Coffee-Table Notes

Johnny McKnight wasn’t aware of Deathtrap when he was asked to direct it at Dundee Rep. Given the writer, director and co-founder of Random Accomplice Theatre Company’s pop cultural roots, this was a surprise to him as much as anyone else. “I’d never heard of it,” he says of American writer Ira Levin’s Tony-nominated play, which still holds the record as the longest running comedy-thriller on Broadway. Four years later it was adapted for a film starring Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve and directed by Sidney Lumet. “One of my favourite films is Charade, which is both a comedy and a thriller, and that’s what I liked about Deathtrap. There’s loads of twists and turns, there’s a touch of humour, and it’s loaded with really sharp dialogue. “It also felt really modern. I was surprised it was from the late 70s, because it looks more like a post-modern take on Dial M for Murder or something like that. It feels as well that somebody who knows that genre really well and gave it a w...

“There’s a danger of being too respectful to the story,” says playwright Conor McPherson. “For something to live, it needs energy, or else it can end up being set in stone, and end up pretty soulless.” McPherson is talking about The Weir, the Dublin born writer’s Olivier award winning break-out play that first appeared at the Royal Court in 1997, before transferring to both the West End and Broadway. As with much of his work in the twenty-one years since the play’s debut, story-telling is at the heart of The Weir. Set in an isolated rural pub which gives the play its title, three local men attempt to impress a young woman who’s just moved into the area from the city by telling an increasingly fantastical set of supernatural-tinged tales. When the woman tells her story, she upstages the lot, and the bravado and banter that powered the men’s conversation takes a more redemptive tone.   As with the stories in the play, McPherson doesn’t mind a spot of embellishment to give i...

Robert Wilson’s appointment as the new chair of Creative Scotland was announced last week as Scotland’s hapless arts quango floundered once more in a crisis of its own making. The much-delayed announcement of the latest round of grants to Regularly Funded Organisations (RFOs) should have been a cause for celebration. After organisations had been warned of potential cuts to Creative Scotland’s overall funding, a Scottish Government uplift of £6.6 million should’ve meant that everything was hunky dory. As it turned out, Creative Scotland snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, cutting funds for several major organisations, including all disabled theatre companies, all children’s theatre companies and Transmission, the pioneering artist-led gallery that helped put Glasgow’s art scene on the map. This latest bout of accident-prone managerialism appeared to deflect from other Scottish arts crises, including the ongoing shambles following the closure of Inverleith House, the internationa...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars “The fashionable life is a scream,” beams Edinburgh New Town ingénue Lady Frances Touchwood at one point in director Tony Cownie’s tartan-tinged reimagining of Hannah Cowley’s eighteenth century rom-com romp. By this time, Helen Mackay’s previously prim Lady Frances has been led well and truly astray by Mrs Racket and Mrs Ogle, a pair of grand dames about town who show their new charge the livelier sights of auld and new Reekie. Meanwhile, dashing Doricourt is back in town swishing his way around like a peacock-coloured pop star on tour, with even his reluctant betrothed Letitia unable to resist his charms despite herself. As various schemes are hatched around these parallel plots, happy ever afters may be inevitable, but it’s the women who run rings around the hapless men-folk. Cowley’s original script may date from 1780, but even pushed forward a few years as it is here in Cownie’s well turned out production, it remains a pro...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When the curtain opens at the start of David Leddy’s new play for his Fire Exit company in co-production with the Tron, it becomes clear that the six characters in search of an author onstage are as screwed up as the scrumpled programmes the audience have been tempted with at the door. The scene is apparently a war-torn brothel in Gaza circa 1970, where David Rankine’s horny Palestinian teen Mitri has been sent by his brother to become a man. Ushered into a flamboyant world of madams, maids, harlots and whores of every shape, size, colour and persuasion, Mitri may go willingly, but he soon becomes complicit in his own slow torture.   With the bombs outside sounding more like muffled depth charges, the sexual revolution may appear to be in full swing, but this is the brothel’s final day, a closing down sale of sorts where anything goes. To entertain Mitri, each takes it in turns to tell their story, so it becomes a parlour room cabaret wh...

It's a good day at Blackrock, Dublin, where it may be the fag-end of January, but where the day is imitating a glorious spring day, chock-full of something that smells like hope. ''It hasn't rained for weeks,'' says playwright Frank McGuinness. He's done a full morning's teaching by the time I knock on the door of his little blue-fronted house. The lunchtime news is just finishing on TV, going over the headlines. Some war or other. The Omagh inquiry. The Bloody Sunday inquiry. McGuinness strokes his beard, grabs his big flappy coat, and we hotfoot it to his local before the weather forecast goes and spoils it all. ''We were always taught about 1916 in terms of the Easter Rising,'' he says, recalling the origins of his play, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme in the early eighties, and which receives a new production this week at Glasgow's Citizens' Theatre. ''But the First World War was an absolute...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Four lads play cards in a quiet pub in the town they’ve known since they were born. One of them plays guitar in the corner, plucking out the accidental soundtrack to their lives. Come last orders, and all these boys’ arguments forged by shared experience – working class Tory, socialist idealist, hot head looking for a way out, and apathetic cynic – will be forgotten, washed away at the bottom of a pint glass. Eighty years before, a bunch of young men just like them took a different course of action, as is made clear when the ghost of old-timer George Watters wanders into Jack Nurse and Robbie Gordon’s new play for their increasingly expansive Wonder Fools company. Developed over an eighteen-month research period, Nurse and Gordon’s play gives voice to the 549 men who left Scotland in 1936 for Spain, where they fought against fascism with the International Brigades. This is done by having four of the six performers onstage embody the spir...