Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   Two men stand peering at a large white screen made of paper. It is as if they are looking out on to some idyll-like landscape or a futuristic city that remains invisible to anyone without vision enough to build it. A printer at the side of the stage spews out sheets of paper with words on it that act as silent dialogue. Once the men move the screen to one side, a group of small tree trunk sized logs and some wooden pallets are revealed. For the next half hour, each man takes an axe to a log apiece and chops and chops and chopsuntil they splinter and break.   This audacious and compelling spectacle of hard graft sees the performers build up a percussive momentum that at times recalls the pounding rhythms of 1980s industrial music relocated to a forest. What happens over the next hour beyond their mini display of physical strength, however, is a remarkable study in renewal, recycling and transformation through a mix of imagination an...

Summerhall, Edinburgh Three stars   Auntie Empire has something to say. As  writer/performer Julia Taudevin’s creation holds court over a soundtrack of couthy Scottish classics, the audience enter to become both her subjects and a very, very, very extended family. The address that follows sees Auntie prepare to give her last will and testament as she slowly falls apart along with the last fetid gasps of British imperialism.   Taudevin’s new solo show premiered as part of the Manipulate festival this weekend after assorted showcases over the last few years. Clad in prosthetically enhanced twin set and joke shop teeth, Taudevin’s Auntie is the sort of toff so posh you can only understand one in ten words they say. A veneer of respectable authority manifests itself in cups of tea and Tunnock’s teacakes handed out to the audience, some of whom are forced on stage to do her bidding. Gradually, however, Auntie’s hectoring gives way to a bowel busting collapse of power.   U...

Lyra, Edinburgh Three stars   The studio of the former school transformed by the Lyra organisation into Scotland’s first dedicated theatre for children and young people resembles a playroom prior to Bruno Gallagher’s new show for this year’s Manipulate festival of visual theatre and animation. Young audience members try on masks and costumes that sit on hangars waiting to transform the wearers, who pose for dramatic selfies. Other props sit on tables waiting to be perused. Wild images of surreal characters line the walls, while all the while a package tour soundtrack compiled from sunnier climes plays with joyful abandon.   If this interactive pre-show spectacle allows a glimpse into what goes on in Gallagher’s head, it also acts as a trailer for what happens upstairs in the theatre by way of a quartet of what their creator calls ‘Absurdities’. These are bite-size vignettes inspired by Gallagher’s wanderings in Europe played out by an array of creatures that have effectively b...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Three stars    After more than fifteen years creating once in a lifetime musicals out of thin air and audience suggestions, the Olivier award winning, BBC Radio 4 friendly comic troupe The Showstoppers will know to always expect the unexpected. Even so, when on tour, they should always brush up on the local landmarks, lest someone throws out some serious googlies.    Such was the hilarious case on Friday during the first of the Showstoppers two-night run at the Citz, when co-director and mine host for the evening Adam Meggido was taken somewhat by surprise on several counts. Firstly, while asking for suggestions of a location for his company’s still unwritten opus, the suggestion of Haven Caravan Parks threw him. As the purveyors of static caravan summer breaks are a UK wide operation, his reaction probably says much beyond geography. More pertinently, perhaps, when the Barras was suggested, it was clear that  Glasgow's world famous mar...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   Birth, sex and death are pretty much the driving forces in one form or another behind most human drama as we know it. They are the heart of the matter too in the life cycle of a puppet as laid bare in absurdist maverick Mamoru Iriguchi’s latest creation, which previewed in the Citz Studio over the weekend prior to a forthcoming short run at Edinburgh’s Manipulate festival of visual theatre.    Here, Iriguchi and fellow performer Julia Darrouy are Tangerine and Sunshine, a pair of life size puppets playing versions of each other. Introduced by a much smaller narrator puppet that then proceeds to keel over, Tangerine and Sunshine are then taken under the wing of the narrator’s now fully proportioned ghost, who takes them on a trip in which they get to explore all puppets great and small by way of different size versions of themselves.    As opposites attract and one size most definitely does not fit all in certain situations,...

Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh  Four stars   When Iddo Oberski  suffered a stroke in 2009, his whole world was turned upside down. While he could now only walk with two sticks, this didn’t stop the then academic from exploring notions of freedom stemming from the ideas of nineteenth century spiritual guru and author of The Philosophy of Freedom, Rudolf Steiner. Oberski also began to explore the history of his own family in the Netherlands who were victims of the Nazi Holocaust.   Seventeen years on since his accident, Oberski has channelled his various experiences and researches into a deeply personal meditation that fuses memoir, history lesson, puppetry, music, and film in a slow burning line of enquiry that suggests emancipation comes in many forms. Over the seventy minutes of a production co-directed by Oberski and collaborator Mark Kydd, this evolves into a one man philosophical cabaret that takes in card tricks, live flute interludes and an ongoing dia...

