Coffee-Table Notes

What happens if you can't get from A to B because there's no road to take you there? In an already isolated island community with a declining population such as Raasay, the fourteen-mile long no-man's-land that lies between Skye and Scotland's mainland, such a lack of civic facilities can cut people off from each other even more. This was something crofter, assistant lighthouse keeper, part-time postman and resident of Arnish at the island's north end Calum McLeod could see first hand. What happened next can be found in Calum's Road, a new stage play inspired and adapted by David Harrower from journalist Roger Hutchinson's 2006 book of the same name. Co-produced by the National Theatre of Scotland and director Gerry Mulgrew's Communicado company, Calum's Road will tour in tandem with a revival of children's show Tall Tales For Small People before finishing up on Raasay itself. This is further recognition of McLeod's feat of ev...

The Arches, Glasgow 3 stars For The Fire Burns and Burns, Arches Live veterans Peter McMaster and Nic Green pool resources for an intimate experiential work in which an audience of eight are asked to disrobe psychologically and emotionally as much as physically. After introductions while sat on chairs in a circle, we move through to a room where a sauna-like teepee awaits us. Inside, we speak in turn about what fires us. While it would be quite wrong to reveal what was said over the next forty-five minutes, it's safe to say that there were elements here of confessional, co-counselling and the last night of summer camp. McMaster and Green have adopted the sort of 1960s-sired techniques which, in the wrong hands, can be left open to ridicule, abuse or both. Yet proceedings are orchestrated with such tenderness and care that it's easy to go willingly into a set-up which many might ordinarily find uncomfortable. For this old hippy, more of a build-up, and indeed ...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars The barbed-wire covered container guarded by a couple of shell-suit and trainer-clad likely lads that greets the audience for the National Theatre of Scotland's revival of Ena Lamont Stewart's tenement tragedy speaks volumes about the play's contemporary relevance. While Graham McLaren's vividly visceral production never labours things, when the pair pull back the door as the sparks of long-redundant industries fly off-stage, it's as if what should by rights be a museum piece kept in storage has burst into angry life, part history lesson, part warning. The dark age inhabited by Maggie Morrison and her errant brood was searingly of the moment when Stewart's play first appeared in 1947, and its characters remain instantly recognisable, from Kevin Guthrie's feckless mummy's boy Alec to the ruthless ambition of his trophy bride Isa and the equally ambitious Jenny. Veteran folk singer Arthur Johnstone punctuate...

National Museum of Flight, East Fortune 4 stars It may have been a coup bringing the then new Philip Glass scored musical melodrama to Glasgow back in 1990, but it can't have played a venue since that's as perfect as the National Museum of Flight's Concorde hangar, where James Brining's new production opened on Sunday night as part of the Lammermuir Festival prior to dates in Glasgow and Aberdeen. Even so, in a work that's essentially about one man's alienation, extra-terrestrial or otherwise, one can understand why actor David McKay's troubled copy-shop clerk 'M' might feel overwhelmed as he ducks around and about the under-carriage of flight's most spectacular jet-age folly. David Henry Hwang's text is a dense monologue concerning 'M's voyage into his very own twilight zone, which McKay delivers heroically throughout the piece's eighty-five minute duration. Constantly in motion as the audience promenade after him...

Glasgow Pavilion 3 stars When footballing playboy George Best ordered one more magnum of champagne to be delivered to the hotel room where he was rolling around a bank-note carpeted bed with newly-crowned 1973 Miss World Marjory Wallace, he was asked by room service where it all went wrong. This incident may be immortalised in Marie Jones and Martin Lynch's musical play about the first ever superstar footballer's spectacularly public rise and fall, but this isn't the traditional lads mag version of the tale. Rather, the incident, told here in song, reveals Best as a terrified mummy's boy who had too much too soon, and, unable to deal with fame in a pre-gagging clauses world, partied his way to an early grave. It's a telling moment in a show that is never shy of easy laughs in Peter Sheridan's spit n' sawdust production, but says stadium-loads about how working-class aspiration can become back-alley Greek tragedy. Opening with a feelgood stu...

Tramway, Glasgow 4 stars When Andrew O'Hagan's social memoir which his new play is adapted from arrived in 1995, it tapped into a barely explored British malaise that took in everything from the Bible John murders to the then still fresh killings by Fred and Rose West. O'Hagan's study remains the most significant non-fiction book of the last two decades. But how to put it onstage? The answer in John Tiffany's multi-faceted production, set on a checkered dance-floor flanked by stacked-up, end-of-the-night chairs, is to make an impressionistic, sensurround construction that is hauntingly evocative while remaining faithful to its own source. Central to this is Joe McFadden's writer figure, who begins by interviewing grieving parents with an ache where a son or daughter once lived, but who ends up on an existential quest for himself. The crucial phrase here is when McFadden's character says “I'm not from anywhere,” becoming part detective, pa...

When Turner Prize winning artist Jeremy Deller made a series of posters to raise funds for the Labour Party at the last General Election, it was typically engaged stuff from the man who'd set up and filmed a recreation of the Battle of Orgreave, the very real English civil war between police and striking miners that took place in the summer of 1984. 'Vote Conservative' the white-lettered legend went on a sky-blue background in Deller's new construction, with 'the words For a New Britain' emblazoned below in smaller letters. Beyond such mixed messages, however, it was the face next to the slogan that caught the eye. Rather than an image of Tory leader David Cameron, a far more telling photograph of a beatific looking Rupert Murdoch beamed out, looking like butter wouldn't melt in his somewhat wrinkly mouth. At the time, while no-one doubted the Murdoch media empire's influence on British politics, Deller's work appeared to be the subtle...