Coffee-Table Notes

The Poetry Club at SWG3, Glasgow Four stars   A giant inflatable heart leftover from Valentine’s hangs down in the Poetry Club bar prior to the performance of Kathryn Mincer’s bite size new play in the main room next door. While the audience are encouraged to write down what they wish they had asked their ex, it is perhaps worth considering that the trouble with inflatable hearts is they either burst or else slowly deflate and lie limp.    One or the other appears to be what has happened to Alexa and Thomas, the not so happy couple driving each other crazy in Mincer’s play, brought to life in Dominique Mabille’s production by a young international company with their sights clearly set on something bigger.    Alexa and Thomas aren’t crazy the way they were on their first date, nor when one of them told the other they loved them for the first time, and the other one loved them right back. After just shy of seven years together, alas, it might just have someth...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow  Five stars   The stage curtain creaks as it rises with painstaking slowness on the barren twilight zone occupied by Samuel Beckett’s most forlorn of duos in Dominic Hill’s moving new production for the Citz. Here, George Costigan and Matthew Kelly embody Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s mould breaking piece of mid twentieth century existential vaudeville with a tragicomic rapport that comes through a lifetime of shared experience.    All dressed down and wildly bearded, the pair look more like redneck hobos living in the woods than the silent movie double act they are often presented as. Only through the terminal sense of tragicomic pathos that they hold on to throughout all the brilliant bickering Beckett has concocted for them do they find some kind of accidental salvation.    Jean Chan’s set looks like some battle scarred lower depths, with Costigan and Kelly guarding it through the night like long lost casualties of a war no...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Three stars   When Paul McCartney decided to get his head together in the country in the aftermath of the Beatles splitting up, this took him and his then wife Linda to the wilds of his Campbeltown farm. This eventually sired their band Wings’ 1977 Christmas number one, Mull of Kintyre.    Before all that, however, Fab Macca had Kathy and Jack to contend with. As the now seventy-something grandparents to Molly explain to her for an oral history project in Milly Sweeney’s new play, it was Beatles daft Jack’s idea for the couple to go on holiday to Campbeltown. It was the long hot summer of 1976, and Jack had a vague but determined notion of meeting his pop idol. What happens instead is a series of more everyday epiphanies that force the young couple to navigate their often fractious relationship while making a set of memories that will last a lifetime.    Sally Reid’s production for this first show in a new season of lunchtime theatre prese...

Tramway, Glasgow Four stars   Sex and the disabled has long been considered by some as a taboo topic, with presumptions that those with disabilities don’t have sexual feelings, let alone act on them, still prevailing in some quarters. Such ideas should have been put to bed after the screening of The Skin Horse, an impressionistic 1983 Channel Four documentary on the subject that was co-scripted by the late Nabil Shaban, who also appeared in it prior to becoming a familiar presence on Scotland’s stages later in his career.    More than four decades on, the subject is still hot property, as this new play from disabled based theatre company Birds of Paradise demonstrates in a work co-written by Hana Pascal Keegan, Gabriella Sloss, and BOP artistic director Robert Softley Gale.   The play’s main focus is Ben, a nineteen-year-old wheelchair user who has barely left his parents house for six months following an incident in a Liverpool nightclub. With his only real human co...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars    For almost three decades now, composer Jim Parker’s foreboding theremin waltz has been an oddly comforting prime time telly fanfare that has opened the door to millions of viewers on what may or may not be regarded as rural middle England’s answer to Twin Peaks. So it goes as well for Guy Unsworth’s stage version of Caroline Graham’s very first Inspector Barnaby novel that gets behind the hedgerows and into the deceptively sleepy killing fields of the fictional county of Midsomer.   As long term fans and subscribers to ITVx will already know, this involves the quietly determined Inspector Tom Barnaby and his wet behind the ears Sergeant Gavin Troy dispatched to the even sleepier hamlet of Badger’s Drift to investigate the death of an 80-something local called Emily Simpson.    In a village peopled by a roll-call of dotty eccentric spinsters, Freudian mummy’s boys, wannabe artists, posh girl gold diggers and illicit trysts th...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   When George Bernard Shaw dragged himself out of premature retirement in 1923, the great man’s late burst was inspired by Joan of Arc being made a saint. A decade on, Shaw was persuaded to write a screenplay based on his drama. As other filmmakers have shown, the story of the French teenager who made France great again after hearing holy voices in her head only to be burnt at the stake for her trouble was ripe big screen material. Shaw’s slimmed down version of his play, alas, remains unmade.    It is his screenplay, however, that is the source  of director/designer Stewart Laing’s remarkable rendering that sees Martin O’Connor’s malevolent Chorus speak the scenic directions as the action unfolds. At points his narration makes him sound like a frontline war correspondent in a way that recalls the historical reconstructions of Peter Watkins’s great documentary styled film, Culloden, by way of the voiceover disruptions of radical L...

