Coffee-Table Notes

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...

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...

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 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...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four stars   Down by the docks they’re talking tough in James Graham’s stage adaptation of Alan Bleasdale’s classic twentieth century TV drama. For the unlikely Liverpool lads thrown on the scrap heap in the thick of 1980s Thatcher’s Britain, all that talk won’t pay their rent or feed their kids. As each man moves from dole office to cash in hand desperation to an increasingly volatile home life, the Kafkaesque absurdities of the dole office ‘sniffers’ become the enemy.    Licking their wounds from the disaster of a get rich quick job a year ago, Chrissie, Loggo, Yosser, George, Dixie and Dixie’s son Kevin’s lives collapse like the wall on the dodgy building site that kills old George’s political firebrand son Snowy. Beyond ideology, the survivors are felled by a kind of collective emasculation.   While Graham’s script remains faithful to Bleasdale’s original, Kate Wasserberg’s production steps out of its naturalistic roots with a series of the...

The Pavilion, Glasgow Four stars   American dreams don’t come much more broken in Arthur Miller’s slow burning 1949 tragedy, brought to life here in Andy Arnold’s mighty production, led by a towering performance from David Hayman at its centre.    Hayman is Willy Loman, the veteran salesman as past his sell by date as some of the wares he’s been hawking for more years than he can remember. Where once he was apparently a hot shot, charming the buyers in Boston and beyond, now he can barely earn enough to pay off all the things he and his wife Linda have bought into. This built in obsolescence of a clapped out fridge and other domestic goods becomes a symbol of the ruthless disposability of consumer capitalism. Willy may be over the hill, but next year’s model will be along any second.    Throw in the terminal underachievement of Willy and his wife Linda’s two sons, Happy and Biff, the missed opportunities with his brother Ben, and the guilt of being caught out in...

Perth Theatre Four stars   When D.H. Lawrence wrote his novel The Rainbow in 1915, his tale of three generations of working class lives saw it hauled before the courts on obscenity charges. More than a thousand copies of the book were burnt, rendering it unavailable in the UK for eleven years in an early example of cancel culture.   Given such an extreme response, one can only speculate what cultural gatekeepers might have made of writer Nicola Werenowska and director Jo Newman’s audacious new stage version, which rips into Lawrence’s story to focus on the three women at its heart.   Lydia is the widowed Polish refugee who lands in rural mid nineteenth century Nottinghamshire where she marries Tom, sevral years her junior. Anna, Lydia’s daughter from her first marriage, inherits her mother’s individualism as she embarks on her own domestic battle. By the time Anna’s own daughter Ursula comes of age, the new freedoms she embraces appear to make anything possible. What foll...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   Storm clouds are gathering in Tim Foley’s new play, set on a beach in North East England that becomes both sanctuary and battleground for the two brothers who reunite to bury their father. Mark is the reluctant prodigal, the one who got away to find success, freedom and a life a million miles away from the now dead end town he couldn’t waiter get away from. Tiny is the one who stayed behind to look after his old man, hanging on his stories, with the big bad world a restless ocean away. For now, at least, the tide has gone out enough to leave them space to try and soothe troubled waters.    Foley’s two-hander is brought to full roaring theatrical life in this touring co-production between the Wigan based ThickSkin and Shropshire sired Pentabus companies. Directors Neil Bettles and Elle While pull out all the stylistic stops to make it work, with he first thing that greets the audience the rolling waves of Sarah Readman’s video backd...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Five stars    It is just shy of seven years since Isobel McArthur’s poptastic reimagining of Jane Austen’s girl powered nineteenth century novel burst into riotous life at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre in the fledgling Blood of the Young company’s original smash hit production. Since then, McArthur has picked up the directorial baton for a scaled up version that has toured the UK, wowed the West End and picked up an Olivier award for what has become a fully fledged theatrical phenomenon. One might wager as well that bringing Austen’s work to life in this way has done more for the Brit lit classical canon than more traditionally inclined heritage industry homages that intermittently light up stage and screen.    Now here we are for this latest tour coming home to roost in a much bigger Glasgow space than the one where it all began, with McArthur drafting in a brand new young team of all singing, all dancing, potty mouthed performers to pick up the mant...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars    Arthur Miller’s major plays may have been written in the mid twentieth century, but their huge hearted studies of the human fall-out of post World War Two capitalism continue to tap into the collective American psyche like few others. It is thrilling, therefore, to have new productions of two of Miller’s mightiest works on our doorstep within a couple of weeks of each other. With Andy Arnold and David Hayman’s take on Death of a Salesman to come, Jemima Levick announces her tenure as artistic director of the Tron with a production of A View from the Bridge that resonates with creative vitality.    Miller’s play charts the downfall of Eddie Carbone, the New York longshoreman who opens his already busy house to his wife Beatrice’s two cousins Marco and Rodolfo, illegally transported from Italy. Where Marco works hard for his family back home, Rodolpho is attracted by the glamour of music and movies. In the middle of this is Eddie’s o...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   Meet Evan Hansen. Hero and villain of Oscar winning songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s Tony and Olivier award winning musical with writer Steven Levenson is a socially anxious seventeen-year-old whose therapist has suggested he write a letter to himself every day. This is so he can buoy himself up for what he hypes  himself into believing can only be a great day. Or not, as it more frequently turns out, in what is effectively the sort of self help secret diary intended for Evan’s eyes only.    When one of Evan’s missives is snatched from his hand by school bad boy Connor Murphy and found in the latter’s pocket after he takes a more extreme option for dealing with bad days, it is presumed Evan and Connor were best buds and confidantes. This sets in motion a series of events that go global, as Evan finds himself at the centre of an accidental fantasy that brings him the sort of attention he’s never had before. When things...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   When seventy-something Diane decides it’s time to die, the only way to go, it seems, is to take a last trip to Switzerland, where assisted dying is legal. The ticket price from Easterhouse isn’t cheap, alas, and Diane’s pension won’t stretch much further than paying for the not entirely legal painkillers supplied by her postman Connor. Diane’s wild days may be over, but she’s still queen of the Scheme. Diane’s carer Julie, meanwhile, finally dumps her philandering husband, an act of mid-life emancipation that points her towards a novel way of fundraising for Diane that is soon keeping them all in clover.    Such is life in Éimi Quinn’s increasingly wild new play, which opens the twentieth anniversary season of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s lunchtime theatre phenomenon - the first under new artistic director Brian Logan - with a bang and a lot more besides. As Julie sets up shop as an online dominatrix, she brings new life as well as a stea...

