Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars    A school reunion opens the National Theatre of Scotland’s suitably monumental looking twenty-first century reboot of Muriel Spark’s classic novel. Beside a semi circular coliseum style staircase that dominates the stage, a grown up Sandy Stranger and her less likely peers from the girl gang once known as the Brodie Set rewind on their between the wars adolescence that shaped them. This, as we know, was down largely to the mercurial figure of Jean Brodie, the self mythologizing libertine whose every inspirational utterance in David Harrower’s simmering new adaptation sounds like a victory speech.   Gayle Rankin’s chic and sensual Brodie first appears striding down the steps of Chloe Lamford’s epic set looking part Hollywood diva, part demagogue. Her students follow, initially looking more St. Trinian’s than Edinburgh’s Marcia Blaine School for Girls. This is a fleeting pre-cursor in Vicky Featherstone’s production for when they...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow  Four stars    The world has been turned upside down a million times over since Ayub Khan Din’s tragicomic portrait of multi racial back street Britain caught some kind of zeitgeist three decades ago. The play was successful enough to be turned into a hit film three years later. Both showed off what at the time was a milieu rarely seen on stage. Set in 1971 Salford, Khan Din’s study of chip shop owning Pakistani Muslim, George, his English Catholic wife Ella, and their noisy brood of British born mixed race children tapped into a volatile melting pot of cross cultural, pan generational family life.     Half a century on from the play’s post 1960s setting, this new production comes with several lifetimes of cultural baggage in tow. Kash Arshad’s revival - a co-production between  the Citizens, Bolton Octagon and Wiltshire Creative in association with Derby Theatre - stays true to the play’s roots in a bright, funny an...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars Mothers and sons can be a toxic mix. So it goes in Jonny Donahoe’s emotionally charged new play, which will hopefully have a longer life beyond its lunchtime slot as part of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest season and its subsequent Edinburgh and Paisley dates.    When Mark Barrett’s presumably sole son and heir of Blythe Duff’s solitary matriarch turns up unannounced for the first time in eight months, he finds her burning her back pages on a garden bonfire. Given that some of those pages may involve him, this very Zen gesture of purging has an even greater if largely unspoken resonance. Given that the son’s arrival is because he has something to say to help find some kind of impasse beyond their estrangement, this is even more problematic. As the pair attempt to navigate their way around their differences over the next hour in what looks like an extended co-counselling session, some kind of bridges are eventually built.    As Duff and ...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four Stars   Showbiz secrets didn’t come much glitzier than those of Liberace, the piano playing artist christened Władziu Valentino, who dropped his first names and became a superstar. As the young writer who greets us at the start of Martin Sherman’s new play also makes clear, as far as he is concerned, Liberace’s refusal to acknowledge his homosexuality throughout his life was a betrayal of all those who were out and proud. His successful 1959 court victory over the Daily Mirror’s allusions to his sexuality is key to the writer’s contempt. Liberace’s death in 1987 from causes of AIDS with his gayness still unacknowledged fuels the writer’s ire even more.   As if accidentally summoning a genie, the writer’s angry ruminations about having to write about someone he hates prompts Liberace to swoop in from the heavens and grandstand his way into his affections. What follows in this production co directed by Pitlochry Festival Theatre artistic...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Five stars   The Club of the Unloved is already in full swing as the audience enter for this touring revival of Emma Rice’s twenty-first century reboot of the mediaeval love story that refuses to lie down. As Les Baxter’s lush lounge core sounds are swapped for Wagner on the vintage record player at the side of the stage, the mini mob of geeky ‘love spotters’ and the live junkyard band above them usher in a romp of all romps that turns to tragedy within a broken heartbeat.    In short, when John Leader’s French speaking knight has a dangerous liaison with Nandi Bhebe’s Irish princess Yseult after fetching her for Edward Rowe’s good King Mark following an altercation with her country's comedy gangster invaders, a heady brew of emotions burst forth. The ill fated pair cavort gymnastically throughout choreographer Etta Murfitt’s routines on a circular stage in Bill Mitchell’s original set design. Refreshed by Vicki Mortimer for this latest iteration...

