Coffee-Table Notes

Kolbrun Bjort Sigfusdottir is going through security check at Edinburgh Airport when she’s supposed to be talking about her very personal show, (Can This Be) Home, which she performs in Edinburgh tonight alongside musician Tom Oakes on what was supposed to be the night before the UK left Europe. It turns out the Icelandic theatre director, whose tireless Brite Theatre company is at the forefront of the capital’s grassroots theatre scene, is flying to London to take part in last weekend’s People’s March against Brexit. Whether Sigfusdottir’s experience on the march will be fed into her tellingly named show remains to be seen, but her presence there after living and working in the UK for five years is significant in terms of how much her future personal and professional future might be affected by Brexit. “The thinking behind the show,” she says from airside, “is grounded in the original question of whether or not you’re going home for Christmas, and this idea of going back to y...

Eastgate Theatre, Peebles Three stars In a white hospital ward, a woman wakes up to the world she used to know, but which isn’t quite the same as what feels like moments ago. In actuality in Harold Pinter’s late period miniature, Gina went to sleep as a teenage girl twenty-nine years ago, and has come to as a middle-aged woman, but with all her girlish dreams of old gushing out now in a torrent of brain/speech activity. Watched over by doting doctor Hornby, husband of Deborah’s sister Pauline, the latter of whom he might well have met while caring for her sibling, Deborah is initially overwhelmed by a rush of memories. Among the litanies of boyfriends and fall-outs, long-buried intimations of something far darker surface briefly before she flashes forward to the next thing. When exactly those things happened, if at all, is up for debate. Inspired by Oliver Sacks’ book, Awakenings, which looks at the effects of encephalitis lethargica, or sleepy sickness, which leaves suf...

Perth Theatre Four stars Not everyone is left in the dark in Kai Fischer’s reality-confounding revival of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 potboiler, given fresh life when it first gave rise to the term ‘gaslighting’, a form of of psychological manipulation used to convince victims that they’re mad. When Meg Fraser’s tweed-clad Inspector Rough swoops into Bella Manningham’s increasingly dimly-lit living room, it is with the tireless gusto of an avenging angel seeking to protect womankind from men like Bella’s husband Jack. On the face of things, Jack, as played with quiet malevolence by Robin Laing, is a standard issue post-Victorian husband and master of his house, with all the everyday misogyny this implies. Full-on flirtation with Ruby Richardson’s sassed-up maid Nancy is just the half of it, and it is clear from the state of Esme Bayley’s woman on the verge Bella that things have gone a little bit further than what passes as normal behaviour. Things are disappearing from unde...