Coffee-Table Notes

Madras College, St Andrews 3 stars The demise of the Byre Theatre as a thriving professional producing house following funding cuts after a major refurbishment was a major loss to St Andrews. With any luck, this new production of a script originally penned by John Ward may help encourage the re-establishment of a permanent artistic team at what is now primarily a receiving house. Ward’s play was a heroic reimagining of the life and death of seventeenth century Scots wanderer, James MacPherson, who created his own mythology via the song he penned while awaiting execution. Kally Lloyd-Jones’ production of Linda Duncan McLaughlin’s adaptation was enabled by the Scottish Government-backed Year of Creative Scotland 2012’s bestowment of the Scotland’s Creative Place Award to St Andrews. Performed by a mixed cast of professionals and community participants, the production is staged in a heated tent in the grounds of Madras College, and is a romantically inclined romp that sugg...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow 4 stars When Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe came of big-screen age earlier this year in the cinematic adaptation of Susan Hill’s spookiest of novels, one feared that its gothic gloss might suck the life out of the late Stephen Mallatratt’s stage version. After more than two decades in the west end and ten national tours, judging by this latest encounter, Robin Herford’s still spine-tingling production isn’t ready to lie down just yet. Mallatratt’s play finds lawyer Arthur Kipps hiring an actor to role-play events from years before in an attempt to exorcise ghosts that have haunted him since. These involve a young Kipps being packed off to a desolate country house to oversee a dead woman’s affairs, only to have the eponymous Woman transform his life. As a dense yarn of illigitimacy, accidental death and revenge from the grave is unveiled, the shocks pile on aplenty for Kipps, whether played by Julian Forsyth or by Antony Eden’s Actor. This m...

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 ...