Leith Depot, Edinburgh Four stars   When Dan the man left his Edinburgh home for Iceland in 2015 to study graphic design, it was the beginning of a great adventure. Here he was, out on his own and off the leash with his whole life in front of him, and his cheeky Scottish charm seemingly a passport to anywhere. Reykjavik was buzzing, and so was he, and for a giddy moment, Dan was truly living the dream. Unfortunately in Heidi Docherty’s new short solo play performed by herself, it doesn’t last.    What follows is an unflinching portrait of how a fun loving cheeky chappie has his already fragile confidence dented by the voices in his head who over the next few years mark out Dan’s struggles - with money, his course, his numerous jobs, his love life, his family, and ultimately with himself - until he can’t take anymore.    The result is a tragic indictment on the perils of young people overwhelmed by anguish even before you realise that for Docherty this is painful...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow  Four stars   Old ghosts are everywhere in this latest tour of the late Stephen Mallatratt’s ingenious staging of Susan Hill’s best selling 1983 gothic horror novel, in which an ageing solicitor called Arthur Kipps attempts to lay those ghosts to rest. He does this by telling his story of what happened years before after he was dispatched to a marshy godforsaken landscape to sort out a deceased recluse’s affairs. Here, the spectral figure of the woman who gives the show its title haunts the town into submission, with portents of doom at her every fleeting appearance, as Kipps learns to his cost.    Back in 1987, Mallatratt took Hill’s already spooky yarn and set it in an empty theatre, where Kipps has hired a young actor to play out his past in an attempt to exorcise his demons. Originally intended as a low key entertainment performed in the theatre bar, in director Robin Herford’s hands, Mallatratt’s creation took on a life of its own, and up ...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   When Stephen King set out to write an old time prison break yarn in the early 1980s, the result was Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,. This hard boiled novella about life on the inside for ex banker Andy Dufresne after being convicted for murdering his wife and her lover was narrated by Ellis ‘Red’ Redding, a lifer who has become the go-to guy for anything his fellow inmates might need to make the time inside a little easier. With Andy thrown in the deep end of a corrupt late 1940s institution led from the top by prison warden Stammas, what follows over almost thirty years is a story of finding freedom against all the odds.   Much of this will be familiar from Frank Darabont’s 1994 sleeper hit film version, but it was to King’s original that Owen O’Neill and Dave Johns returned to when they adapted it for the stage back in 2009. This return of David Esbjornson’s fleshed out production for this latest UK tour sees Joe McFadden ...

The Georgian House, Edinburgh Four stars   The sins of rhyme, as Robert Burns calls his craft in this new dramatisation of the bard’s words, have much to answer for. Burns himself was an all too familiar bundle of contradictions in his output. On the one hand, he had a common touch that tapped into the collective consciousness enough to take poetry into the mainstream. On the other, his feckless shagabout ways left much domestic mess in his wake. This is before the one about the slave trade the cash-strapped people’s poet almost signs up with to help escape his lot.   All of this and more is addressed in James Clements’ hour long compendium of words and music which returns to the Georgian House’s Robert Adam designed Edinburgh New Town des-res in the run up to Burns Night following last year’s Fringe run and recent tour. With the audience seated the length of a dinner table laid out with all the accoutrements, the traditional Burnsian gathering is duly upended by Clements...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   The world is full of Basil Fawltys these days. Half a century after John Cleese and Connie Booth’s savagely funny portrait of middle aged male neuroses was unleashed kicking and screaming onto prime time Sunday night TV, Basil walks among us once more, as pompous, repressed and set to spontaneously combust as he ever was.    Cleese’s hit stage version of his creation has already proven to be far more than the pension plan nostalgia fest it might initially look like, with the series of note perfect impressions from director Caroline Jay Ranger’s young cast capturing every madcap nuance of his creations as they reboot them with new life.   For those for whom what has been designated to be TV’s greatest sitcom may have passed them by, Basil and his wife Sybil run a sleepy hotel in Torquay, where maid Polly keeps things together as Basil, Sybil and Spanish waiter Manuel attempt to serve a series of increasingly unwelcome guests. ...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Five stars    A wing and a prayer are everything in Morag Fullarton’s ingenious reimagining of one of the festive season’s most loved feelgood films. Celestial interventions aren’t just the order of the day for George Bailey, the small town saviour about to throw himself off a bridge at the start of the play as life gets too much to bear. They are there too for the show itself, which Fullarton confesses to the audience prior to its first night curtain hasn’t had a proper dress rehearsal due to assorted technical glitches. This is all done in mutual good humour, but Fullarton needn’t have worried, as what follows on Oran Mor’s tiny stage is one of the most joyously inventive theatrical experiences on show anywhere just now.    The can-do attitude of Fullarton and her company of four actors is a reflection of the show itself, which opens as a quartet of old school cinema usherettes attempt to pick up the pieces after a screening of Frank Capra’s 1946 ...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars   A woman’s world has probably shifted on its axis several times over since Catherine Johnson’s ABBA powered musical dramady first stormed the West End a quarter of a century ago. That may have been at the fag end of the ab-fab, girl powered 1990s, but the show’s heart remains in the 1970s, a seemingly more innocent age of free(ish) love without too many apparent consequences as feminism trickled down the class scale.    Or so it probably seemed for forty-something Donna’s generation in Johnson’s story, which, while tailored to Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus’s greatest hits, could probably stand up dramatically on its own. This isn’t to undermine one of the greatest songbooks in late twentieth century mainstream pop history. Far from it. In truth, for Johnson, director Phyllida Lloyd and producer Judy Craymer, the mix of ennui and euphoria that fires the Swedish songwriting duo’s grown up mini melodramas were a dramatic gift.   ...

