Coffee-Table Notes

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 ...

Church Hill Theatre Four stars    The title of Greek auteur Mario Banushi’s devastating meditation on death, family and the baggage left behind comes from the Albanian restaurant his father ran, and which translates as Restaurant of Kindness. Kindness isn’t the first thing that comes to mind in the 70 minutes that follow, as Banushi lays bare the agony of a family’s grief in a series of set-pieces that become increasingly ritualistic.   On designer Sotiris Melan os’ tiled wall set, Banushi steps out of the shower having cleansed his sins for a funeral. Once suited and booted, he sits beside a row of grieving women. This is heightened by the remarkable singing voice of Savina Yannatou, whose improvised lament is a wracked howl that at points sounds drawn from the same guttural well as Greek/American virtuoso, Diamanda Galas.   A jacket torn from the earth where the body is buried hangs on the back of a chair. One of the women who has just attempted to f...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow  Four stars    Darkness becomes Gina Gionfriddo’s new stage version of Thomas’ Harris’ 1988 novel. The second in the author’s Hannibal Lecter quartet saw the most erudite of incarcerated cannibals gnaw his way into mass consciousness by way of Jonathan Demme’s 1991 film version. More than three decades on, Gionfriddo returns to the book to pick over the horrors anew. The fact that Lecter isn’t the villain of the piece but its conscience speaks volumes about the age in which he was sired.    In Harris’ tale of rookie FBI agent Clarice Starling’s search for a serial killer nicknamed Buffalo Bill who skins his victims, we enter a 1980s where the fallout of therapy culture has left a lot of psychological damage in its wake.    In Nikolai Foster’s touring production that began life at the Curve Theatre Leicester, John Partridge’s Lecter may initially lack charm as he is wheeled on like some caged exhibit, but his dangerous presen...

The Studio Four stars    Something is cooking in Jaha Koo’s culinary dissection of exile, and it smells very much like home. For Koo, this means South Korea by way of Berlin, Brussels and beyond. Scenes of dancing neon on the roads and in the skyscrapers are projected on to a triangular tent construction that Koo eventually unfolds to build a pojangmacha, a portable street food stand that becomes Koo’s stage, kitchen and sanctuary.    Grabbing a couple of audience members from the front row à la 1970s TV cookery show The Galloping Gourmet, Koo proceeds to cook and feed them several courses of Korean delicacies. As he does so, a memoir of Koo’s very personal journey unfolds, taking in conflicts local and global en route to finding his way back to a very different South Korea.    In what is already a bittersweet taster, Koo’s story is helped along, first by a snail, then by a gummy bear, and finally by an electric eel. These all appear in animated form on scr...

Scottish Parliament Four stars   A winter coat and a kept promise isn’t too much to ask for in this theatrical installation that looks at the iniquities of the care system through the voices and experiences of those who have been through it. The National Theatre of Scotland’s main contribution to Edinburgh’s festivals season is an interactive critique of a failed system which isn’t looking like it’s going to get better any time soon.   An initiative led and scripted by playwright Nicola McCartney, One Hundred Voices forms part of Caring Scotland, a three-year listening project that has recorded and documented the experiences of Care Experienced people across the country. From this premise, audiences are navigated through an audio-visual tour of the care system in all its institutional messiness. Our guide - officially, at least - is Brian, an industry professional who does things by the book. Brian speaks to us through headphones, and is assisted - unofficially - by Kayla, who...

Assembly George Square  Four stars    Liane is angry in Corinne Salisbury’s new solo play, which looks at the murky extremes of what we now call toxic masculinity. Liane’s anger is understandable. One minute she’s taking a walk in the park after her Pilates class and trying to figure out how her primary school age daughter can deal with playground bully boys. The next she’s fending off the overtures of a fedora sporting stranger in broad daylight. Once she starts digging, the man who accosted her turns out to have a very disturbing history approaching women uninvited. Even worse, he’s not alone in his everyday abuse, but is part of an organised alliance that plans their moves and shares their every action.   One of Liane’s responses to this in Salisbury’s punchy monologue is to enrol her and her daughter Molly in a boxing class run by her brother’s ex, Nathalie. Forming an alliance with Molly’s best friend’s mum Angela, the trio become a force to be reckoned with as ...