Tramway, Glasgow Five stars    When a man turns up at a cheap hotel in the outer edge of nowhere, the last thing he expects to find is a talking monkey, let alone one with whom he spends the night drinking while hanging on his every word. The man, a writer whose by-line we never discover, has just been in a meeting with an editor who couldn’t remember her own name.    The Monkey, a Bruckner loving beast with a hangdog demeanour and a yearning to connect, has come all the way from Shinagawa, from whence he might just be able to explain what’s going on. Not that this helps another woman called Mizuki much, let alone her long lost friend Yuko, whoever they might be.   This makes for a haunting adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short stories based around the Monkey. Knitted together by Glasgow’s Vanishing Point company in this international co-production with Japan’s Kanagawa Arts Theatre, where it premiered in November 2024, this makes for mesmerising viewing.  ...

Macrobert Arts Centre, Stirling  Four stars   When you fall down a hole it takes a devil to get you back on your feet. This is the case in James Robertson’s Booker Prize long listed 2006 novel, adapted for the stage by Matthew Zajac for the Highland based Dogstar company. Kevin Lennon’s eponymous Gideon is a free thinking son of the manse, who, for want of something else to believe in, finds himself occupying the pulpit of the Kirk in small town Monimaskit, where temptation lurks in every pew.   As we rewind on Gideon’s coming of age, from questioning teenager to Edinburgh student before settling in small town Monimasket with his young wife Jenny, world events beyond his bubble crackle through radio headlines. Margaret Thatcher’s second term as Prime Minister, The Falklands War and the Miner’s Strike are all in the mix. When Gideon disappears for three days after falling down a gorge, any threat of gritty realist nostalgia is tossed aside as we enter more metaphysical wat...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   Pop trivia nerds will have long been aware that the roots of the title for the chartbusting series of smash hit compilation albums founded in 1983 that gives this new jukebox musical its title comes from a 1920s poster for Danish bacon. As recounted by Richard Branson, whose Virgin label kick-started the series, the poster depicted an image of a pig declaring “Now. That’s What I Call Music,” as it watched a chicken singing.    With a current tally of 119 releases and rising, the history of NOW is the history of mainstream British pop. As the branding of this record company backed show suggests, NOW also provided the soundtrack to the lives of several generations of glossy pop lovers.   So it goes with Gemma and April, the two women on the verge in writer Pippa Evans’ prime time dramady set around the aftermath of a school reunion. When they were just seventeen, Gemma and April were girls who just wanted to have fun, albeit with ve...

The Studio, Edinburgh Five stars   The end of the world as we know it has been pretty much nigh for some time now. Yet despite a parallel universe load of conspiracy theories and threats of alien invasions, somehow it manages to keep on turning. But what does it take to believe in flying saucers and interplanetary interventions to a near messianic degree? More importantly, what happens when the apocalypse never comes and normal life resumes?   These were the sort of questions being asked back in the pre internet 1950s by social scientists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter, who infiltrated one such group of believers that held court in an all American suburban living room. Calling themselves the Seekers, the group put faith in the idea that an impending biblical flood was about to devastate the earth.    The good news, however, is that they believed – that word again – they would be saved by extra-terrestrials who, like thieves in the night, would be...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   Cyndi Lauper fans are having a bonanza just now. Following the 1980s pop queen’s own live extravaganza at the OVO Hydro in Glasgow last weekend, this week sees the return of Lauper’s smash hit musical of heels, deals and broken high ideals.    With a book by the mighty Harvey Fierstein, turning the true story of a traditional Northampton shoe factory that survives the post industrial downturn by making extravagant footwear for drag queens wasn’t the obvious choice for a Broadway musical.    Following the 2005 Brit-flick that first picked up on the story following a 1999 TV documentary, the show’s original 2012 production went on to become a multiple award winner before going on to wow audiences closer to its source material.    This new production originated at Leicester’s Curve Theatre prior to its current tour co-produced with the ROYO organisation. While it retains the necessary pizazz in spades to make it just a...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars   The chair that sits at the side of the stage with a bowler hat cheekily perched on it as the audience enter the Playhouse isn’t the biggest tease in this latest tour of John Kander, Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse’s now half-century-old confection of 1920s naughty fun writ large. If ever a show could legitimately be legally decreed to be sex on legs, Chicago’s high-kicking tale of showgirl Roxie Hart’s five minutes of fame after she shoots her lover in cold blood is the one, and we’re not talking about the chair here.   With roots dating back another fifty years or so to reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins’ 1926 stage play based on real life events, Kander, Ebb and Fosse took Watkins’ tabloid friendly true crime caper that already resembled pulp fiction and transformed it into a thrillingly erotic series of backstage set-pieces. The nylon-clad song and dance routines that follow in this recreation of Walter Bobbie’s original 1996 staging and ...