The Studio, Edinburgh Four stars   Meet Joey. He’s just turned up at church for his best mate’s mum’s funeral looking and smelling like he’s spent the night in Sodom, and has a eulogy to give. Before all that, however, Joey has a story to tell, not just about what happened last night, but how a gay Catholic teenager like him growing up in Galway managed to navigate his way to who he is. And why not? As the great big cross at the centre of the stage makes clear, he’s in the right place to confess all.    Conor O'Dwyer performs his debut solo play with an unfettered brio in Jen McGregor’s production, which comes home following an Edinburgh Festival Fringe run and several years of development care of Capital Theatres and others. In what is clearly a labour of love for O’Dwyer, the play sees Joey bluff his way through school and embrace a few stereotypes en route to enlightenment beyond being a self styled ‘bad gay’.   While O’Dwyer’s writing makes clear there are still ...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars   Christmas has either come early, late or is now an all year round thing judging by the title of the suitably named Mischief Theatre Company’s latest excursion into on and off stage chaos care of their perennially O.T.T. Cornley Amateur Drama Society. As it is, for fans of the, ahem, C.A.D.S. since their inception a decade and a half ago with the cunningly titled The Play that Goes Wrong, such out of season anomalies will be as predictably familiar as much as the show is a chance to catch up with old friends.   Cue Daniel Lewis’s dictatorial director Chris, Henry Lewis’s old ham Robert, Greg Tannahill’s nervous wreck Jonathan, Ashley Tucker’s stars in her eyes Sandra and the rest of a company with only a passing knowledge of Charles Dickens’ classic festive yarn, and even then only by way of the Muppets. With Chris casting himself as Scrooge, what follows beyond the Christmas jumpers, Jonathan’s fear of heights, young Dennis’ inabi...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   Two men stand peering at a large white screen made of paper. It is as if they are looking out on to some idyll-like landscape or a futuristic city that remains invisible to anyone without vision enough to build it. A printer at the side of the stage spews out sheets of paper with words on it that act as silent dialogue. Once the men move the screen to one side, a group of small tree trunk sized logs and some wooden pallets are revealed. For the next half hour, each man takes an axe to a log apiece and chops and chops and chopsuntil they splinter and break.   This audacious and compelling spectacle of hard graft sees the performers build up a percussive momentum that at times recalls the pounding rhythms of 1980s industrial music relocated to a forest. What happens over the next hour beyond their mini display of physical strength, however, is a remarkable study in renewal, recycling and transformation through a mix of imagination an...

