Coffee-Table Notes

Amateur dramatics may still conjure up images of chintzy middle England matriarchs over-playing Alan Ayckbourn in draughty village halls, but it remains one of Britain's most popular past-times. Some two thousand groups estimated to be producing work, while in Scotland, the Scottish Community Drama Association is a major hub of am dram activity. Some of the best am dram groups are currently on show in Nation's Best Am Dram, a six part TV series on Sky Arts HD, which pits teams against each other in a competition judged and mentored by high-profile theatre professionals. With three very different Scottish groups making it down to the last eight, and with performance in a London West End the prize for the winner, am dram is a very serious business for everyone involved. By way of actor and director Kathy Burke's throaty narration, the first two episodes of Nation's Best Am Dram have introduced viewers to Edinburgh Graduate Theatre Group (EGTG), the Glasgow-based ...

Tramway, Glasgow 4 stars The week-long residency at Tramway by maverick producers, Fuel, continued in the tone set by David Rosenberg’s opening sonic adventure, Ring, of invading our space and subverting our senses. The rest of the programme was by turns arresting, provocative and, at its best, deeply political, both on a personal and a global level. Nowhere was this mashed up more than in Make Better Please, Unexpected Guests’ latest meditation on how we live now. This began with focus group style round-table discussions on news events of the day, and ended with a collective purging of the mess of twenty-first century secularised culture discussed earlier. Following a succession of quick-fire role-plays, things grew increasingly frantic, as one of our hosts took on the sins of David Cameron, Jimmy Savile, George Osborne and all the rest. Pulsed along by a punk-style din, this was Unexpected Guests getting back to their and our roots, where the primitive power of the ...

Tramway, Glasgow 4 stars The audience may have been left in the dark in this first of four performance-based pieces that make up the bulk of Fuelfest, Bank of Scotland Herald Angel winning producing team Fuel’s week-long residency at Tramway. Yet director David Rosenberg’s immersive experience is delivered with such scarifying intensity that his production is as enlightening on the possibilities of sound as it is on group dynamics and mass manipulation. Once we’re ushered into a room with two banks of chairs facing each other with a harshly-lit gulf between, we’re lulled into a false sense of security by a man who calls himself Michael, but admits it’s not his real name. We’ve already been given head-phones and our names noted down, and now Michael talks us through proceedings as if we’re regular attendees of some un-named group therapy session. As we’re plunged into blackness, any hinted-at meditations plumb darker imaginings, so the voices in our head bicker, confes...

Doogie Paul - Musician Born October 16 th 1972; died November 3 rd 2012 Doogie Paul, who has died of cancer aged forty, was a singularly mercurial figure, both as bass player with James Yorkston and the Athletes over five albums across ten years, and during his early days as an award-winning if somewhat bruised and battered skateboarder. Paul captivated too on the all too rare occasions he performed his own songs live. Paul's untimely passing has robbed Edinburgh and Scotland's music scene of a rare talent, who, whether in the studio, onstage or in a bar with the many friends and strangers his energy sparked off, remained an instinctive, open-minded and unique presence. Douglas Paul was born in Glasgow to Anne and Douglas, who led a musical family. Paul's father had been a professional bass player, and his elder brothers, Alan and Iain, played guitar and drums respectively. Paul grew up with his family in Newton Mearns, where he attended Mearns Primary and Ea...

It was former Citizens Theatre boss Giles Havergal who told the Gorbals emporium's current artistic director Dominic Hill that Dr Faustus had never been produced at the theatre during his tenure. Given the body of classical plays produced with such flamboyant verve during Havergal's thirty year reign over the theatre along with fellow directors Robert David Macdonald and Philip Prowse, that Christopher Marlowe's play had never been tackled in the Gorbals came as a surprise to Hill. Today's exclusive announcement in the Herald of the Citz's forthcoming Spring 2013 season finds Hill addressing this oversight by putting Dr Faustus at the centre of a programme that aims to make the classical contemporary. As tickets go on sale today for all shows, we can also announce that Hill's production of Dr Faustus will reunite him with the creative team behind his production of Ibsen's Peer Gynt while in charge of Dundee Rep. As well as writer Colin Teevan coming ...

The Arches, Glasgow 3 stars To get over the things you fear, you first have to confront them. Whether novelist Alan Bissett is scared of spiders or not isn’t on record, but he certainly gets stuck in to the little blighters in this arachnid-friendly solo effort first performed by himself during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. From the hoodie-sporting common or garden variety who comes on like some wannabe chancer straight out of an Irvine Welsh story, to the black-booted southern belle Black Widow with predatory intentions, Bissett’s sextet of comic thumbnail sketches are life studies akin to biology lab dissections with extra added amateur psychology thrown in. Bissett’s subjects are being held captive under glass in a St Andrews research centre, where the female of the species rules the roost. The pecking order elsewhere is made clear by the presence of a swarthy Latino tarantula and the neurotic New Yorker who embodies the recluse spider. As well observed as all th...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars There’s something deeply troubling at the heart of this double bill of solo plays by Simon Stephens, which say much about the love/hate relationship with the city it takes its collective name from, be it at home or away. The first, T5, finds a woman in a hotel bedroom on the run from the crime scene she’s just witnessed, but unable to flee completely from the responsibilities she’s left behind. The second, Seawall, follows a shaggy dog story told by a man who seems to have everything, right through to the holiday accident that changed everything. Both plays have appeared separately in different productions during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Seen together in George Perrin’s touring production for Paines Plough in association with Live Theatre, Newcastle and Salisbury Playhouse, these beautifully written studies of urban neuroses and everyday tragedies form a complimentary whole made even more powerful by how each story is told. The Wom...