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Showing posts with the label Theatre - Review

…Earnest?

King’s Theatre, Glasgow  Four stars   The irresistible rise of theatre built on the premise of dramatic calamity both on and back stage has come a long way since it was arguably spawned by Michael Frayn’s ingenious 1982 farce, Noises Off. Since then, the likes of the tellingly named The Play that Goes Wrong has seen a younger generation of artists take what was once a fringe pursuit into the theatrical mainstream.    So it goes as well for the Say it Again, Sorry? company, whose starting point may be Oscar Wilde’s subversive drawing room comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest, but who manage to disrupt it with the sort of anarchic intent that might appeal to dear Oscar himself.   All seems well at first in what looks like a decidedly old school wheeze, as man about town Algernon awaits a visitation from his chum Ernest. When his arrival is announced, alas, his absence is more akin to Waiting for Godot. This prompts an intervention from the show’s director, who ...

Mistero Buffo

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars    When radical Italian farceur Dario Fo first performed his scurrilous solo take on biblically inspired yarns penned with Franca Rame back in 1969, revolution was in the air and the peasants were revolting against pretty much anything that was going. A 1970s TV production of Rame and Fo’s play even prompted the Vatican to take a dive into arts criticism when they dubbed it ‘the most blasphemous play in the history of television’.   When the late Robbie Coltrane took to the stage in 1990 with Joseph Farrell’s translation, Rame and Fo’s comic theological riffs were as damning of assorted establishments as ever. Three and a half decades on again, as Farrell’s new Scots version is brought to turbo charged life in this week’s edition of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest season of lunchtime theatre, not much has changed. Nevertheless, Lawrence Boothman’s rude intrusion as an anarchist on the run from the rioting outside the theatre he is seeki...

LIFE

The Studio, Edinburgh Three stars   Art, life, and the blurring between the two are at the heart of Maria MacDonell’s play, in which MacDonell plays Estelle, a model at a life drawing class run by The Artist. He is the sort of pompous ass whose grand statements seem to have stepped out of the 1950s. As he waits for Estelle, some of the audience sit at easels on the stage as surrogate class members, while those in regular seats are similarly given pencil and paper to sketch out their impressions if they wish.    Only when Estelle arrives does The Artist’s high theory open up into flesh and blood material, as Estelle’s personal archive becomes crucial to her own art. This makes for an impressionistic and abstract self-portrait of bodies, ageing and a life that was once a blank canvas that has become shaded in by a life of incident and colour.    Not since Jacques Rivette’s 1991 film, La Belle Noiseuse, has the relationship between maestro and muse been so exposed,...

In Other Words

The Studio, Edinburgh Four stars   When Arthur met Jane, it was love at first spillage. In a crowded bar accidentally serenaded by a Frank Sinatra soundtrack, the red wine might have stained, but the merry dance the couple in waiting stepped out into was all part of Arthur’s plan. A lifetime and the onset of dementia later, alas, Arthur and Jane may sit next to each other like bookends, but Arthur can barely remember either of their names. As soon as their song comes on, however, they are loving each other to the moon and back once more.    Matthew Seager’s beautifully realised two-hander tackles the cruellest of illnesses and the redemptive power of music in exquisitely intimate fashion. Performed by Seager himself as Arthur and Lydia White stepping into Jane’s shoes, the power of Andy Routledge’s production comes in its quiet understatement. As Arthur becomes increasingly dependent on Jane, Jane is overwhelmed by a life she never planned. As Seager and White step out of...

Moulin Rouge! The Musical

The Playhouse, Edinburgh  Four stars   When Baz Luhrmann made Moulin Rouge in 2001, the last of the Australian auteur’s ‘Red Curtain Trilogy’ after Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet was an audacious fusion of turn of the nineteenth century Paris-by-night bohemianism and contemporary pop bangers. This made for the ultimate backstage musical. Almost a quarter of a century on, director Alex Timbers and writer John Logan’s delirious stage mash up has become a global sensation. First performed in 2018, productions in New York, London and Melbourne are still running, with the show’s first world tour opening in Edinburgh where it is in residence for the next six weeks.   This extensive back-story only goes some way to introduce the sheer scale, ambition and outrageous excess of the three hyperactive hours of  breathless spectacle that is the result. If plot is what you’re after, Logan’s book stays faithful to the film, as American dreamer in search of a scene Christ...

