enough. Rather, Vanishing Point have been grounded due to uncertainties surrounding the Coronavirus currently sweeping the globe, with the Italian government requesting the cancellation of all festivals in their country over the next few weeks as a precautionary measure.  All of which seems a strangely fitting back-story to Lenton and Vanishing Point’s new take on Franz Kafka’s seminal

Alasdair C. Whyte was performing at Edinburgh Festival Fringe when the seeds of his new cross-artform theatrical collaboration, MAIM, began to take root. The Mull-born singer and songwriter was appearing alongside Aberdeenshire born electronic composer Ross Whyte, who, as WHYTE, were presenting a cinematic audio-visual live rendering of their debut album, Fairich. Presented as part of the 2017 Made in Scotland showcase of contemporary home-grown work, Fairich: Live was an attempt to do something different to a straightforward gig and add a more theatrical element to their performance. This was in keeping with WHYTE’s own forward-thinking fusion of melodic electronica and Gaelic song, and arguably set a rough template for MAIM, which opens at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow next week at the start of an extensive country-wide tour. The roots of the new show began after Fairich: Live was attended by Muireann Kelly, artistic director of Glasgow-based Gaelic company, Theatre Gu Leor.