Coffee-Table Notes

Òran Mór , Glasgow Four stars   Eyes are very much down for a full house in this new play by Marc Pye and Gayle Telfer Stevens, the latest lunchtime extravaganza as part of the current A Play, a Pie and a Pint season. Angie and Linda are pretty much addicted to the allure of the bingo hall, which offers some kind of lifeline, as well as potentially sorting out their respective financial woes. If Angie doesn’t get to call ‘House’, chances are she’ll lose hers.    Linda and Angie’s daughters Stacey and Amy, meanwhile, have other plans, and perish the thought of following in their mothers’ footsteps. With a cool 40k a winning number away, however, Stacey could bankroll her online influencer lifestyle and get some work done on herself, while Amy could kick-start her dog grooming business in style. All it takes to change their lives is one stolen membership card.    There is a lot more going on than meets Kelly’s Eye in Pye and Telfer Stevens’ sit-com style affair. ...

Òran Mór , Glasgow Four stars   What happened one sunny day in 2021 on Glasgow’s south side when agents of the UK Home Office were thwarted from removing two Sikh men of Indian descent from their homes has become an inspiration for our times. The spontaneous show of mass solidarity that rose up that day has already been documented in Felipe Bustos Sierra’s film, Everybody to Kenmure Street. Playwright Simon Jay has here picked up the baton with a verbatim approach to his new play drawn from the day’s events. The result in this latest lunchtime production for A Play, a Pie and a Pint mixes interviews and anecdotal accounts with a little old school polemic to tell the story.    Key to this is the song by Kenmure Street residents Craig and Rachel Smillie written within days of the event, and which here acts as a folksy refrain as actors Nesha Caplan, Kal Sabir and Betty Valencia replay what happened. This moves from the initial response to the eventual release of the men fro...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars   For those on side, Cowdenbeath Football Club may never have been premiere league material, but they have always occupied a field of dreams. This is made clear in Gary McNair’s wonderful new stage adaptation of Ron Ferguson’s 1993 book, ostensibly a love letter to the club that becomes a funny and profound meditation on the collective power of football fandom as a form of everyday devotion.   So it goes with McNair’s version, which sees Cowdenbeath native Sally make a reluctant prodigal’s return to the Fife mining town following the death of her football daft dad. The deal is that Sally is to scatter her old man’s ashes onto the pitch at CFC’s home ground of Central Park, but only after they win a game. As historical statistics show, alas, the 1991/92 season when Sally made her promise wasn’t exactly a walk in the park in terms of getting a resuls, which is why she finds herself spending more weekends than she bargained for on t...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh  Four stars   Everybody wants a piece of Jenna in Jessie Horton and Sara Bareilles’ smash hit musical, which celebrates its tenth anniversary on its latest UK tour. Based on the late Adrienne Shelly’s film of the same name, writer Horton and composer Bareilles’ confection is a bittersweet affair served up in Abbey O’Brien’s all singing, all dancing restaging of Diane Paulus’ original production with all the trimmings.    Jenna is the waitress of the show’s title, who may bake the best pies in the American South in Joe’s Pie Diner, but who remains stuck in a dead end marriage with abusive husband Earl. With a baby on the way, Jenna looks set to be even more trapped. Also working in the diner are Becky and Dawn, with whom Jenna forms an unbreakable trio in the face of assorted men folk. While Jenna finds Dr. Pomatter has an impeccable bedside manner, geeky Dawn does a whole lot of re-enacting with oddball Ogie, while Becky gets behind the ...

