Coffee-Table Notes

Dundee Rep 4 stars The mountain of overstuffed black bin bags, broken-down TVs and other detritus looks more post-apocalyptic junkyard than brave new world piled onto the set of Jemima Levick’s revisitation of Shakespeare’s island-bound epic. Levick turns Shakespeare’s world upside down even more by having the island populated solely by women. With Irene MacDougall’s Prospero a steely matriarch in exile, Emily Winter’s Ariel and Ann Louise Ross’ Caliban are jump-suited prisoners in their own country who end up as surrogate daughters alongside Kirsty Mackay’s initially tomboyish Miranda. After the opening amplified bombast that shipwrecks the men from Milan onto Ti Green’s set, what emerges is a serious and stately minded Tempest. With Prospero a single mum bringing up her Miranda without any paternal influence, by magicking her usurping brother Antonio, King Alonso and his son Ferdinand to her crumbling queendom, Prospero is not only reclaiming what’s rightfully hers, but,...

Nice N’ Sleazy, Glasgow 4 stars The Jubilee-tastic Punk Britannia celebrations may be reminding the world of the spirit of 77’s snotty year zero aesthetic, but it arguably misses a trick in terms of what happened next beyond assorted turn-coat rock stars and cause celebres. Take The Nightingales, Robert Lloyd’s reignited vehicle for his unique form of back-street Black Country beat poetry set to a wilfully Luddite garage-band racket. Formed out of the ashes of Birmingham’s first ever punk band, The Prefects, Lloyd and co’s relentlessly literate yarns of urban absurdism soundtracked a fistful of John Peel sessions that were only second to fellow travellers The Fall in number. Back in the saddle since 2004, and featuring original Prefects guitarist Alan Apperley alongside a disparate trio of relative youngsters, The Nightingales have now released more records than their 1980s incarnation. Much of tonight’s set is taken from the just-released No Love Lost album, with a b...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre 3 stars From Rocky Horror to Forbidden Planet, sci-fi B movies and rock and roll nostalgia have been all the rage for now. Howard Ashman and Alan Menken's 1982 stage musical even has the parallel universe luxury of being both inspired by one such feature film only to be adapted into another. Based on Roger Corman's 1960 yarn about a blood-sucking plant who eats up a Skid Row flower shop, Little Shop of Horrors isn't the obvious choice to open Pitlochry Festival Theatre's Summer Rep season. Nor, in John Durnin's production, does it fully spark into the sort of big campy life required to make it such a ridiculous pleasure, even as it tackles how greed and money corrupt in a dog eat dog – or rather, plant eats man – world. It's not without its charms, however, from the moment the girl group turned Greek/Brechtian chorus shimmy out of Mushnik's recession-hit store, to the alien plant's devouring of everything in sigh...

You could be forgiven for thinking that women are taking over Dundee. Or Scottish theatre for that matter. As Dundee Rep’s former associate director Jemima Levick is appointed joint artistic director of the theatre with former Traverse head Philip Howard as Chief Executive, after Orla O’Loughlin taking charge of the Traverse and Rachel O’Riordan heading up Perth Theatre, Levick becomes the latest female in charge of one of the country’s main producing houses. As if to stress the point, Levick’s long-scheduled production of The Tempest, which opens in Dundee this week, bends genders in Shakespeare’s magical island yarn to the extent of casting female actors in the traditionally male roles of Prospero, Caliban and Aerial. Of course, given Dundee's long-standing reputation as something of a matriarchy, such an approach seems the perfect fit, as Levick explains. “I was keen to find a play where I felt I could do what I wanted,” she says. “You can't do that with all S...

When David MacLennan founded A Play, A Pie and A Pint at Oran Mor in 2004, his first season of lunchtime plays with refreshments included in the ticket price was a modest affair. Eight years on, and having presented some 250 new works, as MacLennan gets set to receive the Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland's inaugural CATS Whiskers award for Outstanding Achievement, A Play, A Pie and A Pint now looks like a genuine theatrical phenomenon that was seriously ahead of the game. With initial seasons seemingly pulled together with the help of MacLennan's extensive address book of Scottish theatre movers and shakers, it was as if those seemingly left in the theatrical wilderness after grants for companies such as the MacLennan-led Wildcat company had been cut had suddenly rediscovered their mojo. With no tradition of lunchtime theatre in Scotland, A Play, A Pie and A Pint served up works from veteran writers such as Peter MacDougall that were more serious than the...

There are surprisingly few signs of starriness attached to Alan Cumming. On the one hand, the Aberfeldy-born actor has recently become a living room regular by way of a recurring role in the Ridley and Tony Scott produced legal drama, The Good Wife. Yet, as he returns to Scotland to play the title role in a very singular version of Macbeth with the National Theatre of Scotland, he prefers to station himself in the darkest, most faraway corner of the city centre bar/ restaurant he's conducting post-rehearsal interviews in. This is a little bit different from when he last appeared onstage on home turf. That was in a flashy version of Euripides' The Bacchae, which, as with Macbeth, was directed by NTS associate John Tiffany. Then, during a day of interviews at the Groucho Club in London, Cumming seemed more ebullient in a way that matched his turn as original party animal, Dionysus. Almost four years on and playing one of the most intense roles ever written, Cumm...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars It is more than 30 years since Willy Russell's Thatcher-era two-hander of working-class aspiration first appeared. But with higher education once again becoming the preserve of a privileged elite, there's a contemporary poignancy to what is essentially a platonic rom-com.   Tamara Harvey's touring production, co-produced by the Menier Chocolate Factory and Theatre Royal Bath, nails its Scouse colours to the mast from the off by using orchestral instrumental versions of Beatles songs as pre-show music. When pop got ideas above its station in this way and went classical, the legion of mop-topped autodidacts that came out of the closet were clearly kin of Russell's Rita. Claire Sweeney is almost too perfectly cast as the gobby hairdresser who breezes into the book-lined study of clapped-out Open University lecturer Frank, played with warm-hearted diffidence by Matthew Kelly. As they move through a succession of 1980s cosy cardies, there...