Coffee-Table Notes

4 stars   When Victoria Melody gets hold of an idea, she doesn’t let it go. After shows about Northern Soul and dog shows, Melody’s latest obsessive outing charts her fascination with the seventeenth century English Civil War. Having developed a particular interest in the Diggers, the band of agrarian rebels who rose up across several battles to argue for a fairer society, Melody joins a historical re-enactment society.    Unfortunately she accidentally joins the wrong side, which is why she greets the audience dressed in the authentic uniform of a Royalist musketeer. This doesn’t stop her instigating a mini revolution of her own, as the local grassroots initiative where she is artist in residence rises up to ward off developers and town planners.    Melody is an all too human polemicist, who pokes fun at her own failings as she joins forces with the community she helped create. Prime movers of these different strands are represented by large-scale photographs o...

4 stars   Shakespeare may not have been known for his Samba moves, but that hasn’t stopped the Brazilian Cênica company from serving up his tale of star-crossed lovers in bite-size cabaret style form. The fact that Romeo and Juliet is also the nickname for the post-dinner Brazilian snack of cheese and guava speaks volumes. Opposites attract.    Throw in the greatest hits of best selling Brazilian crooner Roberto Carlos, aka ‘the king’ - like Elvis, Elton and the Beatles rolled into one, apparently, pop pickers - and the scene is set for a piece of serious fun that looks at conflict, cultural division and colonialism in a cross language, cross genre confection.    With seven people on stage doubling up as the band in Fagner Rodrigues’ wild production, the result of this contribution to this year’s São Paulo Showcase is a bilingual feast. It may start early doors, but it’s never too early to carnival. Just desserts all round. ...

Four stars    A naked man sits in an armchair at the centre of an impressionistic version of a family living room. A TV set, a lamp, a vintage record player, surrounded by walls with only one door out. As the man breathes deep in the stillness, voices of his homophobic father, his mother and his therapist pierce the TV static like ghosts in the machine. Film footage of two men wrestling naked - in a field, on a beach, in the sea - beams on to the walls like an earnest reimagining of Ken Russell’s Women in Love.    As we cut between recorded snatches of real life conversations and the on screen struggle, it is as if all the everyday agonies swirling around inside the man’s head are being transmitted as a state of art living installation.    They fuck you up, your mum and dad for sure in this intense forty-minute audience with Andreas Constantinou, the Danish theatre artist who tells his story without moving or saying a word. First performed by Constanti...

Queen’s Hall Five stars   When Karine Polwart heard the story of the 200-year-old Sabal palm tree that was about to be felled in Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden, it sparked the idea for this new illustrated fusion of song cycle and storytelling. This is brought to gorgeous life in collaboration with composer Pippa Murphy chock-full of empathy and warmth.    The hour-long piece begins with a series of delicate piano patterns played by jazz maestro Dave Milligan as Polwart brings a gentle sway to her performance under the guidance of Janice Parker’s movement direction. With a reconstruction of Old Sabal at the centre of the stage care of Neil Haynes’ design, Polwart regales us with details of the tree’s rarity, how it was transported from Bermuda, and how it looked over the city as it got too big for its roots while the world expanded around its tropical glasshouse home.    Polwart’s story becomes as much about the creation of the piece as it does about a silent ...

Royal Lyceum Theatre Five stars    Which came first? Chicken or egg? In the case of this remarkable work by Belgium’s FC Bergman company, who open the show by getting a real life hen to let loose an egg into the earth beneath, probably both. Surrounded by the eight performers of this seventy minute ritual navigation through ancient Greek poet Hesiod’s idea of the five ages, the hen’s egg drop is as golden a statement on new life as it gets, even if it does come a cropper later on.   This is set to a Vivaldi inspired live jazz inflected score played by Joachim Badenhorst & Sean Carpio. As the tight knit ensemble rip up the land – and the wooden stage floor – with a plough, they build a house and create something resembling a community as they shed clothes like skins with each new era they step into.    Wildlife is killed for trophies. The dawning of the machine age sees a steam engine ridden like a bucking bronco before hanging in mid air like a Rene Magritte...