Perth Theatre Four stars   Everyone is a star in Morag Fullarton’s latest remake of a Hollywood classic. Following Casablanca The Gin Joint Cut and It’s a Wonderful Life… Mostly, this reimagining of Billy Wilder’s 1950 showbiz noir  is scaled up to something more suitably epic after being  first seen back in 2015 as a lunchtime show at Oran Mor.    The appeal of putting it back on stage isn’t hard to fathom. Here, after all, is a big picture that mythologises its own world by way of what happens to screenwriter Joe Gillis. Gillis has become the accidental toy boy of faded silent movie queen Norma Desmond after being drafted in to write her back into the spotlight. While Norma is watched over by her devoted butler, Max, Joe teams up with script reader Betty Schaefer, who has her own plans for Joe.    As if such a tangled web wasn’t already a multi-tiered potboiler, Fullarton gift-wraps her production by framing it with Wilder casting his new opus, and t...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars   A big blood red spotlight engulfs the stage as an eerie underscore plays while the lights go down on this trimmed down version of Shakespeare’s Scottish play. Arguably the bard’s best-known saga has been seen in many forms over the last few centuries. His is tale of doomed ambition and men who would be king probably hasn’t been seen that often with such rapid fire brevity as this new version by the Hove based Out of Chaos company. Perhaps with latter day low attention span in mind concerning this set text friendly epic, director Mike Tweddle here oversees a version featuring just two actors who manage to fast forward through the Macbeths rise and fall in a speedy eighty minutes.    Hannah Barrie and Paul O’Mahoney may be centre-stage much of the time as the fortune hunting Macbeths, but they also double up as a full supporting cast of assorted monarchs, thanes and soldiers in arms without missing a beat. They also do a turn as the wei...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Five stars    Sparks fly on the factory floor at the start of Joanna Bowman’s explosive revival of Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, first seen in 2015, but looking more pertinent than ever. As a portent of things to come, this opening image is as telling as the fact that the sides of Francis O’Connor’s set look like a cage, inside which, some kind of combat takes place. This is how it is, not just in the factory, but in the bar where the workers splash their wages around, and almost certainly in the prison the two young men at the heart of the play have just been released from.    The time moves between the turn of the century when it felt like people could get by, to eight years later when the world has changed. The place is Reading, Pennsylvania, a blue-collar heartland fired by iron and steel. Here, Tracey, Cynthia and Jessie spend their down time getting hammered, as do Tracey’s son Jason and Cynthia’s boy Chris. The...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   Hannah Howie has something to get off her chest. The clue is in the title of the actress and singer’s new cabaret style show, the latest mini musical to grace A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s ongoing lunchtime theatre season. Howie’s extravaganza is founded on the life changing diagnosis that she had an 85 per cent chance of contracting cancer. She subsequently turned her decision to have a double mastectomy into something she can have a song and dance about.    Howie does this with the aid of her two little helpers who each represent her Left Breast and her Right Breast, aka Georgia and Freda. As Howie struts her stuff all dressed up in suitably funereal black, G and F are brought to life by Kirsty Malone and Gregor John-Owen, who back her up as assorted comedy doctors as well as busting some moves in step with their mistress. Given that each has a personality of their own - Georgia is the feisty one, Freda the smaller of the two - it is only rig...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh  Five stars   The seasons have shifted since Karine Polwart’s multi media elegy to a 200 year old Sabal palm tree about to be felled in Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden first blew in to the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Back then, in the heat of such a turbulent backdrop, Polwart’s elegant mix of storytelling and song stood out enough to be declared a masterpiece. Eight months on, Polwart’s meticulously realised immersive song cycle has blossomed enough for a countrywide tour that begins at the Lyceum, where an early workshop of the show was presented.    From the moment Pippa Murphy’s environmental soundscape rattles with the wind, this homecoming of sorts remains a monument to the power of the natural world and the glorious constructions that grow from it. As the tree is plucked from the wild, taken across oceans to foreign lands and kept in glasshouses that can barely contain it, it evolves into a magnificently plumed hybrid it tu...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh  Four stars   Johnny Cash and June Carter were destined to be together from the moment they met back stage at the Grand Ol’ Opry. The mercurial life the first couple of country music shared until their deaths months apart in 2003 could have been channelled from the sorts of songs that made them both international stars. Those lives are laid bare in Des McAnuff and Robert Cary’s warts and all tribute to Johnny and June in a show that goes beyond a greatest hits affair to get to the emotional heart of two pop cultural legends.    As the title suggests, this is made myth by a ballad, sung and played throughout by Johnny and June’s son and country music star in his own right, John Carter Cash. Played with considerable charm by Ryan O’Donnell, John becomes the show’s narrator, with a supporting cast doubling up as assorted personal and musical foils as well as what is effectively an all crooning Greek chorus.    The story Jo...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars    It’s all over for Dylan and Roz at the start of Matt Anderson’s new play. Whatever happened, Dylan’s stuff is all packed up for him to collect. When he arrives, it is a frosty reception from Roz that awaits him. But how did these two former lovers get here, having one last awkward exchange before they go their very separate ways?   This is answered over the next sixty five minutes or so of Anderson’s own production, which cuts up a series of bite size scenes that jump between time frames to piece together a bittersweet romance that began with Dylan bumming a fag off Roz at a party. The highs and lows of the first love that follows leaves a profound sense of loss for them both as they career around each other towards the end.     First seen on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe back in 2024, Anderson’s own production for his Kangaroo Court outfit and here presented with Serpentine Productions retains a DIY feel in its sp...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   In January 1981, 240 women occupied the Greenock factory they worked in after their jobs were put on the line following the factory’s sale. Like the then prime minister, these ladies weren’t for turning. Led by indomitable shop steward Helen Monaghan, the women’s struggle captured the public imagination, and after seven months, in the short term, at least, they won their fight.    Almost half a century on, Frances Poet has taken this vital piece of history and put it back on the front line in her new play that gets to the human heart of the story. Developed from an idea with journalist Paul English, Jemima Levick’s production - a collaboration between the National Theatre of Scotland and the Tron - sets out its store on Jessica Worrall’s old school social club set, where the six-strong cast punctuate each scene by playing some of the year’s smash hits like a cabaret cover band.    The girl group chutzpah on display in the ...