Royal Lyceum Theatre Four stars.     The strange fruit is already hanging when the curtain slowly rises on Zora Howard’s devastating play to reveal three black men lined up close like pretty maids in a row. With their hands tied behind their backs and their legs dangling above a tree trunk like plinth, the extended silence that accompanies the presence of this seemingly unconscious trio allows to sink in exactly what we are witnessing.    As the men come awake, the double edged sword of the play’s title becomes clear as Slim, Blood and Bird bicker, banter and sing the dirtiest blues before they contort in pain as invisible nooses tighten, and the same routine repeats ad nauseam.    The three men, of course, are the symbolic victims of assorted assaults on .black community down the ages. And in Howard’s own production for the New York based Flea Theater, they are sentenced to some Beckettian limbo as they are given voice inbetween the agony.  ...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   Happy families aren’t exactly in abundance in this long overdue revival of Iain Heggie’s care home set play, which sees ageing matriarch Andrene wheeled hither and thither in her confused search for a way out. Instead, what we get is the darkest of Joe Orton style sit-coms that sees Andrene doted on by nurse Larry, only for her errant son Derek and his gobby new girlfriend Kath to turn up. With Andrene’s fortune up for grabs, Larry and Derek have some unfinished business of their own, which at least one of them is about to pay for.    Twenty-five years after Heggie’s play first appeared at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, Sam Hardie’s studio production for Pitlochry Festival Theatre brings this freshly rewritten version to life in slow burning and forensic fashion. This doesn’t take away the intermittent hilarity of Heggie’s meticulously constructed farce, but also highlights some of the bleakness of the situation Derek especially...

Zoo Playground Four stars The walls are closing in and the roof is falling down on Cynthia and Gilberto, the bickering couple at the heart of Dante Passarelli’s claustrophobic little play. In the gloom of their spartan apartment, the pipes are gurgling and the entire place is creaking. The entire building sounds like it is on borrowed time and could collapse any second. This would be a blessing to the property developers who are hemming in Cynthia and Gilberto with the shiny new monoliths being built around them. It would also save on demolition costs. For Cynthia and Gilberto, however, this is home, even if the woman upstairs looks set to create an accidental flood by keeping her taps on.    This is a gloriously manic piece of grotesquery by Passarelli, who co-directs with Fernanda Zancopé for this production by Brazil’s Manás Theatre Lab. Part of this year’s Sao Paolo Showcase, this is performed in Portuguese with English surtitles projected onto the sickly coloure...

Traverse @ Lyceum Studio Four stars   Paul Ready’s new solo work ends as it begins, as a talking point concerning a matter of life and death. With the audience sat in a circle in the harsh light of the Lyceum rehearsal room, Ready stands at the centre, his unnamed character dressed in a city boy suit that belies his gentle delivery. He could be about to do a TED talk or some ghastly presentation illustrated with slides and whatever the digital equivalent of flip charts might be. As it is, as he paces, he is preparing to give a eulogy to his best friend Richard, who died drowning.    As we are told, Ready’s character and Richard had been inseparable ever since they were kids, and if things had turned out differently, they would have likely seen out their dotage together. Somewhere along the way, however, the world changed, and what for Ready’s character was a life of aspiration and acquisition, for Richard became one of opposition as he tried to save the planet. With moral...

The Studio Four stars   Hollywood might have ended up a very different place if America’s House Un-American Activities Committee hadn’t assured everyone they accused of being communists was blacklisted. One of those questioned by the committee was Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright who had already been in exile since he left Germany in 1933 as the rise of the Nazis left his politically charged work somewhat out of goosestep.    Having only been in America for a year when he appeared before the HUAC in 1947, he left the country the day after and eventually went back to East Germany, where he founded the Berliner Ensemble. As with other great drama created by HUAC hounded artists, such unintended consequences can create great accidental legacies.    Brecht’s exile and his appearance before the committee are the starting point for this intense construction by Lebanese artistic duo Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué. Presented alongside pianist Henrik Kair...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   The world doesn’t end in Oliver Emanuel’s play, but sometimes that’s how it feels. Over its bite-size 70-minute duration, Emanuel’s play is a living monument that preserves the emotional paper trails that chart the magic moments of people’s lives. Originally seen in a studio based version in 2024, the play charts the love affair of two people, played here by Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson, who become arbiters of something eternal that came in the shape of this play.    He is a terminal adolescent who’s just been chucked hard enough to provoke him to spend his nights playing Radiohead at full blast. She is living next door, and puts a postcard through his letterbox to ask him to turn that racket down. When they meet, the rest is history. As we watch them relive their life together, that history is barely contained in a box of old tickets, receipts, a jar of confetti and magical origami creations.    The play was wr...

