Coffee-Table Notes

Theatre 118, Glasgow Four stars   Meet Alex, the twenty something woman whose entire life is on hold in Larissa Ryan’s solo play. Scratching a living answering calls for a company selling the sort of ideal homes she could never afford, the 3pm till midnight shift suits her ongoing avoidance of the entire human race. Her only interactions come from the after hours freaks and weirdos on the other end of the line who really don’t want whatever it is she’s selling. Alex knows this because they tell her so in graphic terms.    Alex doesn’t hold back either in Ryan’s performance, as she confesses all her troubles while craving some kind of way out. Her sounding board for this comes in the form of a bunny rabbit glove puppet recommended by her therapist. The tough love Alex is harangued with by the bunny recalls the co-dependent sparring dished out in ancient TV routines between ventriloquist Shari Lewis and her similarly sarcastic appendage, Lamb Chop. It is the voices in Alex’...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh  Five stars    The birds are circling in this new take on one of the greatest children’s stories ever told, but nicely. As the flock of green and yellow plumaged puppets swoop, soar and provide comfort several times over to little orphan Ella, they offer a form of liberation as well to their already free-spirited charge, even as she is under the thumb of her gleefully wicked stepmother and her pair of brattish enfants terrible stepsiblings.   This makes for a delightfully colourful Cinderella in Sally Cookson and Adam Peck’s version of the story, written with their original production’s company when it was first seen in Bristol back in 2011. Jemima Levick’s new look at it for the Lyceum’s Christmas show picks up the baton and invests it with a heart, soul and visual wonder that brings it to joyful life. At the heart of this is a fusion of handsomely realised sound and vision bolstered by a set of deliciously grotesque performances...

P itlochry Festival Theatre Five stars   The hills are very much alive in and around Pitlochry just now, as a new wind blows in care of artistic director Alan Cumming. As a parting shot from the still fresh looking old order spearheaded by former artistic head Elizabeth Newman, Sam Hardie’s seasonal revival of Newman’s final show from this time last year similarly goes out on a high. It also shows how great work can create stars. This comes here in the form of Kirsty Findlay, who returns to the role of runaway nun Maria with the same youthful brio and vocal prowess that sees her apply a maturity and understated energy from start to finish in this just shy of three-hour show.    Findlay is helped, of course, by composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II's superlative showtunes, which she and a twenty-two strong, all singing, all dancing cast that doubles up as a mini orchestra bring to life with unabashed gusto under musical director Richard Reeday.  ...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh  Four stars   Life’s a scream for Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, the creators and stars of TV anthology show, Inside No.9. Over nine (natch) series’ between 2014 and 2024, Pemberton and Shearsmith mined the ghosts of showbiz past to make something that was nominally a sit-com but which came possessed with a knowingly dark heart. The show’s dramatic marriage of 1970s hammy horror and tales of the unexpected played tricks with form, content and genre that mixed arcane gothic with post modern archness in a way that pushed whatever button was going.    So it goes with this hit stage show, which sees the duo present a bumper sized live compendium designed to keep both diehards and novices equally on their toes. Opening with an extended scene-setter that plumbed the depths of every theatregoer’s worst nightmare, Pemberton and Shearsmith introduce what on one level is one great big theatrical in-joke before framing the bulk of the first half ...

Theatre 118, Glasgow  Four stars   It was all Sheena Easton’s fault. If the Bellshill diva hadn’t made her prodigal’s return to Glasgow for 1990’s free concert, The Big Day, in possession of a transatlantic accent, the girl gang at the centre of Milly Sweeney’s play wouldn’t have ended up in a police holding cell.    To rewind for those who might not have been there, The Big Day brought a quarter of a million people out onto the streets of Glasgow to see some of Scotland’s biggest pop acts of the era, including Texas, Deacon Blue, Hue and Cry and Wet Wet Wet. Coming in the thick of the city’s year as European City of Culture, it also made a statement about Glasgow’s homegrown renaissance. As big and shiny a PR exercise as it might have been, most of the acts had working class roots.    Hence the disgust of Debs, Fiona, Gracie and Kirsty regarding Ms. Easton’s grand entrance. Having grown up beside each other on the same estate, this is the first time the gi...

