Coffee-Table Notes

When Adrienne Truscott read in 2017 how playwright David Mamet had imposed a ban on post-show discussions of his work, she wondered why the writer of such acclaimed plays as Glengarry Glen Ross and Oleanna wasn’t keen on meeting his public. The result is Masterclass,   a  parody of the sort of exchanges that might occur if the grand old men of American playwriting were put in the spotlight alongside a fawning interviewer. Out of this comes a seriously funny discourse on privilege and power in a world where tough guys still appear to rule the roost.   “ There are some writers that are esteemed and given the name genius,” says Truscott of her  collaboration with the Dublin based Brokentalkers company , “and they're shit. I guess I felt there was some lazy mythologizing going on, and if you actually look at the work, there is some really bad writing, which shaped how people my age thought about what is good playwriting.”   As well as Mamet, Truscott, fellow performer Feidlim Cannon an

Ivo van Hove initially resisted reading A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel. This despite the Belgian theatre director being gifted the book twice by friends, who declared Yanagihara’s 814-page epic was something definitely for him.   Van Hove was familiar with A Little Life’s success, and presumed Yanagihara’s story of four friends in New York to be a gay rites of passage.  Being given the book twice, however, piqued his curiosity. When he eventually opened it, he discovered the novel’s apparent premise to be a sucker punch that opened out onto an altogether more troubling world, in which one of the friends, Jude, a man emotionally and physically damaged to a self-destructive degree, becomes the book’s central focus.    “ I couldn't stop reading it,” van Hove says. “It's the book that you don't want to read but you cannot stop, and you know it's going to end terribly, but you still can’t stop.”    When Van Hove applied for the rights to stage Yanagihara’s stor

This time last year, the Perthshire hills were alive with the sounds and songs of A Christmas Carol. Charles Dickens’ ultimate festive fable of how bad times can be turned to good was Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s 2019 Christmas show. This year’s enforced closure of all theatres and places of entertainment due to safety measures enforced due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, has sadly left such institutions empty.   That hasn’t prevented creativity. The last nine months has seen a welter of online performances designed to provide a lifeline for audiences and artists alike. These have ranged from the National Theatre of Scotland’s thrice weekly Scenes for Survival series of 55 bite size works created in lockdown, to Rapture Theatre’s similarly styled Rapture Mini Bites being made available each Friday. Pitlochry Festival Theatre itself has seen some two and a half million viewers engaging with its online Shades of Tay initiative, which has seen more than twenty premieres of new work for

When Tim Astley’s grand-father gave him a cassette of a 1960s radio comedy series called Round The Horne, it set in motion a life-long love affair with the show that has resulted in a hugely successful live staging that arrives in Edinburgh next week. Using original scripts by Barry Took and Marty Feldman, Astley’s production for his Apollo Theatre Company recreates the original live radio format to revisit an iconic programme that helped set a template for sketch comedy that continues today. “I was twelve when I was given the cassette of Round The Horne,’ says Astley. “My grand-father said he thought it might be something I’d quite like, and it opened me up to this whole new world which has stayed with me since then. Of course, at that age, I certainly didn’t understand all the jokes. It was only much later I realised how clever they are in terms of what they got away with.” Running for four series’ between 1965 and 1968, Round The Horne’s ensemble cast was led by Kenneth Hor

When Clare Grogan takes the stage in Barefoot in the Park this weekend, it will be something of a dream come true. The Altered Images singer and star of Gregory’s Girl has always been a fan of Neil Simon’s New York-set 1960s rom-com, in which newlyweds Corie and Paul navigate their way around the era’s social mores as much as their new apartment. In Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s new co-production of the play with the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, Grogan plays Corie’s scene-stealing widowed mother Ethel.   “It's really extraordinary and interesting and fun and scary and a bit overwhelming and overall quite joyous to just have the opportunity to be doing it,” Grogan gushes of the experience on a Valentine’s Day break from rehearsals. I have a very clear memory of the first time I saw the film with my mum and dad and my sisters, and have just loved it ever since, so I was genuinely thrilled that someone was going to put it on stage.” Grogan expressed her enthusiasm on Twitter, and