Coffee-Table Notes

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars It's not hard to see the appeal of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's musical waltz through the mating game that so captivated Broadway on its 1973 debut. From teenage dreams to mid-life crises and beyond, it is sex that drives its action, after all. It may be set in 1900 Sweden, but it remains a text-book study of a neurotically self-absorbed generation coming to terms with the trickle-down possibilities the sixties brought in its wake. This much is clear from John Durnin's stately revival, beyond the chocolate box veneer of Charles Cusick Smith's set which puts the full compliment of Pitlochry's acting ensemble into the frame. All this with great songs to boot. This is laid bare once the dressed-up chorus gathered round a baby grand give way to the play's principal players, who let off steam with the opening salvo of Now, Later and Soon, as the frustrations of middle-aged lawyer Fredric Egerman, his teenage vi...

Elizabeth MacLennan Actress Born March 16 th 1938; died June 23 rd 2015. Elizabeth MacLennan, who has died aged 77 following a short illness, was an actress of great passion, whose presence on stage and screen demanded attention. As one of the co-founders with John McGrath and her youngest brother David MacLennan of 7:84 Theatre Company, who blazed a trail touring the Highlands in the now seminal 1973 production of The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil, she was also at the vanguard of a theatrical revolution. The resonances of this are currently influencing a brand new generation of politicised theatre-makers in the face of the business of bad government. In partnership with her life-long personal and professional comrade and soul-mate McGrath, MacLennan was at the forefront of applying traditional art-forms to make serious political and theatrical points that created a new form of ceilidh theatre. With McGrath and MacLennan serving as each other's inspiratio...

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow Four stars The hunt is on in the first offering from this year's Bard in the Botanics season of outdoor Shakespeares, with one of his lesser spotted rom-coms leading the charge. Gordon Barr's promenade production opens with Constable Dull cast as a red-neck parkie navigating the audience up hill and down dale. Here King Ferdinand of Navarre and his preppy band of brothers sport donnish gowns to make lofty proclamations of abstinence for three full years while they get themselves some qualifications. When the fair maids of France come calling necking airline miniatures and with their smalls hanging out to dry, the rugby shirts go on but the gloves are off as temptation looks like getting the better of the stags if not the hens. Throw in Kirk Bage's Daliesque Spanish rogue Don Andriano and a couple of chavvy servants and it looks like the casts of Made in Chelsea and Geordie Shore have been rounded up and cast incongruously adrift on Love Is...

In the early 1990s, Baggy may have been on the verge of morphing into Brit-Pop, but in Edinburgh's bohemian Stockbridge district, something was stirring in the form of what can now be seen as a missing link that had absolutely nothing to do with either of those era defining musical movements. Nor indeed would it. Weaving together a mish-mash of musical incongruity that defied both style and substance, The Shrimptons burst onto St Stephen Street, where Velvet Underground vocalist Nico had once held court and where Punk Rock's luminaries once played, to massive indifference. Like all prophets in their own land, however, The Shrimptons were both ahead of and seriously behind the times. In a parallel universe, and with something resembling decent management instead of the shifty, dole queue lowlifes who attached themselves to the band, bumming drinks and favours off anyone who'd have them along the way, they could have been contenders. As it is, all that is left of the Sh...

Paul Bright's Confessions of A Justified Sinner When Stewart Laing's Untitled Projects, who were recently turned down by Creative Scotland for Regular Funding, brought this meticulously observed show to the stage in 2013, it ostensibly told the tale of a radical young theatre director who staged a production of James Hogg's novel, Confessions of A Justified Sinner, in the 1980s before vanishing from an increasingly safe artistic scene. In actual fact, its mix of film footage, archive material and a performance by actor George Anton tapped into a hidden history of underground theatre-making in Scotland that reclaimed it in the most playfully inventive of manners. Already acclaimed internationally, Paul Bright has now been picked up by the Edinburgh International Festival for dates in the Queen's Hall, a venue integral to Anton's story. Edinburgh International Festival, Queens Hall, August 19th-22nd Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour When Alan Warner's Sa...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars If the former World War Two ambulance driver who camped out in a yellow-painted Humber in Alan Bennett's Camden garden for fifteen years until her death in 1989 had been around today, chances are she would have been carted off a lot earlier than she is in Bennett's quasi-autobiographical look at truth, artifice and how we care for each other. The woman Bennett knew as Miss Shepherd arrives in the neighbourhood at the fag-end of the sixties like a leftover from the Bloomsbury set by way of the squatters paradise of alternative London. With Bennett represented by two actors, both facets of his split personality collect people's personal tics as material, even as he divides his time between his ageing mother and this other psychologically bombed-out presence who defines him. Led by strong central performances by Jacqueline Dutoit as Miss Shepherd and Mark Elstob and Ronnie Simon as the two Bennetts, Patrick Sandford's pr...

Jerry Mitchell had never watched the film of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels when he was asked to choreograph David Yazbek and Jeffrey Lane's stage musical of the Frank Oz directed 1988 big screen vehicle for Michael Caine and Steve Martin. That was back in 2004, and by the following year the American born dancer turned director and choreographer was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Choreography on the show's original Broadway production, which ran for some 626 performances. A decade on, and Mitchell revisited the show for a UK production which he both directed and choreographed on the West End. With the production being nominated for an Olivier Award, again for Best Choreography, Mitchell jetted in to London in April to attend the award ceremony in-between overseeing rehearsals for a touring version that arrives in Glasgow tonight prior to dates in Aberdeen and Edinburgh. Oz's original caper movie about a couple of middle-aged con artists competing to scam wealthy women on...