Theatre 118, Glasgow  Three stars   International football euphoria is on every fan’s mind this week following Scotland’s World Cup qualifying victory over Denmark on Tuesday night. But beyond all that snatching victory from the jaws of defeat type stuff, what about the grassroots teams that slug it out on neglected pitches week in, week out, with little reward other than some dreams of glory and loyalty to those who put on the same shirts.    Loyalty is everything in Patrick Marber’s play, first seen in 2015, and revived here as the debut show from the brand new Paperhat Theatre company. Set in the bare brick dressing room of a small time semi professional non-league football club, that loyalty from all three characters is bought off pretty quickly. Even the saintly Johnny Yates, former club hero turned kit man and informal talent scout, almost gives way to temptation in the face of big talking Jimmy Kidd. An old school manager with the crumpled suit and gobby attit...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Three stars   In the wee small hours, the members of the Full Shilling Social Club gather under cover to share stories and imbibe good whisky. Given that Jimmy and May are the only two members, it’s a pretty exclusive affair, but that is how they like it. The so called retirement village the pair have been decamped to is a pretty good front for such nocturnal activities, even if neither party is being quite as honest as they appear.    May was an actress, and, like anyone of her vintage, has anecdotes aplenty. There’s the one about the wannabe Hollywood starlet with tooth issues for starters. Best of all is the one about meeting Frank Sinatra back stage after ol’ blue eyes’ 1990 show at Ibrox. As for Jimmy, he can match May with gags aplenty. But what will happen if May goes to live with what up until now has been her terminally absent son? And why is she pretty much dress rehearsing her conversations with Jimmy, writing down every bon mot in advance les...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh  Four stars   When little Anna Mae Bullock caused a commotion in church when she started freestyling on the hymns, her destiny as a soul singer with one of the biggest voices in town was assured. Or at least that is how this epic homage to that little girl who morphed into Tina Turner tells it, with a bunch of greatest hits to go with it. One of them, Nutbush City Limits, is here the number that got Anna Mae into so much trouble. Reinvented here from the go-go groove created with her creative partner, husband and nemesis Ike Turner, it becomes the gospel hymn that always lurked beneath.   Now embarking on its first UK tour since its initial West End run in 2018, Phyllida Lloyd’s production of a book by Katori Hall with Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins is a warts and all look at Turner life and work that sees her combat prejudice, misogyny and abuse to become a triumphant figure.   Deserted by her angry mother and left with an even angrier father...

Òran Mór , Glasgow Three stars   Everything is up in the air for Liam, the twenty-something stoner in Kevin P. Gilday’s new play, this week’s lunchtime offering at A Play, a Pie and a Pint. Liam is the sole surviving resident of a condemned inner city high-rise about to be demolished, with or without his presence.    Only when social worker Joanne turns up at Liam’s door does he realise he’s been made the figurehead of a protest against the demolition he wasn’t aware of being a part. All he wants is to stay in a room where the presence of his lost mum still lingers in the plants and the black and white films he watches.    As Joanne attempts to ensure Liam won’t throw himself out of his flat window, she reveals ghosts of her own that she is attempting to lay to rest. From Liam’s initial suspicion of Joanne, the pair form a bond that occasionally misfires before the plug is finally pulled on what Liam used to call home.    Gilday’s play takes a look at ...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   The warm up guy has done his bit, the recording light is on, and anticipation is high for a live taping of one of the best-loved sitcoms of all time. Except, as the title of writers Bob and Tobly McSmith and composer Assaf Gleizner’s musical highlights like a prompt card waved at a studio audience, we are about to witness a loving pastiche of the show that inspired, not just catchphrases, but haircuts and lifestyle choices too.    Over a decade from 1994 to 2004, David Crane and Marta Kauffman’s flatshare comedy concerning the lives and loves of a goofy sextet of upwardly mobile late twenty and early thirty something New Yorkers saw a generation of fans do their growing up alongside them.    Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe and Joey are all here in Michael Gyngell’s production of a show which has now been on the go almost as long as the programme it parodies prior to this UK tour. And it is a cr...

Theatre 118, Glasgow Three stars   When Jeanie met Tam, it was love at first song in Helen Fox’s new play, which charts the life and times of two friends who bond over music, but who never quite get to sing the same tune. Jeanie and Tam are just seven years old when they first hear each other back in the 1970s. Their world is one of bubblegum pop from Brotherhood of Man to ABBA, finding mutual ground over the all-conquering Queen, even if Tam doesn’t know the right words.    Even at that young age the pair understand the power of finding a kindred spirit, and swear to meet at the same time and place every five years, come what may. As musical tastes change, this works fine for a while. Jeanie and Tam even form a band, and while the music never stops for Tam, Jeanie’s world falls silent, and for all they try to stay true to their five-year promise, things are never quite the same again.    At first glance, Fox’s play is classic rites of passage stuff, a nostalgia...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   The power is failing in Enda Walsh’s play, set in an inner city tower block where a woman called Isla awaits her ticket out of what appears to be a life long stretch in solitary confinement. Is she a princess being held prisoner and in need of rescuing by the hapless Young Man observing her through a bank of screens in another part of the building? Are we witnessing a state sanctioned experiment in human behaviour with both Isla and the Young Man cast as guinea pigs to see how much isolation they will tolerate before doing a runner? Either way, that diminishing power is about a lot more than the shonky electrics that cause the lights to fail and assorted screens to freeze.   First seen in Galway in 2016, Walsh’s play slows down his more recognisable torrent of words to be found from his 1996 breakout hit, Disco Pigs, onwards, for a less frantic if just as elliptical set of exchanges. Not that there is anything sedate about the Glasgow b...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Three stars    The loneliness of the jobbing actor has been the stuff of back stage dramas for many a year. For every fairytale story of overnight stardom and hitting the big time in Hollywood, alas, the every day reality is more one of under appreciated graft. In today’s world of instant stardom, after all, if you want to be famous, the internet is where it’s at. It’s a generational thing. Maybe.    Matt Anderson’s new play for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest lunchtime theatre season takes a look at both as he sets up an overdue reunion between Gerry and Tyler. Gerry is a fifty-something actor who has just opened a smaller than small scale tour of Death of a Sails Man with his partner Peter. Tyler is Gerry’s seventeen-year-old son, a ‘content provider’ with several million followers on social media.    When Tyler turns up unannounced in Gerry’s dressing room after his first preview, it’s to relay to him a life changing offer that involv...