Doubt: A Parable

Dundee Rep Four stars   Faith and belief are at the heart of John Patrick Shanley’s 2004 play, seen here for the first time in Scotland since 2010. Set in a Catholic school in the Bronx district of New York in 1964, Shanley’s play pointedly frames itself a year after the assassination of President John F Kennedy. This is highlighted in an opening sermon by the progressive Father Flynn, who questions putting what is sometimes blind faith in old certainties.    This is a red rag for Sister Aloysius, who rules the school with a tight-lipped authoritarianism that won’t allow room for any new ways of thinking, whatever Vatican 2 might say. This leads her to embark on a campaign against Father Flynn with the intent of ousting him from office. To do this, she manipulates her young charge Sister James into reluctant complicity with her damning claims regarding Father Flynn’s alleged conduct before what is effectively a trial by hearsay ensues.   This makes for an intense nin...

Restless Natives: The Musical

Perth Theatre Four stars   Life’s a joke for Will and Ronnie at the start of this brand new stage version of Ninian Dunnett, Michael Hoffman and Andy Paterson’s 1985 big screen curio, which rode the wave of post Gregory’s Girl Scottish whimsy with an Edinburgh world view that was a gift to tourist board types.    While neglected at the time of the film’s release, forty years on, the whimsy is still intact, but there is a whole lot more going on besides, as the trio reposition their film as a feelgood musical with a higher purpose. Heroes don’t wear capes here, but, as with the film, sport clown and wolfman masks instead, as Will and Ronnie make the move from not so merry pranksters to dandy highwaymen.    On the run from their back street roots to hold up the highland tourist buses, the pair become international legends en route. As Will finds romance in the arms of tourist guide Margot, Ronnie falls in with a bad crowd of comedy gangsters who seem to have stepp...

Nun of Your Business

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars    “A young man in his underpants is not a good look in the Catholic Church.” So goes one of Mammy Superior’s brand spanking new set of commandments down at St. Boaby’s on the Knob. The gift shop isn’t exactly doing a roaring trade under the watchful eye of this holier than thou demagogue and her frisky underling Sister Mary Mary. With the Cambuslang Cat Burglar on the prowl, the Old Relic of St. Boaby’s seemingly easy pickings, and Mammy Superior’s sights set on the Vatican, it’s only a matter of time until someone is crucified for their sins.    The Lord moves in mysterious ways in James Peake’s riotous new comedy for Oran Mor’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint season of lunchtime theatre. No sooner is a scurrilous nun-based post Easter farce programmed before real life events in Rome intervene, with the script requiring a couple of respectful tweaks lest assorted plagues fall down on the former church venue.    If such incidents reca...

Frankie Stein

Lochgelly Centre Three stars     When twenty-year-old Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818, little did she realise the enduring scale of the monster she had just spawned. More than two hundred years on from what is regarded as the first science fiction novel, writer Julia Taudevin has drawn inspiration from Shelley’s story and dragged it firmly into the twenty-first century.    Taudevin’s title character is a machine age product of TechBro, the near future’s all consuming conglomerate on a mission to mass produce an army of robots programmed for your every need. Frankie, alas, has been set up to be more human than the real thing. This causes her to be rejected by the Bro-powers that be and left in a limbo with a group of fellow prototypes who similarly don’t compute.    This causes the emotionally charged humanoid to embark on a quest to meet her maker, who comes, not in the form of company man and possibly mad scientist Frank, but the more independe...

Jocasta

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars   Life is a curse for the street-smart queen with the messy domestic life in Nikki Kalkman’s reimagining of Greek mythology. Instead of simply bumping off her heroine after her incestuous affair with her more dramatised son, Kalkman has Jocasta arrive with a flourish as she attempts to gain an access all areas pass into the Underworld. Amidst designer Gillian Argo’s celestial looking array of curtains, Jocasta is forced to tell her story to the unseen godlike gatekeepers, purging her own demons as she goes.    As Jocasta offloads all, from one night stands with muscle-bound himbos to becoming an abused trophy bride at the hands of king Laius, where ‘the fingerprint of every day was bruises and boredom’, it is clear Jocasta has been damaged enough to warrant some kind of intervention. As she gets herself the ultimate toy boy to die for, alas, the sex may be great, but as the local gossips aren’t shy of pointing out, it’s complicated. ...

