Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars    In December 1982, twelve miners descended 2000 feet below the surface of Kinneil Colliery in Bo’ness. This was no ordinary working day, however, but a sit-in protest at the announcement by the National Coal Board of the pit’s imminent closure. Two years before the Miners’ Strike, and with no support from the unions, the protest’s failure was the shape of things to come as British working class culture was transformed forever.    Almost forty-three years after the Kinneil sit-in, Sylvia Dow’s play excavates this piece of local history in a play that is both mournful and monumental. As it honours the recent past, it also looks to the future in a parallel plot in which a couple of centuries hence everyone is living underground, with the perils of outside an alluring totem of what went before.    For those who occupy both time zones in Philip Howard’s production for Dow’s Sylvian company and the Bo’ness based Barony The...

Òran Mó r, Glasgow Three stars   The heat is on when Iain meets Zainab after going in search of a place to cool down. Being downtown Marrakesh, however, things don’t quite turn out as planned. Iain is a gay man from Manchester who turns up at Zainab’s spa. Given the strict rules in Morocco regarding the rights of women, the two shouldn’t even be in the same room, let alone be preparing a very special massage. With Iain wheelchair bound and unable to bear to be touched, even that comes with complications. With protests on the streets outside, Zainab is as alive to the power of dissent as Iain is, and once both let their guard down they find a surprising amount of common ground.    Simon Jay’s new play - the latest in this season’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint series of lunchtime plays - is a warm and human take on everyday solidarity across cultures where differences might normally turn into something toxic. Jay’s script may have a polemical heart, but the way his characters m...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Three Stars   When the massed ranks of Scottish Brass champions the Whitburn Band join forces at the end of Lau accordionist and guitarist Martin Green’s new play, alternating with the Fife based Kingdom Brass, the sound they make together is one of unity laced with a bittersweet mix of sadness and euphoria. As the culmination of a show about working class experience in a former mining town decimated by the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike, it is a finale that speaks volumes about everything that went before.   This is embodied by the seventeen-year-old firebrand who gives Green’s play its title. Keli’s everyday life may be chaos as she tends to her mum inbetween shifts at the supermarket and a failing college course, but when she plays her tenor horn with the local brass band she comes alive. Keli’s musical skills are recognised by bandleader Brian, who promotes her to soloist for a competition at the Royal Albert Hall.    While Keli makes it t...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars   A World War Two soldier is playing We’ll Meet Again on the piano at the start of this latest tour of C.S. Lewis’ classic morality tale. The melancholy melody is about the most down to earth thing you’re likely to see over the next two hours of a show that turns its dramatic world upside down in epic fashion. Scaled up by director Michael Fentiman from Sally Cookson’s 2017 version at Leeds Playhouse, the result is spectacular.    The opening song sets the tone for the wartime evacuation of the four Pevensie children, who are decamped to Aberdeen, where the allure for their new home’s spare room proves too much for the eternally curious Lucy. Before she knows where she is she has gone beyond the flea ridden fur coats and landed in Narnia.    As imagined by designer Tom Paris and original designer Rae Smith, the Narnia under the queendom of Katy Stephens’ White Witch’s more resembles some Fritz Lang styled dystopia driven by...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   Esme has gone a bridge too far in Millie Sweeney's new play, her professional debut after it won the St Andrews Playwriting Award. A Glasgow art student who's lost her mojo, Esme has given up, not just on her painting, but for  anything resembling life itself. Harris is just the opposite. He's just scored a new job with a high-class eaterie and is on a roll. He may only be washing dishes, but it's a start.    When Harris saves Esme’s life after she attempts to throw herself into the Clyde, both are affected in radically different ways. As Esme manages to pull herself back to the surface with the help of family, therapy and friends she never knew she had, Harris sinks to the lower depths. As the duo’s parallel lives circle around each other, they trace an all too hazardous line between hope and despair. This is an assured and heartfelt debut from Sweeney, whose initial diary like speeches by Esme and Harris become ever rich...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars    The missionary position, as set down in the gospel according to Mormon, is to spread the word of the Lord as far and as peachy-keenly as possible. Such is the premise behind Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone’s now fourteen-year-old Broadway smash, which returns to Glasgow for a three-week run. For those not already keeping the faith, the show transforms the perfectly coiffed door stopping evangelists from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints into an all singing, all dancing, perma-smiling showbiz troupe.    In-between throwing shapes cheesy enough to have graced a 1950s family friendly variety show, like the animals in the Ark, our heroes go forth two by two as they are packed off to far-flung climes in need of salvation. In the case of goody-two-shoes himbo Elder Price and puppy-dog terminal liar Elder Cunningham, they are tasked to convert the masses in a seemingly godless Uganda. For the locals, alas, a few o...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Three stars   Life is one great big musical for Charlie, the young woman at the heart of Taylor Dyson and Calum Kelly’s lo-fi musical, the latest lunchtime treat as part of Oran Mor’s current A Play, a Pie and a Pint season of bite-size theatre. For Charlie, alas, where once all she had to think about was the job she loved in the Inverness bowling alley that gives the play its title, a run of everyday tragedies suggests any kind of happy ending is a long way off yet.    Having lost her job, her home and all of her family except her brother Ross overnight, Charlie’s solution is to head for Dundee, where her granddad’s long lost brother may or may not be hiding behind sunglasses and a Stetson. Missing presumed lost by Ross, Charlie’s penchant for attracting disaster causes him to fear the worst. Charlie, however, is merely changing lanes as she finds a new song to sing.    There is charm aplenty in Dyson and Kelly’s quirky tale of an innocent abr...