Òran Mór, Glasgow  Three stars   When the Reverend John Home’s play, Douglas, first appeared in 1757, its romantic verse drama was a sensation. Arriving at the vanguard of the Scottish Enlightenment, Home’s play was hailed as the future by those hanging on to its commercial coat tails, while at the same time outraging those who saw any theatre at all as the Devil’s work.    Probably Douglas’s greatest gift to popular culture is the phrase called out by a fired-up audience member that gives Brian Logan’s new play its title. Several centuries on, history has largely forgotten Home’s opus, with the last professional Scottish production dating back to 1989, when Robert David MacDonald directed it at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre.    This is a useful marker for Logan’s back stage romp, which charts Douglas’s irresistible rise through the eyes of Home, his play’s champions who think they are about to hit the big time, and the naysayers who effectively had him chucke...

Perth Theatre Four stars   The writing is on the wall for Alanah, the sparky young woman in Matthew McVarish’s solo play, receiving its first revival since it was seen in 2012. Alanah is living the high life after a fashion, that fashion being in a twenty-storey tower block  in a concrete jungle where she moved when her husband dumped her after just three months of wedded bliss.    That was after Alanah dropped out of uni and pretty much everything else besides to make someone else’s dreams come true. Now she’s chief bridesmaid for her neurotic best mate Zoe’s forthcoming nuptials while holding down a job in the family planning drop in centre. Other people’s private lives, it seems, are demanding her attention at the expense of anything resembling a life of her own.     Just to cap things off, some would-be street poet has started graffitiing bon mots on the wall next to the lift. The fact that she can trace each phrase back to things said to her ...