Òran Mór , Glasgow Four stars   Everything is going off down at the local community centre in Ross Mackay’s new play, where an old school Tory turned Reform defector and a newly elected Green councillor are about to host a joint surgery for their constituents. As Jeremy and Viv argue the ideological toss, it turns out they might be closer to being two sides of the same coin than either of them likes to think.    The first test of this unlikely alliance comes in the form of Lenny, whose faith in the political system, it’s probably fair to say, has reached the end of its tether. Locked in for the night as accidental captives, the trio work their way behind unworkable ideologies to more workaday matters worth voting for before negotiating an uneasy truce that might just get blown apart any second.    With elections looming and political allegiances on all sides increasingly polarised, Mackay’s mini satire couldn’t be more telling about the current state we’re in. J...

Summerhall, Edinburgh Three stars   Sigmund Freud: so much to answer for. This is certainly the case in terms of the original pop therapist’s relationship with Emma Eckstein. The well-heeled Viennese twenty-something only became a patient of her soon to be guru in search of a solution to her endometriosis. In terms of diagnosis, however, once she took up residence on Freud’s chaise longue she got considerably more than she bargained for. After a series of increasingly ludicrous claims from Freud and his scalpel wielding pal Wilhelm Fliess regarding Eckstein’s condition, she found herself scarred for life before following in Freud’s footsteps and becoming a psychoanalyst herself.    If such real life doctor/patient shenanigans in high places sounds like the template for some steampunk style historical reboot, this new play by Becca Robin Dunn and Claire Macallister doesn’t go quite that far, but neither is it shy of taking liberties. This is the case fr...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh  Four stars    Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you. Joseph Heller’s deadpan maxim from Catch 22 could easily apply to Alec Leamas, the down at heel anti hero of John le  Carré ’s 1963 best selling novel. Set two years earlier, le  Carré ’s forensic study of secret agents shot by both sides of the Berlin Wall remains a darkly unsentimental piece of Brit-noir pulp fiction.   David Eldridge’s stage version heightens the light and shade of Leamas’ plight in Jeremy Herrin’s stiff-backed production. Played out by a cast of twelve on designer Max Jones’ array of black painted walls, this is where Leamas’s handlers in the below radar organisation known as The Circus pull the strings. As Ralf Little’s pugnacious Leamas sets out the story’s historical context, he is revealed as the ultimate burnt out cannon fodder this side of Harry Palmer. Whisky laced, tobacco stained and heavy coated, Leamas is forever caught...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Three stars   Maggie is going round in circles. It’s the morning of her thirtieth birthday, and she has somehow found herself on a slow train to Aberdeen. As she reflects on how she got here, a series of brief encounters forces her to go beyond her original destination and make connections with what has been on her doorstep all along.    Maggie thinks she is on a one-way trip to  Norway in her search for some kind of sanctuary where she can be alone. From hen parties to handsome himbos to wise old sages, alas, all life seems to be amongst these strangers on a train, as each arrival and departure bestows their unique brand of wisdom on Maggie as they go.    So much for the quiet carriage in Stephanie MacGaraidh’s new solo mini musical, which she performs as part of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest lunchtime theatre season. Part of this, of course, is that Maggie’s story is told largely through MacGaraidh’s canon of indie-folk-pop song...