Summerhall Four stars   Frankie Donnelly never meant to go to prison. He never meant to  become an addict and a dealer either. As Ed Edwards’ new monologue shows, however, he was a victim of the times Frankie was living in. It’s the early 1990s, the Strangeways prison riots have just kicked off, the Berlin Wall has not long come down and the old certainties of political belief systems have been replaced by hedonistic excess.    Caught up in all this, Frankie takes the rap for others as he is sent down for three years. It’s something of a cushy number, mind, as he becomes part of a prison community that includes ‘De Niro’, who pretty much runs the place, Kenny, who tries to play guitar like the Velvet Underground, ex para Bron, who may or may not be having an affair with one of the guards, and Irish Tony, whose name conjures up a world of unsettled scores. As a man of letters, Frankie becomes a proxy writer of romantic missives for Bron as he ends up embroiled in...

Scottish Storytelling Centre Four stars   When Alan Bissett steps up to play the two heroes of Scottish culture who give his new solo play its title, for much of the next hour he switches between telling the life stories of each. From Billy Connolly’s move from the shipyards to folk clubs to international stardom, a quick pair of glasses later and we see Alasdair Gray’s visionary life of writing and painting. The latter was finally recognised in 1981 when Gray was 47 with the publication of his novel, Lanark.    This criss-crossing primer is framed by Connolly’s star studded sixtieth birthday bash, which Bissett imagines with a showbiz sweep that couldn’t be further from Gray’s ascetic existence. Connolly relates how the two men met at the launch of Lanark at Glasgow arts lab the Third Eye Centre. We know this is true from the photograph beamed out behind Bissett that shows the two men together. This image was taken by George Oliver and was later gifted to Bissett by his ...

Summerhall 3 stars   Annie’s little brother thinks he sees their father on the beach while on holiday in Skye. Given that their dad died in a car crash the year before, however, they might just have seen a ghost. With Annie’s twin sister and teenage brother on board, the siblings find themselves chasing a driverless silver car. A tall man who might be the only one who can solve the mystery remains forever just out of reach.    Thirty years on, Annie is still chasing ghosts as she relates her story on camera for the sort of prime time supernatural shows that fill up wall-to-wall digital TV stations. As she revisits the scene, the past comes flooding back, from her father’s death and her drink addled mother, to the interplay between her and her siblings and what happened next.    What emerges over the taut fifty-five minutes of Matthew Iliffe’s production - the first for the newly formed K Media with Summerhall Arts - is a dark meditation on loss, grief and how th...

Traverse Theatre Four stars   Happy days are here again for Eileen in Karis Kelly’s new play, set in a contemporary Northern Ireland simmering with recent history. Eileen is celebrating her 90th birthday, and all four generations of the family she sired will be gathering around the kitchen table to celebrate. Or at least he women will, anyway. There’s Eileen’s own daughter Jenny, who keeps house and pretty much everything besides as she hoards up the past. Then there’s Jenny’s daughter Gilly, who’s just arrived from London with her teenage offspring Muireann. Muireann rejects her Irish name, and has no sense of history before five minutes ago.   Whether Eileen has always been a potty-mouthed harridan who will pick a fight with anyone or whether it’s come with age isn’t clear. Either way, it sets the tone for a vicious four-way sparring in the first half of the play as the women reacquaint themselves with unsettled scores while they prepare the birthday dinner.  ...

Traverse Theatre Four stars   A good dame should grow old disgracefully. So says Johnny McKnight, and he should know. This dressed up doyen of twenty-first century pantomime has been at it for twenty years now, and has learnt a trick or two along the way he wants to share with us in this solo show and tell of his brilliant career. In order to do this, McKnight arrives on stage in full costume, make up and attitude as Dorothy Blawna-Gale, who has become a true friend, both to McKnight and young audiences who lap up her larger than life persona.   Don’t be fooled by the disguise, mind. Behind the extravagant wig, make up and gingham ensemble that liberates McKnight to reel off a stream of deadly one-liners, McKnight lays bare both his personal odyssey into the pantosphere while relating some of its colourful history.   From a primary school kid enthralled by panto great Johnny Beattie, McKnight works his way up to don a frock to call his own. As he speaks directly with...