Dundee Rep Three stars   Jack may not be the only one full of beans in Dundee Rep’s festive reimagining of the classic English fairy story, but they certainly keep him out of view. The star of Jonathan O’Neill and Isaac Savage’s new ‘mooosical’ take on the story is Caroline the Cow, a sassy Highland breed who is milked for all she’s worth to make Jack’s mum and dad’s ice cream business liquid. When Jack’s dad dies everything dries up, alas, as Caroline is farmed out to the Happy Smiles Petting Zoo, where she falls in with a musical trio made up of a hen, a pig and a llama.    While a blinged up Jack and his mum Sherry strike gold from their raids up the beanstalk, it is left to Caroline and her flock/pack/herd to shimmy up and sort things out for good. Throw in a half man, half harp and an increasingly benevolent sounding Giant, and by the end everyone’s back in business, including some for whom it has to be the one of show.    Stephen Whitson’s production is a ...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   It’s hard to be a private dancer when your support group mates turn up at the door. No intervention is required, however, for the veteran pocket rocket who soon becomes known to the world as Dancing Donny. Donny may have two left feet, but away from the crowd, he gets the sort of kick from a soft shoe shuffle that the booze he once numbed himself with could never match.    Craig and Jay have never seen the like, with Jay in particular spotting a chance to make a fortune once phone footage of Donny’s shape throwing goes viral. While Donny is none the wiser about some of the less flattering online comments, he loves every second of being the centre of attention.    Stephen Christopher and Graeme Smith’s comic drama plays with expectations about what a show about a bunch of addicts should be like by having its Leith based trio introduce themselves to the audience with a ‘no childhood trauma’ rule. Brian Logan’s speedy reviva...

Theatre 118, Glasgow Four stars   Aoife McDonagh has a dream. Sweet seventeen and a self styled ‘half a virgin’, Aoife can’t wait get away from small town County Kildare and make her mark on the mean streets of London. If that particular city didn’t happen to be in England, Aoife’s family might like it a whole lot better, but she doesn’t care what they think anymore. If she stays that would be the end of her. Especially after what happened with Erin Kelly, the coolest girl in school who she’s been besotted with since they met when they were six. Erin’s going away as well, so who know what might happen next, but at least they’ll always have that moment.    As confessionals go, Rebecca Donovan has written a rites of passage that taps into the hormonal hunger of young women on the verge with a comic dynamism and an unfiltered frankness that could make a nun blush. Performed by Donovan in Georgia Nelson’s production for Theatre 118, Aoife is a guilt-ridden force of natur...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars    When times are tough, secret worlds await in this new look at the classic eighteenth century French folktale, which here de-Disneyfies things to get beneath the skin of the story. In Lewis Hetherington’s version, Israela Efomi’s Beauty is one of two daughters to the widowed Baron Aaron, for whom business is a crash and burn affair, while encouraging Beauty that looks alone are all she needs to get by. Beauty’s sister Bright, on the other hand, has big ideas of her own.    When her dad’s wheeler dealing sees him go bust, the family are forced to move to a woodland shack. A chance encounter with a seemingly scary monster sees the Baron bargain with Beauty, who is exiled to the nearby castle, rendered as a spooky cartoon construction by designer Rachael Canning. With feline friend Mr Mittens in tow, Beauty finds a spooky world of locked rooms and celestial sounds, as well as a Beast whose bark is considerably worse than his b...