Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars 'NO FIGHTING' says a makeshift banner hanging over the upper circle of the Lyceum auditorium as seen from the stage, where some of the audience are seated throughout Wils Wilson's production of Bridget Boland's little seen 1948 play. Set in a Berlin theatre used as a holding centre for displaced persons – refugees caught up in a post World War Two limbo and about to be exiled in alien and possibly hostile lands – the play's depiction of still warring factions in newly liberated Europe is both history and prophecy. The actuality sees Poles, Russians, Serbs and Croats at loggerheads, with a show of unity only emerging out of a crisis before hostilities flare up once more. Boland's play is remarkable enough in its evocation of a conflict-riven Europe steeped in territorial suspicion and warped ideologies. By using the entire theatre as its stage, Wilson has herself broken through a symbolic barrier that makes for ...

When the doors of Perth Theatre re-open to the public in November following a £15m make-over of the category B listed building, it will be reflecting on its past as much as forging towards a bold new future. Today, as exclusively revealed to the Herald, new artistic director Lu Kemp, appointed in 2016, announces her first season of in-house stage productions. With a pantomime, a Shakespeare play and a contemporary Scottish classic all confirmed, there is much to whet the appetite of Perth audiences old and new. Beyond Kemp's three productions, a tour of rural venues aims to reclaim a circuit which previously spread its net right across the Perthshire region. There will also be a season of children's work in the theatre's new 200 seater state of art studio space, while an array of renowned theatre practitioners have been drafted in as associate artists. As for the building itself, “It's beautiful,” says Kemp of the transformation, overseen by Richard Murphy Archi...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Thursday October 5 th 2017 The last time Michael Head graced Oran Mor's doors in February 2016, his forever changing Red Elastic Band featured just a trumpet player and a cellist. There are no such baroque flourishes this time out, as Head gets back to basics with a classic guitar/bass/drums line-up which more resembles a second generation version of Shack, the Scallydelic nouveau Merseybeat combo he led with his guitar hero younger brother John across five studio albums. There are echoes of that era from the off, as Head enters sporting a Modern Lovers t-shirt alongside guitarist Danny Murphy, and opens with an elaborately plucked acoustic version of Byrds Turn to Stone. The song, taken from Shack's fourth album, Here's Tom With the Weather, documents the Head brothers’ back room epiphanies as they attempted to learn the chords for all the mind-expanding1960s anthems they'd discovered. Hearing something so personal without one of its key ar...

The glass-fronted foyer of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh is piled high with well-worn suit-cases. Wils Wilson seems pleasantly surprised to see them as she briefly escapes from rehearsals for her production of Bridget Boland's little-known play, Cockpit, which opens at the Lyceum this weekend. With window ledges lined with vintage books beside her as Wilson makes her way up the stairs, it's as if the theatre has been taken over by occupying forces. Which, given that Wilson's production won't be confined to the stage, but will sprawl it's way across the theatre's auditorium, in a way, it has. “It's not a play that anybody knows,” says Wilson of Cockpit. “It did well critically in the West End, but it didn't keep its audience, so it didn't run for terribly long, and since then, according to all our researches it hasn't ever been done again.” Cockpit premiered in 1948, three years after the end of the Second World War. The play is set i...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Stepping into another world is not unusual for an audience attending a new piece of theatre by Edinburgh based site-specific auteurs Grid Iron. Walking into a mock-up of the high court, in which you're likely to be selected to be one of fifteen jurors overseeing a fifty-two day murder trial, as is the case with this new co-production with the Traverse, is a step into a world of class-bound ritual and enough arcane Latin phrases to bamboozle the crustiest of academics. Ben Harrison's production of a text co-written with legal academic Jenny Scott disrupts proceedings of what initially seems like a cut and dry case by shining a spotlight on the jurors' imagined internal monologues. Recordings of these overlap with John Bett's Judge droning on inbetween declarations for both the defence and the prosecution. The play's authors themselves occasionally get to comment on things. It is the second act of what looks like it m...

Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh Three stars Oxygen House theatre company may have taken a twenty year break since their last production, but the pioneering Edinburgh-based purveyors of dramatic abstraction have retained an inherent sense of style in John Mitchell's production of Sophocles' final play in his Theban trilogy. Presented in association with Acting Out Drama School at the venue where Oxygen House began their adventure in 1987, this regeneration features a largely female cast in Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald's 1938 translation. Storm clouds seem to gather from the off amidst the blackness of a bare stage heightened by Phil Cooney's swirling soundscape. Into this step a black shirted chorus who turn their back on the action as Antigone pleads with her sister Ismene to help her bury their rebel brother Polynices against the will of Queen Creon. Creon herself is a lady not for turning, whose apparent strong and stable outlook is doomed to fail...

There's anything but silence in court in the North Edinburgh rehearsal room where Grid Iron theatre company are pulling together their latest production. In preparing for Jury Play, the renowned site-specific auteurs' new play by Grid Iron artistic director Ben Harrison and legal academic Dr Jenny Scott, the company are re-creating the everyday spectacle of a jury trial through the point of view of the jury itself. These fifteen ordinary men and women selected at random to pass judgement in High Court criminal trials may in one sense be a symbol of democracy. As they sit there in silence while evidence is put before them through witnesses for both the defence and the prosecution, they might have altogether different things on their minds. In Jury Play, this is revealed through a series of internal monologues that lay bare a form of truth not necessarily heard in the witness box, and which makes for some lively cross-talk beyond it. “The way that a trial is delivered in c...