The Pavilion, Glasgow Three stars   All life walks through Kim’s Convenience, the Toronto based corner shop that gives Ins Choi’s play its title. Best known to many from its Canadian Broadcasting Company TV adaptation that ran for five series between 2016 and 2021, and which can still be found on Netflix, Choi’s 201l template set the tone by putting a Korean immigrant and his increasingly westernised family at its centre.    Where Appa (Korean for ‘dad’) works all hours holding court from behind the counter, Umma (‘mum’) quietly keeps the family together. Their daughter Janet has ambitions to be a photographer, while estranged son Jung can only communicate with his mother at church. The shop may be at the heart of the local community, but with Janet looking set to embark on a fine romance with local cop Alex and everything else going on besides, it doesn’t look like Appa will have anyone to leave his empire to any time soon. Jung, however, might just beg to differ.  ...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow  Four stars   The irresistible rise of theatre built on the premise of dramatic calamity both on and back stage has come a long way since it was arguably spawned by Michael Frayn’s ingenious 1982 farce, Noises Off. Since then, the likes of the tellingly named The Play that Goes Wrong has seen a younger generation of artists take what was once a fringe pursuit into the theatrical mainstream.    So it goes as well for the Say it Again, Sorry? company, whose starting point may be Oscar Wilde’s subversive drawing room comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest, but who manage to disrupt it with the sort of anarchic intent that might appeal to dear Oscar himself.   All seems well at first in what looks like a decidedly old school wheeze, as man about town Algernon awaits a visitation from his chum Ernest. When his arrival is announced, alas, his absence is more akin to Waiting for Godot. This prompts an intervention from the show’s director, who ...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars    When radical Italian farceur Dario Fo first performed his scurrilous solo take on biblically inspired yarns penned with Franca Rame back in 1969, revolution was in the air and the peasants were revolting against pretty much anything that was going. A 1970s TV production of Rame and Fo’s play even prompted the Vatican to take a dive into arts criticism when they dubbed it ‘the most blasphemous play in the history of television’.   When the late Robbie Coltrane took to the stage in 1990 with Joseph Farrell’s translation, Rame and Fo’s comic theological riffs were as damning of assorted establishments as ever. Three and a half decades on again, as Farrell’s new Scots version is brought to turbo charged life in this week’s edition of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest season of lunchtime theatre, not much has changed. Nevertheless, Lawrence Boothman’s rude intrusion as an anarchist on the run from the rioting outside the theatre he is seeki...

