Coffee-Table Notes

Act 1 - The End Scene 1 - Interior Once upon a time, everyone wanted to make movies. In the beginning, there were studios and moguls, matinee idols and starlets. Then there were auteurs and mavericks, the Free Cineastes and the Nouvelle Vaguers. Then came the movie brats and the baby boomers, the indie-kids, the guerillas and the grindhousers. And somewhere in the cracks between blockbusters and blandness, great movies were made, and sometimes terrible ones too. There were the collectives and the self-starters, the DIYers and the undergrounders. And lo, picking and mixing from all of these like there's no tomorrow, Tartan Features was born. Scene 2 - Exterior In their short, imperfectly formed lifespan, Tartan Features learnt on the hoof to pitch with the best and the worst of them. But beyond the Tartan Shorts, the 81/2s and all that jazz, Tartan Features wanted to go beyond the pocket-sized to make something bigger. Something e...

Scotland’s designated Year of Young People got off to something of a rocky start earlier this year when, just a few weeks in, Creative Scotland announced that it would no longer be providing regular funding for any theatre companies making work for young people. While this wasn’t a good look for anybody, a couple of necessary U-Turns later, and thankfully the likes of the world-renowned Catherine Wheels company were, for the time being at least, allowed some kind of stability. Mercifully, none of this has had any effect on plans for Futureproof, a massive international initiative for the Year of Young People initiated by EventScotland and presented in partnership with the National Theatre of Scotland. Opening tonight in Glasgow, Futureproof brings together some of the finest companies in the world for a series of ten events across Scotland which has seen them collaborate with young people in each area to create a set of brand new theatre-works developed throughout the year. “I...

King’s Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars It’s the clutter you notice first in David Grindley’s staging of Christine Mary Dunford’s play, adapted from Lisa Genova’s novel about a woman whose life is ripped apart by young-onset dementia aged just fifty. The furniture in the open-plan living room and kitchen arrangement of Jonathan Fensom’s set seems to spill into each other, the physical manifestation of a busy and over-loaded mind that will gradually be stripped bare until there’s nothing to hold onto anymore. This is what happens to Alice, the driven Harvard linguistics professor who finds herself slowly losing her faculties. Like her would-be actress daughter Lydia, Alice suddenly has to improvise her way through life, aided here by her inner self brought to life by Eva Pope, who gives voice to Alice’s internal workings. Where Alice and her husband John were once academic equals, by the end she can’t recognise him or her children, but remains dependent on the kindness of the p...