Coffee-Table Notes

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four Stars Willy Russell spawned a very charming monster when he wrote his Pygmalion for the Thatcher age forty years ago. As it outsmarts its way into middle-age, Russell’s play remains a wise and witty inspiration, as working class hairdresser Rita’s leap into boozy Open University lecturer Frank’s book-lined study becomes a beacon of hope. In Rita, after all, is the bright and brassy epitome of a generation of common people with ideas beyond their station. Like the gobbiest of revolutionaries, she manages to gatecrash a world of books and intellectual aspiration, where an unhappy marriage and a job that bores her were previously the only future on offer. In Max Roberts’ revival of a production first seen at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, Jessica Johnson’s Rita is a vivacious human dynamo in search of enlightenment, who reignites a fire in Frank enough for them to become accidental kindred spirits. What follows is a bittersweet tale of intimate eq...

Dundee Rep Four stars There will only ever be one Jim McLean, the legendary football manager, who, in the 1980s, when the former joiner’s calling was still the people’s game, built a rundown Dundee United team up from its foundations to become a major European force. But beyond the emotional debris and layers of machismo protecting him, McLean was a fragile construction likely to crumble before the final whistle blew. All this is brought home magnificently in Philip Differ’s dramatic love letter to McLean, which moves between the blustering rage of his subject’s public persona and the doubt-fuelled self-flagellation of the private man. This is made flesh in Sally Reid’s production by a wonderful Barrie Hunter, who captures McLean’s vulnerability with a lightness that can’t help but endear him even to those who loved to hate this most pugnacious of characters. With Hunter pacing urgently across the expanse of Kenny Miller’s symbolic building site set to the buzz of Fiona ...

Dan Mutch was reading a lot of H.P. Lovecraft when he named the new album by The Leg Chromatic Perversion. The psychedelic-sounding title is taken from a line in Lovecraft’s story, The Colour Out of Space, though any influence Lovecraft’s mid-expanding fiction might have had on the manic folk-punk jug-band’s fifth album has been lost to the mists of time. “Chromatic Perversion was a song we did as a spoken-word thing that was originally going to be on the album,” Mutch explains. “It ended up not making it on, but I still liked the title.” Released this weekend on the Leith-based Tenement Records, Chromatic Perversion sees The Leg’s core trio of Mutch, cellist Pete Harvey and drummer Alun Scurlock expanded to incorporate guitarist James Metcalfe as well as the prodigal’s return of bassist John Mackie from Mutch’s first band, Khaya. This finds the fleshed-out five-piece galloping through the record’s ten songs with a frenetic abandon married to an appealing jauntiness that n...