Summerhall, Edinburgh Three stars   Auntie Empire has something to say. As  writer/performer Julia Taudevin’s creation holds court over a soundtrack of couthy Scottish classics, the audience enter to become both her subjects and a very, very, very extended family. The address that follows sees Auntie prepare to give her last will and testament as she slowly falls apart along with the last fetid gasps of British imperialism.   Taudevin’s new solo show premiered as part of the Manipulate festival this weekend after assorted showcases over the last few years. Clad in prosthetically enhanced twin set and joke shop teeth, Taudevin’s Auntie is the sort of toff so posh you can only understand one in ten words they say. A veneer of respectable authority manifests itself in cups of tea and Tunnock’s teacakes handed out to the audience, some of whom are forced on stage to do her bidding. Gradually, however, Auntie’s hectoring gives way to a bowel busting collapse of power.   U...

Lyra, Edinburgh Three stars   The studio of the former school transformed by the Lyra organisation into Scotland’s first dedicated theatre for children and young people resembles a playroom prior to Bruno Gallagher’s new show for this year’s Manipulate festival of visual theatre and animation. Young audience members try on masks and costumes that sit on hangars waiting to transform the wearers, who pose for dramatic selfies. Other props sit on tables waiting to be perused. Wild images of surreal characters line the walls, while all the while a package tour soundtrack compiled from sunnier climes plays with joyful abandon.   If this interactive pre-show spectacle allows a glimpse into what goes on in Gallagher’s head, it also acts as a trailer for what happens upstairs in the theatre by way of a quartet of what their creator calls ‘Absurdities’. These are bite-size vignettes inspired by Gallagher’s wanderings in Europe played out by an array of creatures that have effectively b...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Three stars    After more than fifteen years creating once in a lifetime musicals out of thin air and audience suggestions, the Olivier award winning, BBC Radio 4 friendly comic troupe The Showstoppers will know to always expect the unexpected. Even so, when on tour, they should always brush up on the local landmarks, lest someone throws out some serious googlies.    Such was the hilarious case on Friday during the first of the Showstoppers two-night run at the Citz, when co-director and mine host for the evening Adam Meggido was taken somewhat by surprise on several counts. Firstly, while asking for suggestions of a location for his company’s still unwritten opus, the suggestion of Haven Caravan Parks threw him. As the purveyors of static caravan summer breaks are a UK wide operation, his reaction probably says much beyond geography. More pertinently, perhaps, when the Barras was suggested, it was clear that  Glasgow's world famous mar...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   Birth, sex and death are pretty much the driving forces in one form or another behind most human drama as we know it. They are the heart of the matter too in the life cycle of a puppet as laid bare in absurdist maverick Mamoru Iriguchi’s latest creation, which previewed in the Citz Studio over the weekend prior to a forthcoming short run at Edinburgh’s Manipulate festival of visual theatre.    Here, Iriguchi and fellow performer Julia Darrouy are Tangerine and Sunshine, a pair of life size puppets playing versions of each other. Introduced by a much smaller narrator puppet that then proceeds to keel over, Tangerine and Sunshine are then taken under the wing of the narrator’s now fully proportioned ghost, who takes them on a trip in which they get to explore all puppets great and small by way of different size versions of themselves.    As opposites attract and one size most definitely does not fit all in certain situations,...

Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh  Four stars   When Iddo Oberski  suffered a stroke in 2009, his whole world was turned upside down. While he could now only walk with two sticks, this didn’t stop the then academic from exploring notions of freedom stemming from the ideas of nineteenth century spiritual guru and author of The Philosophy of Freedom, Rudolf Steiner. Oberski also began to explore the history of his own family in the Netherlands who were victims of the Nazi Holocaust.   Seventeen years on since his accident, Oberski has channelled his various experiences and researches into a deeply personal meditation that fuses memoir, history lesson, puppetry, music, and film in a slow burning line of enquiry that suggests emancipation comes in many forms. Over the seventy minutes of a production co-directed by Oberski and collaborator Mark Kydd, this evolves into a one man philosophical cabaret that takes in card tricks, live flute interludes and an ongoing dia...

