Coffee-Table Notes

Eilidh Loan was just eighteen when she left small town Erskine to take up a place at Guildford School of Acting. There she was, a teenage mod in her Fred Perry and Doc Martens, rocking up out of Renfrewshire to take on the world. By the end of her time in Guildford, Loan had won the Alan Bates award for most promising actor in their final year at drama school ahead of 300 other entrants. Among other things, this enabled her to develop her own play, Moorcroft, a version of which has already been seen at the John Thaw Studio Theatre. Fellow actor Elliot Barnes-Worrall, who presented her with the award, described Loan as “a warrior woman.” Now here she is, having already played Lady Macbeth on radio and Lady Jane Grey on TV in BBC 4’s England’s Forgotten Queen, and the now barely twenty-something Loan is making her professional stage debut as another driven eighteen-year-old. In Rona Munro’s new version of Frankenstein, which opens at Perth Theatre next week prior to a UK-wide to...

Dundee Rep Four stars Strangers on a train are destined for disaster in Peter Arnott’s new play, which marks this December’s forthcoming 140th anniversary of the 1879 Tay Bridge tragedy. That was when what was then the longest rail bridge of its kind in the world collapsed, plunging an estimated 75 passengers and crew to their deaths. Using this as the source to imagine the inner lives of seven passengers, the result is a series of thumbnail sketches illustrating the divided and poverty-stricken society that existed in nineteenth century Scotland. Once the mist clears on Emily James’ revolving train carriage in Andrew Panton’s production, one by one we get inside the heads of Ewan Donald’s idealistic school-teacher, Irene Macdougall’s put-upon minister’s wife exposed to the slums and Anne Kidd’s maid finally taking what’s hers. Leah Byrne and Bailey Newsome’s young couple are chasing a new life in America, while things take a lurch into full-on music hall as Emily Winter’s g...

When Stuart Hepburn’s play, Chic Murray: A Funny Place for a Window, is screened on BBC Scotland this Sunday night as part of a new series of works first seen at Oran Mor’s A Play, A Pie and A Pint seasons of lunchtime theatre, Hepburn’s study of the iconic comedian will mark a new era for an already phenomenal Glasgow institution. The play is the first of a series of six plays that aims to capture the immediacy of what is now more than 500 brand new one-act works showcased at the fifteen-year old institution. With the new season of of A Play, A Pie and A Pint having opened at Oran Mor this week with Crocodile Rock, a new musical by Andy McGregor, if you’re quick off the mark you could catch the filming of today’s performance for later broadcast as the final show of the BBC Scotland season. All other plays being screened have already been filmed in front of a live audience in similar fashion, designed to catch the buzz of the play as performed. “We’re really, really excited ab...