Coffee-Table Notes

Eden Court Theatre, Inverness Three stars The sound of twittering gulls flying high over St Kilda that ushers in the first revival of Sue Glover's eighteenth century set play on home soil in almost three decades is a significant pointer to what follows in Liz Carruthers' production, as three women attempt to spread their wings and fly free. While Isabel is the virginal wife of newly arrived minister Aneas and Oona the Gaelic speaking local, at the play's centre is Rachel Chiesley, aka Lady Grange, the furious wild child exiled by a high-falutin' and hypocritical husband who couldn't control her more singular ways. Like St Kilda, Lady Grange is abandoned, but rather than look on her imposed exile as some kind of retreat, she is a walking confrontation, a stranded Miranda in rags whipping up her own tempest from the neck of a bottle. With her airs and graces barely contained by the rough-shod chair made by Oona that allows her to indulge a sense of superiorit...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars In a virtual world, what does it take to change the universe? Such dilemmas are put under the microscope in this devised exploration of lives in orbit from the Curious Directive company, revived here following an Edinburgh Festival Fringe run for the Edinburgh International Science Festival in association with the Norfolk and Norwich Festival and Watford Palace Theatre. Set in the year 2029, the space race has set its sights on Mars, with couples in particular being favoured in a billion dollar project backed by an Indian philanthropist. But Imke has lost her partner Oscar en route to the red planet, and Imke's sister Maartje must be hauled from the depths of her own researches to save Imke's sanity. The great-grandsons of Russian space pioneer Sergei Korolev, meanwhile, are on their own rocket-fuelled road trip to recreate the stratospheric thrill of it all by any means necessary. Jack Lowe's production immerses its cast...

West Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh Three stars When four women gather on a grassy hillock on Easter Saturday to introduce us to a very familiar story, the dressed-down approach of Salome, Anna, the wife of Peter the disciple, and two very different kinds of Mary ushers in something beyond a more familiar roll-call of emperors, scribes and hand-washing statesmen. Instead, Susan Mansfield's take on the greatest story ever told in Cutting Edge Theatre Company's now annual open-air Edinburgh Easter Play lets those who we normally don't hear about have their say. Over a series of nine largely solo scenes, the audience bear witness to confessionals and testimonies from the Bible's minor characters, innocent bystanders, bit part players and all but silent witnesses to the everyday miracles and crucifixions that will define them forever after. There is the apology of Claudia, the wife of Pontious Pilate, who remained acquiescent in her husband's decision. Ther...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars The five performers sat in a row across the front of the stage as the audience put on their headphones may be still as they begin Kai Fischer's dramatic exploration of assorted twilight zones, but everything they say and do over the next hour suggests lives in constant motion. With a big screen behind them projecting swirls of far off planets and torrents of ocean, the quintet juxtapose the stories of Yuri Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut who in 1961 became the first man in space, and a group of nameless refugees on the run from Africa to a world full of western promise. It begins informally enough, with guitarist Tyler Collins and percussionist Gameli Tordzro tapping out infectious global rhythms while performers Ryan Gerald, Mercy Ojelade and Adura Onashile test out microphones that will link them directly with the audience's own wavelength. Within seconds, however, we hear the crackle of pre-launch dialogue between Gagarin and a Ground ...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars For those who remember when there was something called old Labour, there's something heart-breaking watching Jeremy Herrin's vital revival of David Hare's fictionalisation of the Labour Party's 1992 General Election campaign. Herrin's production for Headlong with the Rose Theatre Kingston and Sheffield Theatres on tour opens with a driven coterie of speech-writers, minders, spin doctors and pin-striped PRs flitting urgently around unreconstructed Party leader George Jones. Given everything that has happened in UK politics in the two decades since Hare's play first appeared, what follows now looks like a final fanfare for the common man who has been replaced by the business of bad management. In this way, Reece Dinsdale's theatre-loving Jones is thrust from strategy meeting to TV studio to podium, burying his core beliefs until even he forgets what they are as he's betrayed by oily careerists on the make. Where ...

When Sue Glover's play, The Straw Chair, first appeared at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in 1988, it's eighteenth century setting and focus on volatile female characters was in stark contrast to a prevailing trend of gritty realism. The play's study of Lady Grange, exiled from Edinburgh to a barren St Kilda by her philandering husband, was a hit nevertheless, and regarded by many as a contemporary classic. It is curious therefore, that Liz Carruthers' revival of the play which embarks on an extensive Scottish tour this week, is the first time Glover's play will have been seen in Scotland in a full production for twenty-seven years. “I never pushed for it,” says Glover today. “The Traverse used to say to me that if only I wrote about housing estates and drugs they could market me better, but I wasn't interested in that, and a lot of bigger theatres didn't think it suitable. The play wasn't published until later either, and after about five years...

When Kai Fischer was growing up in East Germany when the Berlin Wall still divided his country, the big dream of his generation was to travel beyond the Wall to all the perceived liberties the west apparently offered. Around the same time, the story of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who in 1961 had been the first man in space, had already captured Fischer's imagination as it had little boys around the globe. More recently, Fischer saw parallels with African migrants trying to get to what they imagined to be a European land of freedom and liberty. The result of these musings are brought together in Last Dream (On Earth), the theatre designer best known for his work with the Vanishing Point company's follow-up to Entartet, an audio installation based on transcripts that accompanied the Nazi Party's Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937. Using similar sound-led techniques devised with composer Matt Padden, this new co-production between Fischer, the National Theatre of Scotlan...