The Pavilion, Glasgow Four stars   Once upon a time, history books were full of heroes, who helped sex up the humdrum realpolitik of what actually happened enough to bring it off the page and into the hearts and minds of those who might be led to take sides. So it goes with the much lauded story of William Wallace, Scottish knight, scourge of English marauders and, in Mel Gibson’s blue paint smeared eyes, Hollywood’s idea of a nation’s saviour.    Writer Rob Drummond and composer/lyricist Dave Hook take a different approach in this scaled up hip hop take on Wallace, developed out of its bite size original that first appeared at A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s lunchtime theatre initiative in 2025. Back then, it was done as a three-way pub debate between a Scotsman, a Wummin and a Sassenach. This time out there are six people in Orla O’Loughlin’s production for the Raw Material company, which takes place on Neil Haynes’ set of steps that looks somewhere between the epic courtroo...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Five stars   When a half buried Winnie asks a barely visible Willie if he still finds her loveable mid way through the first act of Samuel Beckett’s tragicomic study of still lives, it as if they are on a second honeymoon. As Winnie attempts in vain to rekindle lost passions that long gave way to the daily torpor of their routines, Willie can only hide behind a newspaper to barricade himself from her incessant chatter. In her attempts to find some kind of spark, Winnie’s free associating babble flits between everyday mundanities and half remembered moments that defined the way things once were. Unable to spell out her inner yearning, she is literally being buried alive, swamped by the sands of time as the pair go on living apart together.    Siobhán  Redmond captures the full brittleness of Winnie’s desperation as she  comes to life on designer Emma Bailey’s sand hill set in Roxana Silbert’s pitch perfect production. All dressed up in ...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   You never met bored teenagers quite like Antigone and Ismene, the two self-mythologising sisters at the centre of Lulu Raczka’s audacious twenty-first century reboot of Sophocles’ Ancient Greek classic. First seen in 2020, Raczka’s reimagining of the original is revived here by director Finn den Hertog in an appropriately bold production that sees Eilidh Loan and Holly Howden Gilchrist bring the two girls to life in devastating and dervish-like fashion.    Stuck in their living room and caught in the crossfire of the epic family fallout turned civil war the play is hinged upon, Loan’s Antigone and Howden Gilchrst’s Ismene play at being wannabe grown ups in a sleepover like scenario. Sex, booze, older men and all the other things they can only pretend about are all on the agenda before they end up doing karaoke instead of actually indulging in such japes.    It is Antigone’s attitude problem that does for them, as she makes out ...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   Some stories should never be told. This is made clear by matriarch Marion in Izzy Gray’s new play for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s autumn season of lunchtime theatre. Given the Orkney set backdrop of Gray’s drama, one might say secrets revealed here are best left buried at sea.    So it goes with Marion, Elsie and Bess, three of the women left behind in the seaport of Hamvenroe - the ancient Viking name of what is now Stromness - when their men folk disappear for months on end on whaling expeditions. As the trio go on with the daily grind despite the absence, a communal anxiety simmers to the surface. Beyond it, unexplained mysteries on their own doorstep have a seismic effect that erupts into view, only for it to die down once more in a conspiracy of silence, as if nothing ever happened.    There is a brooding fire of unspoken dissent at the heart of Gray’s play, written in a rich Orcadian Scots that in the mouths of the three women...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   When Taylor Swift released her epic 2025 single, The Fate of Ophelia, it possibly did more to introduce the work of William Shakespeare to Swift’s school age audience than an entire term of English Lit classes. One suspects something similar has occurred with the History syllabus over the last decade since Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s poptastic celebration of Henry VIII’s six wives was performed by a bunch of Cambridge undergraduates on the 2017 Edinburgh Festival Fringe before conquering the world.    The premise is simple. Each of Henry’s exes who have been magicked together like a manufactured girl band from the grave take it in turns to tell the story of their respective wedded bliss with the king in a bid to prove who was the best queen, divorces, beheading or plain old everyday deaths notwithstanding.    The first of two sextets for this latest tour already look and sound like a stadium-sized headline act in Moss and...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars In every dream home there is heartache for the couple at the centre of Amy Conway’s play, the latest in A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s current season of lunchtime theatre. Henry is almost caught with his pants down when the buzzer goes at the door of his flat, but it’s nothing compared to what happens next.    The woman at the door may look like the spitting image of Henry’s ex girlfriend Liz, but behind the belted raincoat and the hyper efficient persona is the sort of all access dream girl that initially at least seems even better than the real thing. When things don’t go to programme, however, Henry’s actions are a whole lot more extreme than simply pulling the plug. And when the buzzer goes again, reality bites in disturbingly similar ways in the flesh.    The all-encroaching rise of AI is very much on the agenda just now, as it has been long before science fiction became fact. The humanisation and sexualisation of robots too has bee...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   Life takes two people by surprise in this debut work by LC Stephens for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest lunchtime theatre season. Stephens’s play focuses on Clare and Barry, habitués of Glasgow’s West End who find themselves in the same student friendly boozer one night trying to offload their respective baggage to each of their ill suited companions. Through a series of alternating monologues, we discover that both Clare and Barry’s worlds have been turned upside down by very different matters of life and death. We also learn that both parties feel like bit part players in their own story to the point of invisibility. Oh, and as Barry realises, even if Clare doesn’t, they already have history with each other.    There is a lovely sense of everyday mid life longing in Stephens’ script, brought charmingly and wittily to life in Graham McLaren’s elegant production on Gillian Argo’s simple but effective tables and chairs set. This is ide...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars   Matthew Zajac’s now almost twenty-year-old solo play has had a journey almost as remarkable as its subject matter. Opening for previews in Glasgow’s now long lost Arches venue back in 2008 prior to a successful Edinburgh Festival Fringe run, Zajac’s autobiographical tale of his father’s flight from his homeland in the then Polish area of Galicia and everything that followed has travelled the world several times over.   This latest tour of Scotland is the biggest for some time, and chimes with the publication of a new edition of Zajac’s play that also charts his own quest to find his roots. The result in this revival of Ben Harrison’s production for the Highland based Dogstar Theatre Company is a show that retains its original intimacy as it explores Zajac’s deeply personal story about fathers and sons. Through this backdrop it becomes a far bigger universal tale that lays bare the unintended consequences of war in terms of migration...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Five stars   Imagine a world where truth doesn’t matter anymore. Then imagine someone who held on to old truths is spied on, hounded and tortured until they kow-tow to the official version and fall in line with everyone else. Welcome to Chris Hannan’s searing new stage version of George Orwell’s visionary novel, which sets out its dystopian store with major resonances of so called democracy now in terms of how dissent on all sides is dealt with.    From the opening bombardment of electronic noise, Dominic Hill’s production brings home the mix of mundanity and terror in Hannan’s adaptation. This comes in the regulation utilitarian blue uniforms worn by Winston Smith and his regimented peers as much as it does from Winston’s final submission to the system following a relentless series of rapid-fire torture scenes. In-between comes the frightening realities of masked men turning up at meetings to remove deviants, and the collective release of a bayi...

