Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars As this week marks the twentieth anniversary of the Labour Party's General Election landslide, it is also the perfect time to see Douglas Maxwell's play, which charts a legacy of 1990s sired terminal adolescents who try but sometimes fail to grow up. Into what looks like a waiting room to some possible wonderland steps Chick, a middle-aged prodigal who seems to have slipped through the security blanket of post-university career opportunities and domestic bliss. While his former student playmates Jackson and Gary learnt how to lead a good and useful life, Chick has kept on partying, though he's long since forgotten why. One minute changes everything, however, and the sight of Gary's sixteen year old daughter Audrey in a hospital bed coma awakens a flicker of purpose for Chick. What follows in Matthew Lenton's dream-like production is a slow-burning elegy to loss that sees a disoriented Chick lurch between times and...

Giles Havergal thinks it might have been the very first preview of Travels With My Aunt when he thought his new production was doomed. It was 1989, money was tight, and, necessity being the mother of invention, Havergal had opted to make his adaptation of Graham Greene's 1969 novel as economically spare as he could. On the eve of Phillip Breen's revival for the Gorbals-based institution's main stage, things may have come full circle in terms of austerity, but Travels With My Aunt remains both of its time and an evergreen masterpiece which transcends literary fads and fashions. “I'd just got started,” recalls Havergal during a flying visit to Glasgow for the read-through of Breen's production. “I'd just got into the aunt and I was fluttering away doing all my stuff, and I suddenly heard one of the seats in the circle go, and I thought, ohh , somebody can't bear it. Actually, I discovered later it wasn't that, but at that time I thought, oh my God, I...

Of all the plays that looked at World War One as part of the war's 100 year commemoration, arguably the most powerful was The 306: Dawn. Performed in a barn in Perthshire, the National Theatre of Scotland and Perth Theatre's production of Oliver Emanuel's play looked at the experience of some of the 306 men executed for cowardice between 1914 and 1918. This first part of a trilogy of music theatre works used movement and a live score by Gareth Williams performed by the Red Note Ensemble alongside Emanuel's text to dramatise a piece of hidden history that became an elegy to the men. Today, it is recognised that those executed would likely have been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder, and it took the best part of a century for them to receive pardons. Almost a year on, the second part of the trilogy opens this week in very different surroundings, as it focuses on the women behind the men that fell on the front-line. The 306: Day opens in the Station Hotel in...

Bill Drummond has been making a spectacle of himself for almost half a century. In a myth-making anti-career with assorted ideas and accomplices in tow, he has subverted the mainstream in ways which the mainstream didn't expect, notice or understand, but which changed forever anyway. Bill Drummond is still The Man. Some might call him a national treasure. He'd hate that. This was written for the press release to promote Bill Drummond's appearance as part of Neu! Reekie!'s Where Are We Now? Edina event that took place at Leith St Andrew's Church, Edinburgh on April 28 th 2017. The release went out on March 7 th 2017, and also featured words from Hannah McGill, Leo Condie, Rab Choudhry and Davie Miller. Also on the bill on the night were poet Clare Pollard, Callum Easter, 404 Ink / Nasty Women's Laura Jones and Heather McDaid, animators Iain Gardner and Will Anderson and Ainslie Henderson, plus What We Have Done, a new film by Bonnie Prince Bob...

Big Gold Dream is the everyday story of how a group of disaffected youth in search of the only fun in town went on to change the world. High on theory and with only cheek, cheek-bones and cheap guitars to get them through between dole cheques, they took a set of hand-me-down reference points plundered from second-hand books, late night TV and subtitled films, created a scene and transformed it into ART. As was typical of the times, entryism was in and subversion was from within, but like all great movements, it was never going to last. Except everything you hear today, tomorrow and knocked into the middle of next week started here. Indie-Disco, Art-Rock and Difficult Fun are all in the mix. Big Gold Dream is as much about Now as Then. Sound and Vision are everything. Welcome to the Future. This is Big Gold Dream. This is Pop! January 2017 This was written for the back cover of the DVD release of Big Gold Dream, Grant McPhee's documentary history...

Watching Blow Off live is a thrilling experience. A.J. Taudevin's relentless piece of self-styled guerilla-gig-theatre rips open the psyche of a feminist activist to lay bare the emotional and psychological drive which has pushed her to the limit to take on the patriarchy that has been doing the pushing. Accompanied onstage by a live soundtrack performed by composer/musician Kim Moore, aka Wolf, and Susan Bear and Julie Eisenstein, aka nouveau-punk duo Tuff Love, Blow Off is given a fearless momentum, with the music driving Taudevin on, backing her up every every explosive step of the way. With this in mind, it is essential that Blow Off is heard in its own right as much as it is seen. Soundtrack albums of musical theatre shows are nothing new. It is only logical that an audience member who has enjoyed a show will want to take home some kind of permanent record of their experience, be it a copy of the play itself or an album. But such a record becomes more than a mere souveni...

"My God!” beams the rangy figure towering over the foyer of the Citizens Theatre, “I bet you thought you had a date with Lazarus!" Giles Havergal's presence announces itself with unbridled glee. For a man whose well turned out appearance was a one-man reception committee on every opening night during his thirty-three years in charge of the Gorbals-based institution between 1969 and 2003, it's as if he's never been away. Havergal has just been getting his picture taken in the theatre's auditorium, where he and his co-artistic directors Robert David MacDonald and Philip Prowse created so much remarkable work as they defined the Citz's flamboyant style over three decades. In the corner of the foyer, tucked away en route to the toilets, images of Havergal, MacDonald and Prowse hang side by side like maids in a row. They were taken not long before all three men departed the institution they'd put on the international theatre map as a new era was ushered i...