Traverse Theatre Four stars   A storm may be looming in Flora Wilson Brown’s beautiful new play, but as it’s title suggests, there is still some kind of hope. That hope comes through the three women from past, present and future whose appliance of science attempts to change the all-encroaching climate crisis and prevent the end of the world as we know it.    In nineteenth century New York, Eunice tries to convince the scientific hierarchy of her ideas about the climate, but is either dismissed as an amateur or else patronised for being a woman dabbling in such lofty pursuits. Her collaborator John may have faith in her, but even he sees her considerable brainpower as a novelty.    In a near future that will soon be now, Claire and Dan feel the heat as they fall for each other and plan a life together out of London. When the damage caused by floods intrude, extreme measures provoke a wake up call beyond everyday tragedy.    Three quarters of a century f...

T raverse Theatre Four stars   Brotherly love - and hate - are at the heart of Gabriel Jason Dean’s play, which charts the twin journeys of two siblings who respond in very different ways to the emotional baggage they carry with them. The younger begins as a nervous college kid, full of liberal idealism but still awkward around grown ups. Given that his brother he visits at the start of the play has already served four years of a life sentence for murder, no wonder. The fact that his elder sibling has a Swastika tattoo on his chest and is a leading light in a white supremacist group behind bars is something of a shock to the wet liberal system.    Over the next two decades the irresistible rise of the younger as a writer sees both men learn much from each other. As they forge some kind of uneasy truce over the pains of shared history, however, it doesn’t take much for those old bonds to break.    Deans has produced a devastating piece of work that uses the trapp...

Festival Theatre Four stars    Oasis playing their festival busting Murrayfield next week as the Edinburgh International run of James Graham’s play about the rise and fall of failed banker Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin comes to a close is a glorious piece of synchronicity. Both are very different symbols of working class aspiration during the Blairite era of Cool Britannia largesse that saw all involved have it large. Oasis’s hungry anthem of excess, Cigarettes and Alcohol, even has a lyric that shares the title of Graham’s play that becomes Goodwin’s mantra for success. The difference between Oasis and Goodwin, of course, is that while one is returning to Edinburgh as conquering heroes, the other was at the centre of the 2008 financial crash after a banking institution was destroyed  overnight .   Graham’s play charts how a ruthlessly driven boy from the same Paisley housing estate as John Byrne and Gerry Rafferty put his faith and whatever assets were going into Ki...

Traverse Theatre Four Stars    The way Gary McNair was told it, when England beat West Germany in the final seconds of the 1966 World Cup Final, his granddad won a small fortune after betting on the result. This appears to have been much to the chagrin of his fellow drinkers in the spit and sawdust Gorbals boozer where he watched the game, but it seems to have been well worth the beating that resulted.    More than three decades on, McNair’s granddad makes another bet that inspires similarly grand thinking in the telling, whether he wins it or not. Inbetween, McNair is at his granddad’s side, listening to stories as they grow into legend, until he starts telling his own.    There is something heroic about McNair’s solo play, receiving its tenth anniversary outing in this revival of Gareth Nichols’ production at this year’s Fringe. As he paces around the clutter of an old-school living room set, McNair is not only telling his own shaggy dog story about the m...

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow Four stars   The ongoing reboots of Arthur Conan Doyle’s genius detective has kept his creation on trend well into the twenty-first century. Jennifer Dick’s boutique stage version for Bard in the Botanics’ latest non-Shakespeare outing stays true to the forensic peccadilloes of Conan Doyle’s original while putting a feminist spin on things.    Dick weaves together three stories; The Adventure of Abbey Grange, A Scandal in Bohemia, and The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton. At the centre of these is Irene Adler, aka The Woman, the former actress and opera singer who left her mark on the Conan Doyle canon after getting the better of Holmes.    As both seasoned Sherlockians and Wikipedia will tell you, however, Irene only ever appeared in one original Holmes story. That was A Scandal in Bohemia, first published in the Strand magazine in1881 as the first of 56 Holmes missives following two novels. Dick’ considerable liberty taking...