Òran Mór, Glasgow  Three stars   The double edged sword in the title of Éimi Quinn’s new comedy gradually becomes apparent through the three women at the heart of this opening salvo from A Play, a Pie and Pint’s latest season of lunchtime theatre. Set in the pungently scented lift of a Glasgow high rise, the play pits Lauren as our guide and narrator as she introduces us to her neighbours while preparing for a hen do with her pals.    First up is Pat, who’s been in the block for years, and has an opinion on everyone and everything. Behind her potty-mouthed pontificating, Pat has something precious in her bag she carries with her all the time. Then there is Aaliyah, a heavily pregnant Mother Earth migrant whose devotion to her offspring inspires Lauren to keep an ever-expanding list of exactly why motherhood isn’t for her.    Lauren says she wants a quiet life, though her PVC outfit and the bottles of sticky blue booze she necks beg to differ. As Lauren does...

Dundee Rep Five stars   Like a Busby Berkeley of the Barras, Tony Roper knows how to make a memorable routine. This is why his comic masterpiece set in a 1950s Glasgow washhouse on Hogmanay where four working class women banter the night away has survived almost forty years and umpteen productions since it first appeared in 1987. Since then, it has become a bona fide contemporary classic, with bums on seats guaranteed wherever it plays.    So it goes in this big new touring production led by cast member Louise McCarthy and Ryan Alexander Dewar’s Rerr Terr company in association with Neil Laidlaw Productions, Selladoor and Dundee Rep. With Roper back in the director’s chair, it isn’t hard to see why his celebration of women, community and the collective power of both retains its rapport with audiences, many of whom are likely to be as familiar with the play as the brilliant cast are here.    One mention of Galloway’s mince by old Mrs Culfeathers is enough to sign...

Royal Lyceum Theatre Four stars    The drums beat loud in this mighty rendering of a 14th century epic Middle Eastern narrative poem. Passed down the centuries in various guises, it is reimagined here from a Syrian version by Palestinian writer/director Bashar Murkus and dramaturg Khulood Basel of their Haifa based Khashabi Theatre. With the seven performers already on stage and welcoming audiences as they arrive, the result over the next life affirming three hours is a gorgeous mash-up of storytelling, dance and a wonderful live score led by drummer Rami Nakhleh and singers Rana Baransi and Abed Zoabi.    The story they tell in Arabic with English surtitles - The Epic of Bani Hilal  or السّيرة الهلاليّ - is an awfully big adventure that takes in battles of love, war and an eternal quest for new lands to call home. Out of this comes a contrary beauty that comes from a joyful and playful delivery by the cast as they act out each chapter o...

King’s Theatre Four stars    Roll up! Roll up! America may not be the greatest show on earth in Geoff Sobelle’s tragicomic depiction of a big top in free fall, but oh, what a night. The acrobats have somersaulted off into the distance, the ringmaster has gone west, and with only the clowns left behind and left to their own devices, the lunatics appear to have take over the asylum, But at least they have an audience, so of course they’ll provide the entertainment, albeit in all its shambolic, falling apart glory.    There’s nothing subtle in Sobelle’s latest work, an Edinburgh International Festival commission following the American physical auteur’s previous visits in 2018 with HOME and 2023 with FOOD. What there is in Clown Show’s 100-minute construction is a meticulously madcap series of ensemble routines that take familiar gags only to upend them beyond the regular pratfalls to self destruct on a grand scale.  Lined up in search of approval from the lifesize ...