Calamity Jane

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh  Four stars    Don’t mess with Calamity Jane. If you do, you’re likely to be shot down in a dramatic standoff you’ll never win. This is as true of any attempt at reworking Charles K. Freeman’s 1961 stage version of David Butler’s 1953 James O’Hanlon scripted movie as it is of the gal herself. As unreconstructed as this rootin’, tootin’ yarn concerning tomboyish Jane’s getting of wisdom remains, Freeman’s play is as faithful to its big screen roots as the assorted brides at the end of the play are to their various beloveds who look like they finally struck gold.   All this is driven by composer Sammy Fain and lyricist Paul Francis Webster’s wagonload of showtunes that have become sing-along classics. This is evident from the opening moments of this touring revival of Nikolai Foster’s 2014 production, first seen at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury. As a grizzled old cowboy plucks out a few notes on a banjo, it immediately prompts the audi...

Ivor

Òran Mor, Glasgow Three stars   Birthday girl Scarlet is in for a big surprise when she goes home to mum Sarah for her twenty-first. The very special present waiting for her in Jennifer Adam’s new play for Òran Mor’s current A Play, a Pie and a Pint lunchtime theatre season turns out to be something pretty titanic. To say it wasn’t what Scarlet was expecting is something of an understatement, especially as an environmental activist with big plans of her own with her girlfriend and fellow agitator Judyth. To carry out those plans, however, Scarlet needs to get her hands on her inheritance left to her by her dad, who passed away fifteen years earlier. A somewhat large obstacle, alas, is preventing Scarlet from getting her hands on it. In an increasingly hothouse environment, things go into meltdown at every level.    Adam’s play merges the personal and the political just as it fuses everyday absurdism with social realist observation. This looks to the metaphorical ridiculou...

Through the Shortbread Tin

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Dead poets don’t always get second lives once they are lost to history. Once rediscovered and reclaimed, however, poetic license is up for grabs in a way where myth-making is often more interesting than the boring old truth.     So it goes with James Macpherson, the eighteenth century Scottish writer who caused a literary sensation with his apparent rediscovery of ancient Gaelic bard, Ossian. Trouble was, it was quickly debunked as fake news, with the artistic gatekeepers of the day led by Samuel Johnson dismissing Macpherson’s apparent exclusive as a hoax of the highest order.    This is the starting point for Martin O’Connor’s own dramatic poem that quickly goes way beyond Macpherson and Ossian’s place in Scotland’s cultural canon to a more personal reflection on what it means to be Scottish. In a landscape as kitsch as the tartan tat shop Emma Bailey’s set resembles, O’Connor explores his own family roots on the Isle of Lewis and t...

Nessie

The Studio, Edinburgh Three stars   Something is stirring in the depths of Loch Ness, and there’s a lot more making waves than the new hydroelectric plant that’s just opened in Shonagh Murray’s new family friendly musical. This is something would be junior marine biologist Mara finds out for herself when she discovers an entire community of little and not so little creatures hiding just below the surface where they deal with all the junk thrown into the water.    As well as a dam-building otter called Oggie and a friendly heron named Heather, there is a timorous beastie called Nessa, a one of a kind creation that evolution seems to have forgotten about as she finds shelter in increasingly stormy waters. While Mara’s mother Emma, an engineer at the plant, is forced to defend its workings in the face of nimbyish opposition, Mara’s school project sees her bullied by a boy named Ally. The tourist myth of the Loch Ness Monster, meanwhile, runs ever wilder in an alrea...

Little Women

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   To be young, female and with writerly intentions probably wasn’t easy in American Civil War era nineteenth century Massachusetts. This is partly why Louisa May Alcott’s much adapted semi autobiographical novel was so ahead of its time. Initially published in two parts in 1868 and 1869, Alcott’s rites of passage saga concerning four very different sisters as war rages elsewhere tapped into a radical need for women’s emancipation, literary or otherwise.    A love for Alcott’s story concerning the growing pains of Jo, Meg, Amy and Beth March is palpable at the start of Anne-Marie Casey’s adaptation, directed here by Loveday Ingram. As the girls huddle around Jo’s writing desk at the corner of Ruari Murchison’s tree lined set, this is Jo writing her way into her life. Surrounded by a mix of the natural and domestic worlds and bathed in the corn coloured glow of Mike Robertson’s lighting, it is through the subsequent loves and losses th...