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars    Things have changed in the thirty-odd years since Stephan Elliott’s flamboyant road movie, The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, helped liberate Australia from the Fosters and Castlemaine XXXX swilling hordes and dragged up the world. In the two decades since Elliott first transposed his pink neon vision to the stage and added the campest soundtrack on the planet, the culture depicted therein has become even more ubiquitously mainstream.    None of this stands in the way of director Ian Talbot’s new touring reboot, which explodes with colour even as it stays true to its show bar backdrop. For those living in a closet for the past two decades, the story concerns a cross-country road trip undertaken by drag queens Tick and Felicia and transgender woman Bernadette. While ostensibly the trip is to play a residency at Tick’s ex wife’s casino, it is really an excuse for him to be reunited with his young son.  ...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh  Four stars   Ally is a woman pregnant with possibilities as much as with child throughout Jess Brodie’s new play, a solo piece wonderfully performed by Jessica Hardwick. As Ally prepares to be a first time mum, she feels like she is about to burst on several levels. As well as navigating her way through an increasingly stifling home life with her husband Kevin, this woman’s work also includes an illicit date with a female sex worker in a Cambuslang hotel.    What follows in Ally’s monologue is an exploration of her sexuality that liberates her even as it leads her into temptation beyond her humdrum home life. This sees Brodie’s script tap into the erotic psychology of a woman whose body has been taken over, but which has left her with a deep rooted yearning that needs to be acted on.    The sound of a heart beating pulses the opening of Becky Hope-Palmer’s production. On stage alone for the play’s seventy-five minute duration,...

Òran Mór , Glasgow  Four stars   Coming up for air isn’t always easy for Michael and Pat, the cross generational duo at the heart of Séan O'Neil’s new play, the latest lunchtime offering at A Play, a Pie and a Pint. If Michael can hold his breath in a bucket of water, he’ll get into the Guinness Book of Records. As his coach, Pat can share in some of the glory. The people from Guinness, alas, are running late. While this doesn’t prevent Pat from necking down several cans of the black stuff, when Pat’s daughter Grainne shows up at the pool, it becomes clear that all concerned are drowning in a mire of grief from which they will never fully surface.   What begins as a comedy fused by Michael and Pat’s deadly exchanges in Fraser Scott’s production gradually morphs into a meditation on loss, guilt and the extremes one pushes oneself to in order to try and get beyond the absence. Michael and Pat’s pursuits may seem trivial, but at the heart of their endeavours t...

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Four stars   Election fever may feel somewhat tepid just now in these parts, but with populism on the rise from all sides and out and out crazy people in power, in terms of the future, the bigger picture continues to look increasingly scary. It is not, thank goodness, beyond satire, as Justin Skelton’s DIY construction proves in tuneful fashion with a full six-piece band delivering his song cycle.   Skelton is Beldon Haigh, a former spin-doctor thrown into the industrial prison complex somewhere in Midlothian at the behest of one President Blame. This suspiciously familiar looking demagogue may only want to Make Dystopia Great Again, but his one actual redeeming feature is that he probably plays saxophone better than Bill Clinton.   Like some fantasy latter day San Quentin concert, Beldon hooks up with some of his fellow inmates to form a supergroup of felons that includes a rhythm section of a chicken dancing Donald Trump on bass and a meaty...