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Three stars    Love, sex and death are at the rotting heart of Federico Garcia Lorca’s play, in which unfinished business between families spurs on the doomed conclusion of its scattershot passions. Lorca wrote his rural tragedy in 1932, turning what could have been presented as a domestic melodrama into something more fantastical.    The play’s premise is simple enough. A young couple plan to marry. The Groom’s Mother gets wind of some gossip about the Bride, who might have once had a fling with a member of the family who killed her husband. The Bride still holds a torch for her ex, whereupon they do a runner during the wedding reception. The Groom chases after the pair, whereupon, what might have been a more regular wedding day fallout sees the bodies pile up.    Tanya Ronder’s new version of the play sees director André Agius place his cast of final year BA acting students inside designer Chantal Jared’s virgin wh...

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Four stars   Blood is a lot thicker than water for Oskar and his new friend Eli in Jack Thorne’s stage version of Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist’s much-filmed teen vampire novel. Revived here by director Finn den Hertog in a production performed by final year acting students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Oskar is a teenage schoolboy bullied by the tough kids at school. Eli appears to be the girl next door who can more than hold her own in a scrap.    As their friendship clicks, the pair tap out after dark messages to each other in morse code on the bedroom wall they share. When the local murder rate increases at the hands of some kind of blood sucking serial killer, alas, for Eli and Oskar, the going gets weird.   Den Hertog has his cast play out Oskar and Eli’s slow burning rites of passage at an almost funereal pace that at times resembles a Scandi-noir thriller rather than the spate of supernatural...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars   “Welcome to Dreamland” says the host known as the Engineer in this rebooted production of lyricist Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel  Schönberg ’s Vietnam war inspired musical. Originally produced by Cameron Mackintosh, who is still on board with fellow producer Michael Harrison now in charge, Boublil and  Schönberg ’s epic update of Madame Butterfly is now a staggering 36 years old.    The atrocities of Vietnam and the subsequent fallout that rocked America throughout the 1970s may be getting further away in time, but even on this year’s fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, remains in living memory. Whether Boublil and Schonberg’s vision is an accurate part of that memory is up for discussion, but it remains a theatrical phenomenon that still fills main houses.    Inspired by a photograph of a Vietnamese woman leaving her child at the gate of the airport en route to live with their American ex GI fat...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Five stars   “Four scruffy working class oiks?” says one of the the posh twits who have just accidentally ended up managing one of the most incendiary musical forces of the 1960s. “It’s the new thing.” So it goes with the history of British pop since some of those oiks first strapped on a guitar. The story of The Kinks is a quintessential part of that history. It is also one that should be required reading at all music industry teach-ins lest a younger generation of wannabe rock stars get caught up in a similar mire. In the case of the Kinks, preternatural talent and working class ambition are put through an industry wringer of success, exploitation, burnout and a residue of cynicism that sits alongside a brilliant and era defining back catalogue.    This is hardly the stuff of dancing in the aisles jukebox musicals, perhaps, but as Edward Hall’s production of Joe Penhall’s script has shown since it was first seen more than a decade ago, it has mad...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars    Halloween is about to bite, the party frocks are on, and a creepy time is about to be had by all round at Auntie Sandra’s place. Such is the state of play in Éimi Quinn’s new comedy for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s ongoing season of lunchtime theatre. Sandra and her niece Lisa are dressed to kill, and judging by the fact that Sandra has just battered Lisa’s cheating husband into the kitchen Lino, death very much becomes them.    But what to do with the body? The only solution, it seems, is to do a Sweeney Todd and cut their prey into enough tiny pieces to fill up several bin bags. If only the duo’s stream of gentleman callers weren’t constantly interrupting them from the task at hand, be it busy body neighbour Dennis, whose sole saving grace is his intimate knowledge of bin collecting times; or crap clairvoyant Mark, who seems intent on attempting the exorcise the place. With an unseen builder also trying to get through Auntie ...