Coffee-Table Notes

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars   Ghosts and a whole lot more are in the house in Ali Milles’ overloaded thriller, resurrected by the Original Theatre company following a truncated run in 2020 cut short by lockdown.    It begins simply enough, as the spirited Laura arrives at her family home in the hills with her older lover Suzanne in tow. Before the pair can settle in, unreconstructed family ghillie David arrives to check out the cottage hasn’t been occupied by interlopers. Other former residents soon make their presence felt, however, as what started out as a retreat for Laura and Suzanne becomes an almighty confrontation.    As time slips back and forth between Liza Goddard’s Enid all the way up to Laura’s own mother, history repeats itself by way of several generations of dangerous liaisons and secret affairs that make up a century spanning soap opera. Throw in some free thinking talk of witches and selkies and as the rocking chair springs into unoc...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Five stars   It’s a dog’s life for Ronnie, the man at the centre of Douglas Maxwell’s beautifully realised new play, brought to life in a heart wrenching solo turn by Jordan Young. In charge of five of his neighbours’ pet hounds, Ronnie’s entire life is kept on a pretty short leash as he attempts to navigate the assorted excitable personalities of his furry brood. Yet, for all he never quite bonds with his charges, and however hazardous their daily walks might be, their presence fills a vacuum in Ronnie’s own life that since the Covid induced lockdown has left him bereft. When a particularly chaotic morning finds one of the dogs raking up something unexpected in the woods, it is a necessary shock to the system.    There is huge heart at play in Maxwell’s writing, which looks at the fallout of everyday tragedy against a much larger backdrop to bring it emotionally alive in an immaculately structured work full of big ideas about humanity, loss and surv...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars   “You are us,” says the Inquisitor of Peter Arnott’s play to his silent Prisoner at one point. This is a telling moment in this unspecified war of attrition that reveals the similarities as much as the differences between those in one conflict or another. Whether political, religious or generational, as the Inquisitor expounds on morality, ethics and all the contradictions at play that give us the excuse to square any circle we like in the name of whatever cause is going, for a veteran like him, this time it seems, it’s also personal.    Tom McGovern’s Inquisitor is every inch the establishment mandarin in Liz Carruthers’ suitably elliptical production, the final lunchtime offering from A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s spring and summer season. Sat in the old school splendour of designer Heather Grace Currie’s set, McGovern waxes forth from his desk while his Prisoner, initially bound, but always captive, acts as a human sounding board, never givin...

As the Creeping Bent Organisation winds down operations after thirty years on the frontline of art/pop interface, it is only fitting that one of its swan song releases gets back to its roots. As one of the label’s mainstays from the start, The Secret Goldfish do this on their fourth opus through a collection of cover versions guest-starring a posse of fellow travellers. As a work in progress on the go since 1996, the result is a delirious pop mash-up of influence and homage that joins several generations of assorted rock family tree type dots while still sounding every inch The Secret Goldfish.   Much of this is down to vocalist Katy Lironi, who takes songs by Vic Godard, ex Orange Juice guitarist James Kirk and Fire Engine turned Sexual Object Davy Henderson and makes them her own. There is something Proustian too hearing Lironi sing the Shop Assistants’ mournful Somewhere in China, Godard’s Stop That Girl and Henderson’s Nectarine No 9 era 22 Blue with a cast list that includes G...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   Teenage dreams have rarely sounded sweeter than in Sam Hardie’s loving revival of Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s original piece of rock and roll revivalism. Jacobs and Casey’s quifftastic confection may have been sweetened for Randal Kleiser’s smash hit movie that saw John Travolta and Olivia Newton John keep both the punk and disco hordes at bay from the number 1 pop chart slot in the summer of ‘78, but happy days are here again in a show that takes its moves more from the original stage show.    As good girl Sandy spars with tough guy Danny after a holiday romance that sees them join forces with their respective gangs once school starts. What follows sees them make a song and dance of an everyday tale of first love, peer group pressure, youth cult tribes, the growing pains of friendship and learning to be who you want to be that points to teen drama past, present and future. The mass earworm familiarity of Jacobs and...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars    A storm is brewing over Mull in Amy Conway’s new comedy thriller that forms the latest offering from A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s current season of lunchtime theatre. Agnes and her American TV actor husband James have arrived late at the old house where they are having a belated honeymoon. Greeted unexpectedly by housekeeper Mrs Carlin, Agnes and James are also seeking to escape other domestic pressures. Once things start going bump in the night, however, old ghosts making their presence felt sees things spiral into a nightmare. Only when Agnes confronts a few demons does the storm calm.    Shades of Inside Number 9’s meticulously observed pastiches of hammy horror pulp fiction TV tropes abound in Katie Slater’s production of Conway’s script. This is the case from the creepy portrait of the former lady of the house Constance Laird resembling real life characters, to Manasa Tagica’s Jack appearing to believe he is in a reality show. ...

As the necessary historicisation of Scotland’s pre digital but all too recent artistic past runs on apace, it is vital that collections are put on show to remind year zero types that the world didn’t begin with NFTs and AI, but with hard graft and artistic vision.     So it goes with Story, which fills Edinburgh Printmakers’ downstairs gallery with what is effectively a greatest hits selection that joins the dots between Edinburgh Printmakers’ assorted homes since it was founded in 1967 in Victoria Street as The Printmakers’ Workshop. Seen together, the forty works on show also become something of a rough guide to the high rollers of contemporary Scottish art since then.   Drawn from Edinburgh Printmakers’ permanent collection, the exhibition begins with the muscularity of work by John Bellany, Jock McFadyen, Ken Currie and Peter Howson, as well as pieces from Sam Ainsley and Carol Rhodes. This moves onwards to several generations of art stars, with contributions from the...