Coffee-Table Notes

Oran Mor, Glasgow Five stars    A wing and a prayer are everything in Morag Fullarton’s ingenious reimagining of one of the festive season’s most loved feelgood films. Celestial interventions aren’t just the order of the day for George Bailey, the small town saviour about to throw himself off a bridge at the start of the play as life gets too much to bear. They are there too for the show itself, which Fullarton confesses to the audience prior to its first night curtain hasn’t had a proper dress rehearsal due to assorted technical glitches. This is all done in mutual good humour, but Fullarton needn’t have worried, as what follows on Oran Mor’s tiny stage is one of the most joyously inventive theatrical experiences on show anywhere just now.    The can-do attitude of Fullarton and her company of four actors is a reflection of the show itself, which opens as a quartet of old school cinema usherettes attempt to pick up the pieces after a screening of Frank Capra’s 1946 ...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars   A woman’s world has probably shifted on its axis several times over since Catherine Johnson’s ABBA powered musical dramady first stormed the West End a quarter of a century ago. That may have been at the fag end of the ab-fab, girl powered 1990s, but the show’s heart remains in the 1970s, a seemingly more innocent age of free(ish) love without too many apparent consequences as feminism trickled down the class scale.    Or so it probably seemed for forty-something Donna’s generation in Johnson’s story, which, while tailored to Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus’s greatest hits, could probably stand up dramatically on its own. This isn’t to undermine one of the greatest songbooks in late twentieth century mainstream pop history. Far from it. In truth, for Johnson, director Phyllida Lloyd and producer Judy Craymer, the mix of ennui and euphoria that fires the Swedish songwriting duo’s grown up mini melodramas were a dramatic gift.   ...

Dundee Rep Three stars   Jack may not be the only one full of beans in Dundee Rep’s festive reimagining of the classic English fairy story, but they certainly keep him out of view. The star of Jonathan O’Neill and Isaac Savage’s new ‘mooosical’ take on the story is Caroline the Cow, a sassy Highland breed who is milked for all she’s worth to make Jack’s mum and dad’s ice cream business liquid. When Jack’s dad dies everything dries up, alas, as Caroline is farmed out to the Happy Smiles Petting Zoo, where she falls in with a musical trio made up of a hen, a pig and a llama.    While a blinged up Jack and his mum Sherry strike gold from their raids up the beanstalk, it is left to Caroline and her flock/pack/herd to shimmy up and sort things out for good. Throw in a half man, half harp and an increasingly benevolent sounding Giant, and by the end everyone’s back in business, including some for whom it has to be the one of show.    Stephen Whitson’s production is a ...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   It’s hard to be a private dancer when your support group mates turn up at the door. No intervention is required, however, for the veteran pocket rocket who soon becomes known to the world as Dancing Donny. Donny may have two left feet, but away from the crowd, he gets the sort of kick from a soft shoe shuffle that the booze he once numbed himself with could never match.    Craig and Jay have never seen the like, with Jay in particular spotting a chance to make a fortune once phone footage of Donny’s shape throwing goes viral. While Donny is none the wiser about some of the less flattering online comments, he loves every second of being the centre of attention.    Stephen Christopher and Graeme Smith’s comic drama plays with expectations about what a show about a bunch of addicts should be like by having its Leith based trio introduce themselves to the audience with a ‘no childhood trauma’ rule. Brian Logan’s speedy reviva...

Theatre 118, Glasgow Four stars   Aoife McDonagh has a dream. Sweet seventeen and a self styled ‘half a virgin’, Aoife can’t wait get away from small town County Kildare and make her mark on the mean streets of London. If that particular city didn’t happen to be in England, Aoife’s family might like it a whole lot better, but she doesn’t care what they think anymore. If she stays that would be the end of her. Especially after what happened with Erin Kelly, the coolest girl in school who she’s been besotted with since they met when they were six. Erin’s going away as well, so who know what might happen next, but at least they’ll always have that moment.    As confessionals go, Rebecca Donovan has written a rites of passage that taps into the hormonal hunger of young women on the verge with a comic dynamism and an unfiltered frankness that could make a nun blush. Performed by Donovan in Georgia Nelson’s production for Theatre 118, Aoife is a guilt-ridden force of natur...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars    When times are tough, secret worlds await in this new look at the classic eighteenth century French folktale, which here de-Disneyfies things to get beneath the skin of the story. In Lewis Hetherington’s version, Israela Efomi’s Beauty is one of two daughters to the widowed Baron Aaron, for whom business is a crash and burn affair, while encouraging Beauty that looks alone are all she needs to get by. Beauty’s sister Bright, on the other hand, has big ideas of her own.    When her dad’s wheeler dealing sees him go bust, the family are forced to move to a woodland shack. A chance encounter with a seemingly scary monster sees the Baron bargain with Beauty, who is exiled to the nearby castle, rendered as a spooky cartoon construction by designer Rachael Canning. With feline friend Mr Mittens in tow, Beauty finds a spooky world of locked rooms and celestial sounds, as well as a Beast whose bark is considerably worse than his b...

Pianodrome, St. Oswald’s Centre, Edinburgh Four stars   What to do when you inherit what was once a vital part of your parents’ world, but which played a key part in destroying it? The answer in Rupert Page and Rob Thompson’s moving meditation on legacy, loss and purging old demons is for the newly orphaned siblings to pass the item between them while all the while wanting to smash the offending item to bits. As the giveaway title of the duo’s drama makes clear, the fact that the hand me down in question is an upright piano doesn’t make dealing with it any easier. This is despite the potential for a dramatic exit that would make it the ultimate auto-destructive art action.    Page and Thompson are more John Cage-like in their approach, in that, rather than making a sound, the piano is imagined on stage by Thompson. The sole performer for much of the play’s fifty minute duration, he relates the instrument’s history as it moves from living room to recording studio and back ...

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...