The Studio, Edinburgh Three stars   Art, life, and the blurring between the two are at the heart of Maria MacDonell’s play, in which MacDonell plays Estelle, a model at a life drawing class run by The Artist. He is the sort of pompous ass whose grand statements seem to have stepped out of the 1950s. As he waits for Estelle, some of the audience sit at easels on the stage as surrogate class members, while those in regular seats are similarly given pencil and paper to sketch out their impressions if they wish.    Only when Estelle arrives does The Artist’s high theory open up into flesh and blood material, as Estelle’s personal archive becomes crucial to her own art. This makes for an impressionistic and abstract self-portrait of bodies, ageing and a life that was once a blank canvas that has become shaded in by a life of incident and colour.    Not since Jacques Rivette’s 1991 film, La Belle Noiseuse, has the relationship between maestro and muse been so exposed,...

The Studio, Edinburgh Four stars   When Arthur met Jane, it was love at first spillage. In a crowded bar accidentally serenaded by a Frank Sinatra soundtrack, the red wine might have stained, but the merry dance the couple in waiting stepped out into was all part of Arthur’s plan. A lifetime and the onset of dementia later, alas, Arthur and Jane may sit next to each other like bookends, but Arthur can barely remember either of their names. As soon as their song comes on, however, they are loving each other to the moon and back once more.    Matthew Seager’s beautifully realised two-hander tackles the cruellest of illnesses and the redemptive power of music in exquisitely intimate fashion. Performed by Seager himself as Arthur and Lydia White stepping into Jane’s shoes, the power of Andy Routledge’s production comes in its quiet understatement. As Arthur becomes increasingly dependent on Jane, Jane is overwhelmed by a life she never planned. As Seager and White step out of...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh  Four stars   When Baz Luhrmann made Moulin Rouge in 2001, the last of the Australian auteur’s ‘Red Curtain Trilogy’ after Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet was an audacious fusion of turn of the nineteenth century Paris-by-night bohemianism and contemporary pop bangers. This made for the ultimate backstage musical. Almost a quarter of a century on, director Alex Timbers and writer John Logan’s delirious stage mash up has become a global sensation. First performed in 2018, productions in New York, London and Melbourne are still running, with the show’s first world tour opening in Edinburgh where it is in residence for the next six weeks.   This extensive back-story only goes some way to introduce the sheer scale, ambition and outrageous excess of the three hyperactive hours of  breathless spectacle that is the result. If plot is what you’re after, Logan’s book stays faithful to the film, as American dreamer in search of a scene Christ...

Dundee Rep Four stars   Faith and belief are at the heart of John Patrick Shanley’s 2004 play, seen here for the first time in Scotland since 2010. Set in a Catholic school in the Bronx district of New York in 1964, Shanley’s play pointedly frames itself a year after the assassination of President John F Kennedy. This is highlighted in an opening sermon by the progressive Father Flynn, who questions putting what is sometimes blind faith in old certainties.    This is a red rag for Sister Aloysius, who rules the school with a tight-lipped authoritarianism that won’t allow room for any new ways of thinking, whatever Vatican 2 might say. This leads her to embark on a campaign against Father Flynn with the intent of ousting him from office. To do this, she manipulates her young charge Sister James into reluctant complicity with her damning claims regarding Father Flynn’s alleged conduct before what is effectively a trial by hearsay ensues.   This makes for an intense nin...

Perth Theatre Four stars   Life’s a joke for Will and Ronnie at the start of this brand new stage version of Ninian Dunnett, Michael Hoffman and Andy Paterson’s 1985 big screen curio, which rode the wave of post Gregory’s Girl Scottish whimsy with an Edinburgh world view that was a gift to tourist board types.    While neglected at the time of the film’s release, forty years on, the whimsy is still intact, but there is a whole lot more going on besides, as the trio reposition their film as a feelgood musical with a higher purpose. Heroes don’t wear capes here, but, as with the film, sport clown and wolfman masks instead, as Will and Ronnie make the move from not so merry pranksters to dandy highwaymen.    On the run from their back street roots to hold up the highland tourist buses, the pair become international legends en route. As Will finds romance in the arms of tourist guide Margot, Ronnie falls in with a bad crowd of comedy gangsters who seem to have stepp...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars    “A young man in his underpants is not a good look in the Catholic Church.” So goes one of Mammy Superior’s brand spanking new set of commandments down at St. Boaby’s on the Knob. The gift shop isn’t exactly doing a roaring trade under the watchful eye of this holier than thou demagogue and her frisky underling Sister Mary Mary. With the Cambuslang Cat Burglar on the prowl, the Old Relic of St. Boaby’s seemingly easy pickings, and Mammy Superior’s sights set on the Vatican, it’s only a matter of time until someone is crucified for their sins.    The Lord moves in mysterious ways in James Peake’s riotous new comedy for Oran Mor’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint season of lunchtime theatre. No sooner is a scurrilous nun-based post Easter farce programmed before real life events in Rome intervene, with the script requiring a couple of respectful tweaks lest assorted plagues fall down on the former church venue.    If such incidents reca...

