Coffee-Table Notes

Maxine Peake had always been aware of the Pendle witch trials when she was growing up in Bolton. The actress and star of television dramas such as Silk and Shameless never expected, however, to be spending Halloween performing a politically charged spoken-word reclamation of the seventeenth century trials of nine women and one man from the north of England who were executed for apparently murdering ten people using unspecified powers of witchcraft. Yet that's exactly what Peake will be doing tonight at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. As part of the gallery's latest after-hours event, Halloween: By Night, Peake fronts experimental electronic pop collective, The Eccentronic Research Council to perform Pendle-based spoken-word suite, 1612 Underture. “ The Pendle witches had always been part of the folklore when I was growing up,” Peake says. “No one had ever explained to me their story properly, so I just deducted there was a hill not too far away where witche...

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars At first glance, the well-choreographed burst of jumping, jiving life from the young cast of this new stage version of E.R. Braithwaite's autobiographical novel about his experiences as a black teacher in a run-down east end London school looks like a piece of all-singing, all-dancing youth theatre. For all their brash bravura, there's something initially one-dimensional about the larger than life cockney urchins that doesn't always ring true in Mark Babych's production of Ayub Khan Din's new adaptation of Braithwaite's book for this Touring Consortium and Royal and Derngate Northampton co-production. If this rubs off on the grown-ups in the play, the over-riding lightness gradually matures into something with depth as well as warmth. Ansu Kabia plays Ricky, an ambitious and educated Guyanese ex-pat who takes up teaching as a last resort in a post Second World War London riddled with prejudice. The school he en...

Menzieshill Community Centre, Dundee Four stars When mercurial school-teacher Maggie Brodie click-clacks her way into the room in her bright red shoes and attitude to match, she can't fail to make an impression, not least of all on anyone who dares to cross her. There are plenty who do in Douglas Maxwell's troubling solo play, first seen in 2010, and revived here by Dundee Rep for a tour of community venues before a stint in the Highlands care of producing partner, Eden Court, Inverness. With Maggie taking up a temporary post following a chequered past, also new to the school is a six year old Somalian girl called Rosie, who refuses to speak, and who her religious leaders say is possessed by the devil. With demons of her own to deal with, Maggie finds an affinity with Rosie, challenging what she sees as superstitious mumbo-jumbo before she discovers just how much damage a warped belief system can cause. By having Maggie recognise so much of herself in Rosie, Maxwe...

When Johnny McKnight was a teenager, he would regularly attend the local spiritualist church with his aunties. By that time McKnight had already seen David Lean's big-screen version of Noel Coward's play, Blithe Spirit, in which Margaret Rutherford’s eccentric medium Madame Arcati inadvertently conjures up the ghost of Rex Harrison's novelist Charles Condomine's dead first wife, Elvira. “My first live experience was going to watch psychics with my aunties at the spiritualist church,” McKnight says. “I think that's what got me into theatre. There were times when you just thought the psychic was a fraud. But there were others who were so on the money that you wonder how it could possibly be faked. There were times it was heartbreaking. Every week there'd be the same two rows of people, who'd clearly had a bad loss. It was two rows of desperate sadness looking for peace.” McKnight's formative experiences at the spiritualist church nevertheless fi...

It's more than twenty years since Ashley Jensen was last on the stage of the Tron Theatre in Glasgow. Then, the Emmy nominated Annan born star of Extras and Ugly Betty was a young drama school graduate appearing in a series of new plays by the likes of Peter Arnott and and Anne Downie. Last Thursday night, however, Jensen returned to the theatre where she began her career as the figurehead of a new scheme to promote and ensure the future of Tron Participation, the theatre's multi-faceted outreach and education strand, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. In front of an invited audience, Jensen explained the importance of Tron Participation in enabling people of all ages to discover all aspects of theatre for the first time in what can often be a life-changing experience. As Tron Participation's new Archangel, Jensen also announced the Tron Angel scheme, in which supporters of the initiative can pledge donations to ensure its survival. The Tron Angels sche...

The Arches, Glasgow Three stars How do you get over being gay? That's not the question posed in Stef Smith's new play about one woman's coming to terms with her sexuality. It is, however, the driving force behind the people who run the sort of clinic the woman attends in the hope of 'curing' her homosexuality and getting her some apparently well-earned credit in the straight world. As Julie Hale's Susan flits between the clinic, her home life caring for her ageing mother and a burgeoning romance with a more experienced woman in Ros Philips' fluid production, beyond her initial state of denial she is forced to square up to old episodes of American sit-com The Golden Girls, the trials and tribulations of the dating game and the secrets of something the clinic calls 'heterosexual holding.' All this and a fortieth birthday to deal with too. While all this is told in a broadly comic sweep that makes such cranky institutions as the one depicte...

E.R. Braithwaite never wanted to be a school-teacher, let alone working in a run-down institution in the East End of London with what in the post Second World War environment might be described as juvenile delinquents. As a Guyanese immigrant and an ethnic minority in London, despite Braithwaite's succession of degrees from universities in Guyana, New York and Cambridge, where he gained a doctorate in physics, it was the only work he could get. Despite initial hostilities, Braithwaite's new job became a life-changer, marking out a new path for him as a social worker and author of note. It also gave rise to Braithwaite penning one of the most enduring literary works of its era. Now, following a swinging sixties cinema treatment as well as a more recent radio adaptation of Braithwaite's auto-biographical novel, To Sir, With Love comes to the stage in an adaptation penned by Ayub Khan Din, who made waves with the big-screen adaptation of his own semi-autobiographical play, ...