King’s Theatre, Five stars   America is sick in Tony Kushner’s epic evocation of the rise of AIDS and its political fallout in what eventually becomes a visionary hymn of hope. Thirty-four years since Kushner’s two-part magical realist fantasia first appeared, the world has changed and changed again in radical fashion, with sex in the city a very different proposition these days and big pharma ramping up the prices of life saving medication.    Despite the play’s 1980s setting, Ivo van Hove’s International Theater Amsterdam revival of a production first seen in 2008 nevertheless reads like a tragicomic state of the nation prophecy of today’s increasingly dark times and how we got here. An early riff between one of the play’s key couples lays out the 57 varieties of migrant that make up the American diaspora, with the near five hour performance being played in Dutch adding to the international melting pot.    Shortened from the play’s original seve...

Dovecot Four stars    Jack Ellis was a teenage schoolboy when he first stumbled on the masterpieces of Vincent Van Gogh. This came after he was banished to the library by his art teacher after talking too much in class. This happy accident has stayed with Ellis for life, to the extent that he now lives in Arles, the South of France haven where in 1888 the Dutch master attempted to gather together like minds to form a brotherhood of artists. Only Paul Gauguin, alas, turned up to the party. As these two very different but equally driven artistic personalities spent the next nine weeks making work, this was where the fun began.    Ellis relates his very personal history of Van Gogh and Gauguin’s time in Arles in a script and production concocted with Edinburgh Fringe veteran John Retallack. As the audience lend their ears, Ellis relates the story in a conversational style that sees him slip in and out of character as both artists.    Crucial to the production ...

Assembly Roxy Three stars    Paradise, as is the case in Jack McGregor’s new play, isn’t half as nice as advertised. This is something scientist Kerris discovers first hand while on a research trip to a forgotten British outpost somewhere in the South Pacific. Arriving on the island of Saint John - population 48 - Kerris is taken under the wing of local man Joe, with the only fun in town seeming to be singing at the nightly religious service.    As the audaciously redrafted bible Kerris finds in her room indicates, there’s a lot more going on here than the apparent idyll indicates. With talk of a mysterious prophet laying down the law, Kerris’ private investigations reveal her own vague connection to the history of Saint John. When she comes face to face with this would-be new messiah, anyone who’s ever watched any of the multitude of documentaries on religious cults can guess how things pan out.    Jumping between Kerris’ time on the island and her at...

Scottish Storytelling Centre Four stars    Meet Bonnie. Bonnie’s the Scottish lassie in the tracky top who’s just slunk on stage to say hi - well, awright, actually - and looks like she’s got something else to say besides. Over the next 75 minutes of Fraser Scott’s solo play, Bonnie tells all  about who she is and where she comes from. More importantly, she says it in her own accent. It’s the one she learnt growing up with her Papa, and it’s the one the posh kids laugh at and the Americans treat as a novelty. As she learns along the way, however, it is the only voice she’s got, and  if you’ve got it, flaunt it.   As brought to life by a magnificent Olivia Caw, Bonnie is a whirlwind of working class Scottish self-determination. In-between learning about what words are worth on bookshelves in other places at university, Bonnie gives the audience a few lessons in the power of saying some of the choicest words with a Scots accent, and how their meanings can change a...

Summerhall Four stars    In a world full of heroes, sometimes it is the forgotten ones who are worth unearthing most of all. So it goes with Matthew Webb, the Shropshire born Victorian seaman who became the first man to swim the English Channel. Adam Riches here takes a deep dive into Webb’s life as seen through the eyes of Webb’s trainer and swimming champion, Fred Beckwith.    With the shrouded body of Webb sitting centre stage, Beckwith gives what is effectively an extended eulogy to his former charge, with the audience mourners at his wake. In Riches' rendition, this becomes a legendary yarn of such largesse as to elevate him to the sort of grand old man of the sea who might occupy a story by Herman Melville.    Riches has channeled a tale of rivalry and failure, and of one man’s sheer determination in the face of public ridicule to achieve what was once thought impossible, or else die trying. This is offset by a comic swagger from Riches, who gets...