Lochgelly Centre Three stars     When twenty-year-old Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818, little did she realise the enduring scale of the monster she had just spawned. More than two hundred years on from what is regarded as the first science fiction novel, writer Julia Taudevin has drawn inspiration from Shelley’s story and dragged it firmly into the twenty-first century.    Taudevin’s title character is a machine age product of TechBro, the near future’s all consuming conglomerate on a mission to mass produce an army of robots programmed for your every need. Frankie, alas, has been set up to be more human than the real thing. This causes her to be rejected by the Bro-powers that be and left in a limbo with a group of fellow prototypes who similarly don’t compute.    This causes the emotionally charged humanoid to embark on a quest to meet her maker, who comes, not in the form of company man and possibly mad scientist Frank, but the more independe...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars   Life is a curse for the street-smart queen with the messy domestic life in Nikki Kalkman’s reimagining of Greek mythology. Instead of simply bumping off her heroine after her incestuous affair with her more dramatised son, Kalkman has Jocasta arrive with a flourish as she attempts to gain an access all areas pass into the Underworld. Amidst designer Gillian Argo’s celestial looking array of curtains, Jocasta is forced to tell her story to the unseen godlike gatekeepers, purging her own demons as she goes.    As Jocasta offloads all, from one night stands with muscle-bound himbos to becoming an abused trophy bride at the hands of king Laius, where ‘the fingerprint of every day was bruises and boredom’, it is clear Jocasta has been damaged enough to warrant some kind of intervention. As she gets herself the ultimate toy boy to die for, alas, the sex may be great, but as the local gossips aren’t shy of pointing out, it’s complicated. ...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh  Four stars    Don’t mess with Calamity Jane. If you do, you’re likely to be shot down in a dramatic standoff you’ll never win. This is as true of any attempt at reworking Charles K. Freeman’s 1961 stage version of David Butler’s 1953 James O’Hanlon scripted movie as it is of the gal herself. As unreconstructed as this rootin’, tootin’ yarn concerning tomboyish Jane’s getting of wisdom remains, Freeman’s play is as faithful to its big screen roots as the assorted brides at the end of the play are to their various beloveds who look like they finally struck gold.   All this is driven by composer Sammy Fain and lyricist Paul Francis Webster’s wagonload of showtunes that have become sing-along classics. This is evident from the opening moments of this touring revival of Nikolai Foster’s 2014 production, first seen at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury. As a grizzled old cowboy plucks out a few notes on a banjo, it immediately prompts the audi...

Òran Mor, Glasgow Three stars   Birthday girl Scarlet is in for a big surprise when she goes home to mum Sarah for her twenty-first. The very special present waiting for her in Jennifer Adam’s new play for Òran Mor’s current A Play, a Pie and a Pint lunchtime theatre season turns out to be something pretty titanic. To say it wasn’t what Scarlet was expecting is something of an understatement, especially as an environmental activist with big plans of her own with her girlfriend and fellow agitator Judyth. To carry out those plans, however, Scarlet needs to get her hands on her inheritance left to her by her dad, who passed away fifteen years earlier. A somewhat large obstacle, alas, is preventing Scarlet from getting her hands on it. In an increasingly hothouse environment, things go into meltdown at every level.    Adam’s play merges the personal and the political just as it fuses everyday absurdism with social realist observation. This looks to the metaphorical ridiculou...