Theatre 118, Glasgow Three stars    For the last month, Theatre 118 has hosted four editions of Play of the Week. This is a series of new short plays rehearsed and produced on no budget in a makeshift sixty seat studio space in a former city centre office block the company currently call home. This has been at the behest of Outerspaces, a Scotland wide initiative to open up unused buildings to artists in order to create work without external financial pressures. While Outerspaces has been embraced mainly by the visual art community, those behind Theatre 118 have seized the opportunity to reveal a seam of untapped theatrical talent that exists outwith the mainstream.    This final play of the season sets out its store in a spartan high rise in Springburn, where old Ms Maara sits waiting for a knock on the door. A murder has been committed, and a High Court appeal from the apparently guilty party is ongoing. When a man from the council turns up and starts asking Ms Maa...

Botanic Garden, Glasgow Four stars    On the street, the barricades are full of bouquets tied on in tribute to the victims of the teenage gang warfare that runs riot throughout Bard in the Botanics’ latest look at Shakespeare’s tragedy of young lovers. Gordon Barr’s outdoor production sets out its store on designer Hannah Grace Currie’s neglected building site. This becomes an adventure playground for the tracksuit sporting rebels without a cause who need to build a kingdom of their own.   While Mercutio and Benvolio might be happy to represent the Montague young team in a square go with Tybalt and the Capulet kids, as soon as Romeo and the boys gatecrash Juliet’s family do, our hero’s one-track mind is set on her alone. Juliet may be up for it too, but if either of them gets found out they’ll be grounded for life, or worse.    The perils of puppy love in the middle of a family feud are plain to see in Barr’s production, which has a mere five actors carry the pl...

Leith Theatre , Edinburgh Four stars   Irvine Welsh’s new novel, Men in Love, is on sale in Leith Theatre’s foyer, its soundtrack album is launched in Leith next weekend, and a new Welsh based documentary, Reality is Not Enough, will close this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival next month. As an example of local boy done good, this brief run of Davie Carswell’s stage version of Welsh’s 2002 sequel to Trainspotting is a welcome addition to this spate of high profile activity surrounding the Leith born novelist.    Having begun its life on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2022 five years after Danny Boyle filmed Welsh's book as T2, Carswell's adaptation became a West End hit. Bringing it all back home for what probably won't be the last time is living testament to the ongoing power of Welsh’s ever expanding back catalogue.    The handy translations of Leith patois projected onto the back wall of the stage lest a passing west coaster stumble into the bui...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars    John Buchan probably couldn’t have predicted the liberties  maverick film director Alfred Hitchcock would take with his 1915 novel, in which dashing Richard Hannay takes flight to Scotland after a night at the theatre throws him into a world of intrigue and adventure. Hitchcock too might have raised an eyebrow regarding how writer Patrick Garland transformed his 1935 big screen adaptation into a pocket sized stage pastiche requiring just four actors to do the business.    Garland’s irreverent hybrid of Hitchcock and Buchan’s creations has run and run for two decades now and counting. Ben Occhipinti’s new Pitlochry Festival Theatre production breathes fresh life into a show that has tremendous fun with the existing material while managing to put a personal stamp on things.    This is led by Alexander Service as Hannay, who flaunts his character’s matinee idol looks with a nice line in self parody as he flees...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four stars   Now, here’s a funny one. Take three comedians, household names the lot of them during the 1970s, and all used to dying a death on the variety circuit during their early years. Then, like some celestial impresario, put them on the same bill, and see who comes out laughing.    Such is the premise behind Paul Hendy’s play, revived for a UK tour following a west end run after being a hit of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Hendy’s conceit is to put Tommy Cooper, Bob Monkhouse and Eric Morecambe in a grotty dressing room where the wall is adorned by photographs of other greats of the comedy world no longer with us.    Over the next eighty minutes, professional competition develops into a philosophical dissection of what people find funny. This is punctuated by some well-honed gags that sees each man go some way to reveal the personal drive behind their acts, be it Cooper’s ramshackle magic show, Morecambe’s double act with Ernie Wise...