Leith Depot, Edinburgh Four stars   When Dan the man left his Edinburgh home for Iceland in 2015 to study graphic design, it was the beginning of a great adventure. Here he was, out on his own and off the leash with his whole life in front of him, and his cheeky Scottish charm seemingly a passport to anywhere. Reykjavik was buzzing, and so was he, and for a giddy moment, Dan was truly living the dream. Unfortunately in Heidi Docherty’s new short solo play performed by herself, it doesn’t last.    What follows is an unflinching portrait of how a fun loving cheeky chappie has his already fragile confidence dented by the voices in his head who over the next few years mark out Dan’s struggles - with money, his course, his numerous jobs, his love life, his family, and ultimately with himself - until he can’t take anymore.    The result is a tragic indictment on the perils of young people overwhelmed by anguish even before you realise that for Docherty this is painful...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow  Four stars   Old ghosts are everywhere in this latest tour of the late Stephen Mallatratt’s ingenious staging of Susan Hill’s best selling 1983 gothic horror novel, in which an ageing solicitor called Arthur Kipps attempts to lay those ghosts to rest. He does this by telling his story of what happened years before after he was dispatched to a marshy godforsaken landscape to sort out a deceased recluse’s affairs. Here, the spectral figure of the woman who gives the show its title haunts the town into submission, with portents of doom at her every fleeting appearance, as Kipps learns to his cost.    Back in 1987, Mallatratt took Hill’s already spooky yarn and set it in an empty theatre, where Kipps has hired a young actor to play out his past in an attempt to exorcise his demons. Originally intended as a low key entertainment performed in the theatre bar, in director Robin Herford’s hands, Mallatratt’s creation took on a life of its own, and up ...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   When Stephen King set out to write an old time prison break yarn in the early 1980s, the result was Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,. This hard boiled novella about life on the inside for ex banker Andy Dufresne after being convicted for murdering his wife and her lover was narrated by Ellis ‘Red’ Redding, a lifer who has become the go-to guy for anything his fellow inmates might need to make the time inside a little easier. With Andy thrown in the deep end of a corrupt late 1940s institution led from the top by prison warden Stammas, what follows over almost thirty years is a story of finding freedom against all the odds.   Much of this will be familiar from Frank Darabont’s 1994 sleeper hit film version, but it was to King’s original that Owen O’Neill and Dave Johns returned to when they adapted it for the stage back in 2009. This return of David Esbjornson’s fleshed out production for this latest UK tour sees Joe McFadden ...

The Georgian House, Edinburgh Four stars   The sins of rhyme, as Robert Burns calls his craft in this new dramatisation of the bard’s words, have much to answer for. Burns himself was an all too familiar bundle of contradictions in his output. On the one hand, he had a common touch that tapped into the collective consciousness enough to take poetry into the mainstream. On the other, his feckless shagabout ways left much domestic mess in his wake. This is before the one about the slave trade the cash-strapped people’s poet almost signs up with to help escape his lot.   All of this and more is addressed in James Clements’ hour long compendium of words and music which returns to the Georgian House’s Robert Adam designed Edinburgh New Town des-res in the run up to Burns Night following last year’s Fringe run and recent tour. With the audience seated the length of a dinner table laid out with all the accoutrements, the traditional Burnsian gathering is duly upended by Clements...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   The world is full of Basil Fawltys these days. Half a century after John Cleese and Connie Booth’s savagely funny portrait of middle aged male neuroses was unleashed kicking and screaming onto prime time Sunday night TV, Basil walks among us once more, as pompous, repressed and set to spontaneously combust as he ever was.    Cleese’s hit stage version of his creation has already proven to be far more than the pension plan nostalgia fest it might initially look like, with the series of note perfect impressions from director Caroline Jay Ranger’s young cast capturing every madcap nuance of his creations as they reboot them with new life.   For those for whom what has been designated to be TV’s greatest sitcom may have passed them by, Basil and his wife Sybil run a sleepy hotel in Torquay, where maid Polly keeps things together as Basil, Sybil and Spanish waiter Manuel attempt to serve a series of increasingly unwelcome guests. ...