Coffee-Table Notes

When Sam Shepard came to Glasgow last year to watch the last night of the Citizens Theatre's production of his 1980 play, True West, the presence of someone who was both Hollywood acting royalty and counter-cultural legend packed out the house. With roots in rock and roll, Beat poetry and America's Wild West mythology, here was an underground icon and self-styled literary outlaw who could be nominated for an Oscar for his appearance in The Right Stuff even as he scripted Paris, Texas for fellow traveller, Wim Wenders.  Yet despite such a pedigree which has embraced the hip while flirting with the commercial, Shepard's stage works are rarely seen in these parts. Prior to True West, the last time one of Shepard's plays was seen on a main stage in Scotland was back in 2009, when the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh produced his 1978 piece, Curse of the Starving Class. The arrival of Chorale – A Sam Shepard Roadshow in Edinburgh, then, provides an all too ...

Perth Concert Hall Three stars On the surface, barely anything is made explicit in Joe Orton's dark 1960s comedy of psycho-sexual menace. Every panting innuendo between Sloane's amoral cuckoo in the nest and the middle-aged brother and sister he flits coldly between, however, promises to spill over from Sunday tabloid mundanity into something bigger with every utterance. Now half a century old, Orton's first full-length play teased the Lord Chamberlain, then in charge of what could and couldn't be said onstage, with a taboo-busting mix of contemporary pop buzzwords and stylised baroque. This ages well in London Classic Theatre's touring revival, which arrived at Perth Festival for a one-night stand on Monday night, setting out its store on a jumble of upside-down brass bed-posts and awkwardly angled wardrobes hiding a multitude of sins. Into this mess steps Paul Dandys' sexually ambivalent Sloane, a psycho-pathic piece of rough trade who manages to wrap both his...

When Molly Campbell and her mum Louise Fairlie went to see Tamasha Theatre Company's production of Sudha Buchar's play, My Name Is..., it was an emotional experience. My Name Is..., which tours to the Tron Theatre in Glasgow this weekend as part of the theatre's Mayfesto season, gets behind the sensationalist headlines that  told how, in 2006, the then twelve year old Campbell was apparently snatched from her home on the Isle of Lewis by her father, Sajad, and taken to his native Pakistan. A few days later, Campbell spoke to the world in a press conference to say that, far from being kidnapped, she had gone to Pakistan of her own accord, and would now rather be known as Misbah. Buchar's play, developed over six years after interviewing all three members of the estranged family, aims to set the record straight about a story that wasn't about race or religion, but was more about the painfully familiar fall-out when two people stop being in love, and what happens when ...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars When a woman steps silently into the sculpted tip which two damaged sisters call home and pulls out a baby rat from the swollen track-suited belly of one of them, it's clear just how feral the twenty-something siblings have become in Vivienne Franzmann's remarkable new play. This is one of few silent moments in a ninety-five minute tug of love between Pink and Rolly that explodes with the pains of every-day survival in the messed-up bubble the women have created for themselves. Rolly has arrived on Pink's doorstep straight out of prison. Barely literate but furiously articulate, with a street-smart patois lifted on the cheap from pop songs and trash TV, Pink and Rolly take on the world outside their door with a snarl. Inside, they find comfort from each other, and while Rolly never sees the projected mayhem going on in Pink's head, a pair of magic red shoes might just make things better. While there are obvious linguistic and thema...

Dundee Rep Four stars If Alan Ayckbourn had written his 1985 study of one woman's psychological unravelling today, chances are that his heroine, Susan, would be so numbed by Prozac that her descent into fantasy would have been blotted out by the end of the first act. As it is, Marilyn Imrie's lush-looking revival for Dundee Rep's Ensemble company and Birmingham Rep reveals Ayckbourn as a far darker chronicler of the very English garden he occupies than he is often given credit for. Opening with composer Pippa Murphy's anxious-voiced chorale, we're ushered into Susan's idyll, a world occupied by a white-suited husband, a beautiful and talented daughter and a brother who would defend her to the death. Such endlessly sun-drenched perfection is upended, alas, by the reined-in torpor of something both more mundane and a whole lot more complicated.  When it becomes increasingly hard for Susan to tell which world she belongs in, she takes a mental leap too far. Flanked...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars When American wheeler-dealer Ben Munro attempts to buy up the final dregs of the rarest whisky in the world, things don't quite go according to plan. So it goes in Euan Martin, Dave Smith and composer James Bryce's rollicking musical play, in which the Glenigma malt becomes a symbol both of the absurdities of global capitalism and of the life-force of a rural community struggling for economic survival. Of course, John Durnin's big, showbiz-styled production is a whole lot more fun than that, but such underlying political motifs are what drives this revival of a show first seen in 2010 following its development from the Highland Quest competition to find a new Scottish musical. With distillery heiress Mary forced to sell off the last bottle of Glenigma to the highest bidder, the auction also attracts a Japanese collector, setting up an east-west conflict that captures the attention of the Scottish government. With an export ban imposed o...

Charles Marowitz - Theatre director, playwright, critic Born January 26 1934; died May 2 2014 Charles Marowitz, who has died aged 80 after struggling with Parkinson's Disease, was a theatrical iconoclast of the 1960s counter-cultural avant-garde, whose uncompromising attitude left its mark bluntly and without sentiment. This was the case whether causing trouble in Edinburgh and Glasgow at the Traverse and Citizens Theatres, working closely with Peter Brook at the Royal Shakespeare Company prior to an Antonin Artaud-inspired Theatre of Cruelty season, deconstructing Shakespeare in London at the radical but glamorous Open Space theatre he co-founded with producer Thelma Holt, or advocating his same wilfully singular artistic vision in Los Angeles during his later years. New York born Marowitz alienated many, and not for nothing was his score-settling autobiography, published in 1990, called Burnt Bridges. The youngest of three children born to Polish Jewish immigrant...