Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars “Wasps only sting people they love,” observes Andrea, the troubled teen at the centre of Philip Ridley's devastating monologue near the beginning of a production by the Supporting Wall company first seen at the 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. If that is the case, the litany of ills inflicted on her that are gradually laid bare over the next seventy-five minutes would surely fulfil every yearning for love that Andrea has ever felt. As it is, as she's left alone by feckless parents, taken advantage of by men who make her feel grown up and pushed to emotional extremes just to survive, it becomes ever clearer exactly how damaged Andrea is. Gemma Whelan's fearless performance as Andrea initially sucker-punches the audience with what at first appears to be standard teenage tittle-tattle a la Little Britain's Vicky Pollard. Only when she flips into confrontation mode for the first time does it slowly dawn on us that something i...

Summerhall, Edinburgh Four stars It's almost a decade since David Harrower's relentless study of psychosexual politics between a fifty something man and the woman he had a sexual relationship fifteen years earlier when she was twelve premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival. Then, it broke taboos, however ambiguous its stance. Now, as the Hawick-based Firebrand company revive it for a mini tour of intimate spaces, in a post Jimmy Savile climate where 'paedo' is a standard playground insult and the vagaries of 1970s liberalism are being thrown back in their apparent advocates faces, Blackbird looks more troublingly relevant than ever. Yet there's nothing exploitative when Romana Abercromby's Una bursts in on Greg Wagland's Ray at his work-place in Richard Baron's unflinchingly intimate production. Rather, there's an underlying sense of unfinished business, even as the mess the pair made of each other's lives seems to be summed u...

The last time street-smart Geordie visionary Johny Brown's work appeared in Scotland was when his play, William Burroughs Caught in Possession of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, appeared at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow. While a reignited formation of Brown's troupe of junk-yard baroque soothsayers, The Band of Holy Joy, who had released several records on the Rough Trade label throughout the 1980s, had just released their sublimely euphoric Love Never Fails album, Brown's epic onstage fantasia cast actor Tam Dean Burn as the eponymous author of The Naked Lunch on Coleridge's sea-faring vessel. Also in tow were fictionalised evocations of fellow experimental novelist Kathy Acker, former New York Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders (played by former Exploited bass player turned actor in The Acid House and Gangs of New York, Gary McCormack), and artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. With such a motley crew on board, this was punk theatre personified, and continued an...

City Halls, Glasgow Saturday February 22 Four stars The idea of free improvised music appearing as part of a BBC SSO programme would have been unthinkable a decade ago except as a passing novelty. Such has been the landscape-changing effect of left-leaning music festivals in Scotland, from Free RadiCCAls and Le Weekend through to Instal, Kill Your Timid Notion, Dialogues, Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra's GIOfest and the most recent additions of Counterflows, Sonica and Tectonics, that it would seem remiss of longer standing institutions not to embrace them. So it was with this thrilling bill of works that attracted an audience perhaps more used to seeing and hearing such veterans of experimental music as guitarist Frith, trombonist and electronicist Lewis and saxophonist Mitchell in the low level confines of arts labs and other intimate off-radar gatherings. Yet, despite their avant-garde roots, all three men are major composers in their own right on scales great and smal...

When Game of Thrones star Gemma Whelan first performed Philip Ridley's devastating solo play, Dark Vanilla Jungle, during the 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the actress and comedian was warned there would be walk-outs. Not because of the play's subject matter, which charts the car crash life of teenage Andrea, who is abandoned by her parents before being groomed by older men into a world that leads her deeper and deeper into an emotional morass she eventually kicks against with tragic consequences. Rather, such a reaction would likely as not be down to the more mundane response of audience members having to make a dash to other shows they've booked into. Primed as she was, having one woman walk right across the stage just as she was in the emotional throes of one of the play's most harrowing scenes made things even harder for Whelan. “That was a dreadful walkout,” she says, as she prepares to open a new tour of the Supporting Wall's production of Dark Va...

There's something innocent about Garry Marshall when he talks about Happy Days, the 1950s teen-based sit-com he created forty years ago this year. This is fitting somehow for a writer, director and producer who himself came of age in a post World War Two era of rock and roll and high-school hops which he mythologised on a show that became a key part of a nostalgia boom that's never really gone away. Initially piloted as a one-off episode of Love, American Style, Happy Days ran for 255 episodes between 1974 and 1985. The show's initial focus on Ron Howard's straight-laced good guy Ritchie Cunningham was soon upstaged by Henry Winkler's leather-jacketed tough guy Arthur 'The Fonz' Fonzarelli, who stole the show enough to become a household name. Thirty years since the show ended, Happy Days – A New Musical opened in Glasgow last night as part of its UK tour in a production written by Marshall himself alongside Bugsy Malone composer, Paul Williams. ...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Life and death are everything for Jonah and Sophie, the shyly dysfunctional couple at the heart of Blink, Phil Porter's self-consciously kooky but quietly profound play, which was originally seen at the Traverse during the theatre's 2012 Edinburgh Festival Fringe season. As the pair talk to the audience, their story unfolds via series of criss-crossing monologues that lay bare an awkward, barely there affair that's more about confirming each other's right to be apart than anything that happens when they're not quite together. Sophie has been brought up in the Isle of Man, Jonah in a religious commune. Both come into money via their dead parents, and end up living on top of each other in a London suburb. He watches her as one might view a reality TV show, while she keeps her distance, and they only meet for the first time after a near fatal accident brings them briefly into the same sphere until they go their separate ...