Coffee-Table Notes

It was a different world when David Greig first adapted August Strindberg’s play, Creditors, a decade ago. Back then, when the playwright and current artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, was first approached by the late Alan Rickman to look at the play for a production at the Donmar in London, Strindberg’s lacerating study of a marriage in   crisis seemed eyebrow-raisingly modern for a piece written in 1888, but no more. Ten years on, and Greig is revisiting his version of the play for a new production at the Lyceum directed and designed by Stewart Laing. In the light of the MeToo movement and a culture of high-level misogyny previously hiding in plain sight, the extremes of Creditors now appear even more startling. “It’s about marriage,” says Greig, “and it’s about men and women, particularly men’s emotional fragility. There’s an extraordinary theatrical energy that Strindberg releases in actors. He creates a room which is like a boxing ring, and then...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four Stars An elephant in the room sits  throughout Stewart Ennis’ biographical imagining of the many lives of Mary Shelley, the much neglected author of Frankenstein. Or rather, there is the monster she allowed Dr Frankenstein to create by proxy, and who might just be sitting beneath dust sheets in the corner as Mary too comes to life like a Hammer horror heroine reclaiming her soul. In a room resplendent with lush drapes and papered with scraps of scrawled words, it’s a neat double bluff to introduce this new production from Glasgow-based performance company, The Occasion, in which Catherine Gillard unveils Mary’s story. Like its subject, Ennis’ script is a multi-faceted gothic collage that gives vent to the assorted voices in Mary’s head. As she moves back and forth from hanging with the bohemian set in Lake Geneva and her previous exile to Dundee, Mary adopts a modern-day yoof-speak, outing herself as a teenage mum apparently referred to by the lo...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars In the gloom, the shadowy female figure at the top of the wooden stairs in Dominic Hill’s mighty revival of Eugene O’Neill’s semi-autobiographical dysfunctional splurge looks like some spectral figure trapped in the place that doomed her to oblivion. As perfectly poised as the figure appears, when the lights go up on Tom Piper’s grandiloquent but skeletal set, the figure may be revealed as a headless mannequin draped in a wedding dress, but as the next three hours prove, it is no less of a ghost. As with Piper’s set, there is nothing solid in the lives of the Tyrones, O’Neill’s raging clan, led by ageing star actor James and his morphine-addicted bride Mary. Like them, their sons James Junior and a consumption-addled Edmund are tip-toeing their way through the lies and disappointments of their lives set to explode in the glare of a naked lightbulb and a foghorn that guides no-one home. With an entire family on different drugs, everyo...

Dundee Rep Four stars Coming of age is everything in Dundee Rep’s twenty-first anniversary revival of Stephen Greenhorn’s poignantly funny rites of passage drama. As small-town lost boys Alex and Brian do a runner from Motherwell with a state-of-art surfboard tied to the back of a clapped-out Lada, they end up finding a brave new world where they can be anyone they want to be. With psychotic Binks on their tails, free-spirited Mirren and all the other crazies they encounter en route to the perfect wave up north already seem to be way ahead of them.   Set against designer Becky Minto’s expansive road to nowhere, Andrew Panton’s heartfelt production unearths fresh life in a 1990s period piece that looks and sounds ever profounder with age. Written at a time when an entire generation was looking for a way out, Greenhorn’s play manages to pack a set of big ideas – about selfhood, identity and freedom on every level – into a fast-moving one-liner-laced romp. Ewan Donald ...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars The audience gasps with shock mid-way through the second act of the National Theatre of Great Britain’s latest tour of their epic staging of Michael Morpurgo’s World War One-set novel. When they do, that’s when you know the power of Marianne Elliot and Tom Morris’ puppet-led spectacular is still intact. A decade after it was created, any dead horses involved categorically aren’t being flogged. The opening and closing of Nick Stafford’s adaptation, overseen in this revival by Katie Henry, features a show of collective strength led by Bob Fox’s hearty renditions of John Tams’ Norfolk-inflected songs. This looks drawn from the NT’s 1980s template of folksy radicalism. Once foal Joey is brought to staggering life by a dozen puppeteers in constructions designed by Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler of South Africa’s phenomenal Handspring Puppet Company, it becomes an even more impressive spectacle. As Joey is sold to the army, only to be foll...