Coffee-Table Notes

Perth Theatre 4 stars It’s easy to mistake the first half hour of Conor McPherson’s 2006 West End and Broadway hit for a hangover from the in-yer-face era. Once McPherson’s metaphysical fascinations kick in, however, this furious tale of five booze-sodden men holed up in an Irish cottage playing poker on Christmas Eve becomes a matter of life and death. Sharky has returned home to look after his blind brother, Richard, who’s also tended to by his drinking buddy, Ivan. Sharky is off the sauce and trying to put his life back together, but when local wide-boy and Sharky’s nemesis Nicky turns up with a mysterious stranger called Mr Lockhart in search of a game of cards, it’s as if all his demons have come home to roost. McPherson has crafted a meatily fantastical yarn which rips into macho self-loathing, the psychologically addictive allure of gambling, and how the long term consequences of every misguided action will always get you in the end. It’s an astonishing piece of ...

Film City, Glasgow 4 stars To suggest the art world is full of fakes is an understatement. That they’re usually in the business of buying and selling rather than artists themselves is also generally true. Maverick writer and director David Leddy and his Fire Exit company tackles the art of faking it in a fantastical flight of fancy that dissects the whole notion of authenticity and finding truth through onstage artifice by leaving everything exposed. Actors Wendy Seager and Neil McCormack greet the audience as they enter a room in Govan’s former town hall that’s part studio, part gallery chock-full of apparent old masters draped in dust-sheets. The Jackson Pollock style splurges that decorate the floor looks the part even more. What we’re about to watch, Seager and McCormack explain, comes from a real life meeting in a Glasgow bar between Leddy and a couple slightly worse for wear. The shaggy dog story that follows involves Liz and Jim, a couple of extreme con artists ...

Electric Circus, Edinburgh 4 stars As My Bloody Valentine fever went into (interstellar) overdrive last week on the back of the surprise release of their first album for two decades, enraptured converts could have done worse than check out former Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie’s low-key shows to see where MBV copped some of their FX pedal moves from. Previous visits by Guthrie have seen him playing atmospheric soundtracks to his own equally impressionistic films. With Australian bassist Steve Wheeler and Finnish drummer Antii Makinen co-opted into the fold, his new trio vehicle puts brevity to the fore in a series of instrumental sketches that drift between slowcore fuzziness and post-rock jauntiness. Each miniature is possessed too with a human warmth which at times borders on the sentimental. Guthrie is a towering figure, whose bearded visage these days makes him resemble a hybrid of Vangelis, Jerry Garcia and John Martyn, a trio that reflects too on the different shades d...

Conor McPherson likes going to dark places. This was obvious from his phenomenally successful breakout play, The Weir, and it’s more than evident in The Seafarer, his 2006 smash hit, which is given a new production in Perth Theatre this week after taking London and Broadway by storm. While the original production at the National Theatre in London also saw McPherson direct his own work, this time out he’s content to let Perth director Rachel O’Riordan take the reins. McPherson isn’t saying whether he’s given her any clues on how to proceed, but there’s certainly no mystery to how he came to write it. “It came like a lot of plays,” he says. “The better ones come from an image, and for The Seafarer I just saw this room in this place. I’d always been interested in this place called the hellfire club, which was a place where people would play cards. There was a folk tale, about how there’d be a knock on the door, and this stranger would be standing there who turns out to be the devil. S...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars It’s a mad world for the runaway teenager in Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson’s novel for young people, adapted here by Tron artistic director Andy Arnold for Katie Posner’s dark, fast-moving co-production with York’s Pilot Theatre. The play follows the perils of Leonora, or Leo, the orphaned Anglo-Chinese daughter of musicians, who goes on the run from her creepy Uncle John in search of her Chinese grand-parents in Glasgow. Once on the streets, Leo falls in with the city’s fractured flotsam and jetsam who’ve fallen outside society’s loop, finding sanctuary with Gayle Runciman’s Mary, who survives by dancing to Johnny Cash records at full blast. With paper boy and would-be gumshoe Finlay as a sidekick, Leo’s search is as much for herself as anything else. With five actors clambering across Gem Greaves’ impressionistic set, and pulsed along by RJ McConnell’s burbling sound design, Arnold and Posner capture the full urgency of Leo’s plight from th...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars When young American human rights activist Rachel Corrie was bulldozed to death by occupying forces on the Gaza Strip in 2003, she might have ended up as one more statistic of a bloody and unnecessary conflict. The survival of Rachel’s diaries and their subsequent editing into a piece of solo verbatim theatre by actor Alan Rickman and journalist Katherine Viner ensured an immortalisation which gave voice to her generation. A decade since Rachel’s death, and eight since her words were first heard onstage, and atrocities in Gaza are worse than ever. This makes this blistering revival of Ros Philips’ production featuring Mairi Phillips as Rachel more pertinent than ever. First seen at the Citizens Theatre in 2010, Philips’ take on the play now heads out on a tour spearheaded by Mull Theatre in association with RT Productions and Sphinx Theatre. From the moment the metal door the audience walks through in the Tron’s upstairs Changing House space is s...

Donna Franceschild never meant to write Takin’ Over the Asylum, her hit 1994 TV comedy drama set in a mental hospital. Neither could the American born playwright have predicted that the six-part series would provide high profile break-out roles for its two stars, Ken Stott and a young David Tennant. Franceschild’s new stage version, which updates the action to the present day, already has a head start, with Iain Robertson stepping into Stott’s shoes as double glazing salesman turned hospital DJ, Eddie. Campbell, the patient originally played by Tennant, looks set to be given extra edge by Brian Vernel, a second year acting student at Glasgow’s Royal Conservatoire making his professional debut following a remarkable performance in a college production as Macbeth. “He’s pretty special,” Franceschild says in hushed tones on a lunch-break from rehearsals of Mark Thomson’s co-production between the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, and the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, “but they’re all amazing. E...