Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars Anyone expecting Marie Jones’ ingenious two-hander about a Hollywood film crew descending on a rural Irish village to be a full-on knockabout romp is in for a surprise. Because so adept is Jones at the theatrical and comedic double-bluff that what starts out as a sit-com style yarn about a couple of film extras on the make becomes both an elegy for a dying community and an artistic call to arms against a form of colonialism that denigrates the culture it feeds off. Some sixteen years after the play first appeared, Andy Arnold’s new production for the Tron arrives with a renewed vigour perhaps informed by the current climate of recession. Jake and Charlie meet on the set of a tax-break enabled windswept epic being shot on their doorsteps, and featuring a real-life big-screen starlet as the female lead. For an impoverished work-force, the forty quid a day the men earn is easy pickings. When a teenage drug addict is found dead in the river a...

Patricia Hodge is used to backing a winner. In a private enclosure at Brighton Racecourse, the veteran purveyor of cut-glass Englishness on stage and screen holds court at a large round table with her winnings placed carefully in front of her. As one of the guests of honour at the inaugural Dandy Dick Theatre Royal Brighton atgtickets.com Fillies' Handicap Stakes, Hodge not only got to select the best looking horse before the race and present the trophy to the winner afterwards, along with Nicholas Le Prevost, her co-star in the play that gave the race its name and the rest of the cast, she even managed to have a flutter herself. That a handsome steed named National Hope was favoured by Hodge in all three of her pursuits may suggest some kind of insider trading, but she'll never be a millionaire. “ Eleven pounds!” Hodge says proudly of her sudden windfall, echoing her role as the errant sister who puts temptation into the path of her upright Vicar brother in Art...

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow “ It’s like Wimbledon,” shouts one wag mid-way through the second half of Jennifer Dick’s production of Shakespeare’s island-set elegy, as a ground-sheet is dragged across the set after the show is halted two thirds of the way in once the rain starts. If ever there was a more appropriate play for the annual Bard in the Botanics season of open-air theatre, The Tempest is it. It’s a shame that the unseasonal elements have been against it to the extent that completing the play before the heavens open has been rare. Because there is much to praise about Dick’s approach, which, by concentrating on the play’s magical aspects, looks and feels like some long lost off-cut from spectral film-maker Kenneth Anger’s archive. This effect is accentuated by a cast whose faces are made up in white, and who, when not onstage, observe proceedings as if peering into some celestial looking-glass. As he conjures up an imaginary storm on Giggy Argo’s wooden shipwrec...

When Marie Jones first wrote Stones in his Pockets, as far as the Irish economy was concerned, the boom years were still in full swing. Tax breaks for artists, in particular, had both enabled a creative community to thrive as well as attracting Hollywood producers in search of picture postcard locations. The result of this was a short-term deluge of theme-bar style movies which saw large crews colonise entire villages before leaving already deprived communities with nothing. Rather th an create a polemical tract, however, the Belfast-born writer of Women on the Verge of HRT did what she does best, and penned a two-man comedy that made use of low-budget poor theatre techniques instead. This saw the actors not only play the central roles of would-be film extras Charlie Conlon and Jake Quinn in a County Kerry backwater, but also the play's other thirteen characters, including the film's director and the Hollywood starlet who befriends one of the men in search of some kind of a...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars There’s something a little bit special going on in this latest collaboration between the Citizens Theatre Community Company and Scottish Opera. Inspired by and in part sourced from Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, this pocket-sized version may put its twenty-strong cast in period dress, but the references and themes are as twenty-first century as it gets. Tam is a happy-go-lucky kind of guy about to get hitched to Ann, but who is led astray into the Glasgow flesh-pots by a mysterious stranger with a gold credit card. From Byres Road to Sauchiehall Street, the full social mix of a city in motion is observed in all its glory, with Tam falling prey to hedonistic excess, rampant consumerism and the shallow narcissism of celebrity. This comes in the form of a bearded pop starlet called Lady Baba, while there’s nods too to Hello magazine, west end institution Oran Mor and a top flight emporium revelling in the name of Pradamark. The resu...

The Arches, Glasgow 4 stars AS the Spice Girls head to the West End with their jukebox musical, director Cora Bissett unveils a lo-fi compendium of after-hours confections which I would be prepared to bet reveals an altogether more fascinating and challenging understanding of contemporary musical theatre. By bringing together some of this country’s hippest avant-pop songwriters with a set of actors and writers fully at ease with mixing up artforms as well as moods for this Vital Spark commission, Bissett has taken the musical back to its fringe roots in a glorious mix of domestic sentimentalism and old school grit. All with the odd slice of fantastical ridiculousness thrown in for good measure. It opens with a couple on a cosy sofa recalling the first time they met, which could have been last night or a lifetime ago. From first love to last rites, this launches us on an emotional travelogue that takes us from club-land largesse, wasted youth, missed buses and the company...

In an upstairs hall in Glasgow, the speakers are pumping out an infectious mix of African dance music that proves irresistible to everyone there. Even though no-one's met before this week, the multi-cultural mix of Sri Lankans, Africans, Kurds, Scots and English people are on their feet, shaking their booties for all they're worth. One young man, from Cameroon, only arrived less than half an hour ago, but, encouraged by a quietly enthusiastic Dutch woman, is now at the centre of things, showing everyone how to dance to the rhythms of his country of origin with a sassy mix of pride and elation. What looks and sounds like a microcosm of a global village may have the atmosphere of an after-hours shebeen, but in actual fact, the scene described above took place on a Wednesday afternoon in Govan at the end of a day's rehearsal for a very special theatre project that took place last weekend. The English and Scots are a mix of community workers and performers. The Kurds, Sri ...