Coffee-Table Notes

When director Graham Eatough, writer David Greig and composer Nick Powell founded Suspect Culture at Bristol University in 1990, experimental theatre belonged to an older generation. The chances of seeing any international artists, meanwhile, the sort of maverick gurus young theatrephiles love to look up to, was, outside of the Edinburgh International Festival, a rare treat. Eighteen years on, and, following the withdrawal of Scottish arts Council funding, as Eatough prepares to wind down the company with whom he effectively did his creative growing up in public, and the world, let alone the theatre world, is a different place. As anyone who has followed the company since their ideas-led dramatic lines of inquiry crossed over into the professional sphere in the mid 1990s might expect, Suspect Culture aren’t going out with either a predictable bang or a whimper. Rather, Stage Fright will take the form, not of a theatre show, but of an exhibition in which many of the company’s founders...

Glasgay@The Arches, Glasgow The camp ragtime that ushers the audience into Barry Henderson's boudoir for his very personal view of Tennessee Williams in A Slow Dissolve is deceptive. On a set pasted with torn-out pages of the great manﾒs works, Henderson relates a series of close-ups of real life encounters inbetween impressionistic dissections of what Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire in particular means to him. Out of all this is served up a lucid cider cocktail of confessional auto-biography, literary homage and personal purging. One minute Henderson is talking about how Marlon Brando had to be sewn into his t-shirt to make it ultra-tight, the next he's playing out the whole of Streetcar with Barbie and Ken figurines and dollﾒs house accessories. He also makes the play's gay iconography clearer than perhaps ever before in this most intimate of performance art style meditations. The double-bill of late Williams shorts that precede it are similarly off-kilter. B...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars It must be glorious for unsuspecting audiences to stumble on Michael Frayn’s extended actor’s nightmare for the first time. Imagine it, being dragged along to what looks like some workaday country house farce brim-full of down-the-ages TV friendly faces, theatrical old lags, bimbos, himbos and ditzy bit-part ingénues desperate for a break. Once there you have to plough through some pseudy programme notes while stuck next to sweet-wrapper rustling suburbanites who used to have a crush on the leading lady. Or maybe that’s just my experience of the sort of rubbish which Frayn’s brilliantly conceived study of back-stage theatrical manners so magnificently mimics, and which is still so depressingly flogged to death on the provincial circuit. With Colin Baker and a wonderful Maggie Steed in the frame as a couple of old luvs, David Gilmore’s production takes Frayn’s triple bluffing Russian doll of a play and goes hell for leather with it. Doors slam, trouse...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars Paul Higgins’ new play begins with a fanfare, as if angels were about to storm the gates of heaven. As it is, each member of the Conlan family enters their tenement living room with a blasphemy, damning themselves first, then each other. Johnny’s deep in debt and dragging sister Cath down with him. Mum and Dad are mourning the death of their youngest daughter in their own ways, and Patrick arrives home early from the seminary with a confession of his own brewing. Between them all they’re putting their faith in booze and prescription drugs to pull them through. Sometimes, though, even they’re not enough. On first glance, this final contribution to the Traverse/National Theatre of Scotland mini season of new work appears to be wall to wall misery. The litany of self-loathing that punctuates each line recalls the most old-fashioned kitchen-sink social realism, with its prodigal’s return theme looking to David Storey’s In Celebration. Yet John Tiffan...

“That could be the truest thing I’ve said all day,” Mark O’Rowe admits at the end of our conversation prior to rushing off to catch his flight home. Which, considering the Irish playwright has been doing press interviews all day, makes you wonder about what exactly he’s been coming out with before now. Especially given the fantastical nature of his most recent play, which Dublin’s Abbey Theatre brings to The Traverse Theatre as part of its Edinburgh Festival Fringe season. Because, as the internal rhymes of Terminus spin into ever wilder flights of fancy in its three connecting monologues, the truth it reaches verges on the unbelievable. “I was wondering what would happen,” O’Rowe relates earlier on from the above pronouncement, “if you took someone up a crane after a drunken night. So I took this girl up the crane and had her fall off it. But I knew if she hit the ground she’d be dead, so I couldn’t have that, and I genuinely didn’t know what territory I was going to go into. As it ...

Irene Macdougall is clearly an actor in her prime. Ten years as part of Dundee Rep’s ensemble company have confirmed this most intelligent of performers status in roles such as ageing starlet Alexandra del Lago in Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth and predatory older woman Mrs Robinson in the stage version of The Graduate. That both these stand-out roles came in contemporary American classics requiring gravitas and fearlessness in being shown in such an unflattering light may well have something to how Macdougall has been cast in the Rep’s new production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In this blistering piece of emotional warfare first performed in 1962, Macdougall plays Martha, the childless, drink-sodden spouse of worn-out university lecturer George. When the pair invite a younger, still idealistic couple back to their apartment, with a brand new audience to play up to, Martha and George’s domestic arena becomes increasingly savage as they spar mercilessly ...

Tramway, Glasgow 3 stars The rise of the Glasgow-based Ankur Productions has thus far marked a significant move forward in terms of depictions of contemporary Asian culture. This new play by Shan Khan attempts reinvents ancient myth for the here and now, as a doomed love story between a Muslim boy on the run from his brother and a glamorous Sikh girl mixes Bollywood with Quentin Tarantino to update this fifteenth century tragedy. When Ranjah chucks himself in the Clyde, he ends up on a yacht owned by Glasgow’s curry king, where party girl Heer is preparing a night to end them all. The inevitable love affair that follows sees Ranjah the victim of petty racism as well as more brutal treatment at the hands of Heer’s wheeler-dealer uncle that eventually brings down both a business empire and the young lovers stab at cross-class happiness. Daljinder Singh’s big production takes the bull by the horns, pouring rose petals onto the couple as they embrace, punctuating each scene with bold...