An Inspector Calls

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Five stars   The sirens that usher in this latest revival of Stephen Daldry’s epoch making reimagining of J.B. Priestley’s drawing room skewering of the monied classes speaks volumes about what follows. Written at the end of the Second World War and set two years before the First, Priestley’s play took the whodunnit formula and gave it a social conscience that Daldry’s production explodes into view.   At the heart of this is Inspector Goole, who gatecrashes the fancy dinner held by factory owning industrialist Arthur Birling to celebrate his daughter Sheila’s forthcoming nuptials with the equally well-heeled Gerald Croft. Birling’s feckless dipso son Eric is also in attendance, with queen bee Sybil set to make her entrance.    Goole arrives with news of the death of a young woman called Eva Smith. This may have been by her own hand, but as her assorted circumstances are laid bare, the Birlings appear to be complicit in her demise en masse. It ...

The Kelton Hill Fair

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars    Teenage Flo has been brought before her social worker and a policeman to find out why she hit her teacher. Flo is in care, her best friend has died, and she writes stories to help her survive. When a mysterious figure wielding a guitar appears and encourages Flo to take charge of her life and live it on her own terms, the sanctuary she finds when she runs away isn’t always what it seems.    As opening gambits go, one might be forgiven for presuming Robbie Gordon and Jack Nurse’s new play for their Wonder Fools company to be an exercise in everyday social realism. Instead, while Flo’s traumas are explored, Nurse’s production takes a more fantastical turn, as Flo ends up at a kind of fantasy dinner party with historical figures after stumbling on a Shangri-la of sorts in the hills of Dumfries and Galloway.   The fair on Kelton Hill is occupied by serial killer William Hare, vainglorious national bard Robert Burns, and feminist f...

War Horse

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Five stars   Almost two decades have passed since the National Theatre of Great Britain’s monumental staging of Michael Morpurgo’s anti war novel first galloped into life in a heroic co-production with South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company. Since then, the horrors of battle Morpurgo depicts have become ever more pronounced, even without the horses forced to lead the charge as they were in the First World War that ripped the world asunder several times over.    At the heart of this, of course, is Joey, the horse bought at market in rural Devon, and who becomes young Albert’s best friend before being sold off to the army and ending up on the frontline with a million others. Essentially what follows is a story of the bond between a boy and his horse. Beyond this, its epic rendering says something about holding on to some kind of belief system even as the bombs fall. The interplay between Joey and Tom Sturgess as Albert is genuinely moving to witness...

Wild Rose

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars    When Dawn Sievewright stands at the front of an empty stage wielding a guitar at the end of Nicole Taylor’s stage version of her Tom Harper directed hit 2018 film, it doesn’t matter whether she is acting anymore. For the previous two and a half hours Sievewright has owned the Lyceum stage as Rose-Lynn Harlan, the big city girl with a tragic back-story and a dream of becoming a Country music star in Nashville. As she sings a heart rending version of Glasgow (No Place Like Home), the only song especially composed for the film, Sievewright transcends any fictional rendition to become the star Rose-Lynn so aspired to be.   Sievewright provides the heart and soul of John Tiffany’s all singing, all-dancing production, and is one of the many magnificent things about it. From the moment Rose-Lynn prepares to leave prison accompanied by a foot-tapping ensemble rendition of Primal Scream’s Country Girl onwards, Taylor, Tiffany and ...

The Land That Never Was

The Studio, Edinburgh Three stars   Wanna' buy a bridge? Maybe later, but before we begin, a history lesson. Between 1820 and 1837, a Scottish soldier called Gregor MacGregor fairly successfully attempted to get hundreds of believers to invest in a country in Central America he claimed to rule called Poyais. When those who bought into MacGregor’s promised land sailed out to embrace their new homestead, alas, they found only uninhabitable jungle. Or so we’re led to believe.    Such a back story is about as true to life as it gets in Liam Rees’s solo show, in which he explores our willingness to suspend disbelief and put our faith in pretty much anything a smart talking huckster like MacGregor can offload, however non-existent it might be. Rees does this in an affable mix of pop history lecture and shaggy dog stand-up routine, in which he double bluffs the audience with geeky charm, only to bamboozle them with what may or may not be details of his own personal history. He t...