Coffee-Table Notes

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars The boys and girls in the band are mingling with the riff-raff in the cheap seats at the start of Elizabeth Newman’s staging of one of the finest of twentieth century romances. They could be one more cafe bar combo providing a background soundtrack to the sort of everyday liaisons that never make the headlines.    So it goes in Emma Rice’s adaptation of David Lean’s 1945 film, which saw Noel Coward expand his 1936 one-act play, Still Life, about a very English affair between a housewife on an away day and a doctor cutting loose on his Thursday commute.    Rice’s version was originally seen in 2008, when she was in charge of Kneehigh Theatre, and mixes and matches Coward’s two takes on the story in a perennial playful rendering clearly relished by Newman’s Pitlochry ensemble. As soon as Matthew Trevannion’s Alec removes a protuberance from the eye of Kirsty Stuart’s Laura, the cut-glass politesse of their initial meeting accelerat...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three Stars   The ghosts of lost children are circling in Iain McClure’s new play, which puts eminent child psychiatrist Joseph’s own emotional baggage in the spotlight to be analysed and offloaded before the ultimate purging takes place. When we first meet Joseph in late 1990s Edinburgh, an as yet unexplained police incident is being laid to rest as Joseph prepares to flit to America.   Next time we see Joseph, he’s in a restaurant with Cindy, his Native American bride half his age, and has twice been a very special guest on Oprah. With a baby of his own on the way, Joseph makes an ill fated prodigal’s return to Edinburgh, where, holed up in a state of art apartment that used to be his hospital office, old demons come calling in unexpected ways.    Kolbrún Björt Sigfúsdóttir’s production brings all this to life in slow burning fashion on Kenneth MacLeod’s compact one room set occupied by Cal MacAninch’s Joseph. There is an inherent creepi...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars A hothouse atmosphere prevails from the start in Elizabeth Newman’s revival of Tennessee Williams’ Deep South 1947 pot-boiler. You can see the effects of the stifling humidity on the array of plants dotted about designer Emily James’s revolving stage, drooped and wilting as we chase the play’s psychodrama from room to room.   The heat is on in a different way for Blanche DuBois, the woman on the run who blows into the cramped New Orleans home of her sister Stella and her husband Stanley. With the DuBois family fortune having seemingly disappeared along with the lost youth Blanche so desperately clings to, all Blanche can do inbetween bath times is hide in the shadows lest her brittleness be exposed to the glare of Jeanine Byrne’s lighting design and she break into a million pieces and turn to dust.   There is nevertheless a tough intelligence to Kirsty Stuart’s portrayal of Blanche, who in Newman’s production is survivor as much as victim....

Ghosts are everywhere in ChildMinder, Ian McClure’s new play which opens at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh this month as part of a short three-date tour.   Kolbrún Björt Sigfúsdóttir’sproduction of McClure’s play sees Cal MacAninch play Joseph Croan, a fifty-something child psychiatrist returning home from New York to Edinburgh. Here, Joseph’s luxury flat turns out to be the site of the former hospital room where he once assessed a thirteen-year-old boy in what became a life changing moment for both of them. With the boy’s spirit remaining, Joseph becomes haunted on every level.   Given that McClure is himself a consultant child psychiatrist who once worked in Edinburgh’s former Royal Infirmary where the residential Quartermile development now stands, all this sounds pretty close to home.   “I think one of the big themes of my career has been the awareness of the vulnerability of young boys and young men in society, and what gets branded now as this idea of toxic masculi...

The noise of art looks set to be heard all around Dundee this summer, when, for one night only, Art Night comes to town. With ten commissioned artists showing off their wares in some of the city’s most iconic civic venues from early evening until late, this Dundee edition of the mini festival co-founded in 2015 by Philippine Nguyen and Ksenia Zemtsova will mark the first time the event has happened outside London.   Judging by the results of some of the commissions under Art Night’s current artistic director, Shetland born Helen Nisbet, who took up the reins in 2018, this is certainly worth making a song and dance about. Sound and music based commissions include works by Emma Hart, Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley and Richey Carey.   While Hart’s   BIG UP  aims to explore local rave culture, Braithwaite-Shirley’s   The Lack: I knew your voice before you spoke  will present a new generative game inviting users to share sounds and music with the virtual world. Ri...

The Complex, Edinburgh Five stars   Ghosts of office parties past came out to play in the latest artistic intervention by Edinburgh’s nomadic grassroots festival, Hidden Door, as the John Hardie Glover designed hive-like former home to Scottish Widows was transformed over five days and nights into a sprawling arts village. Where an army of temps once passed through the building, the pandemic induced rise of working from home has seen such white collar temples of administration become artistic playgrounds, just as closed down factories were reclaimed by rave culture before them.    Two music stages possessed a breadth many shoebox size Edinburgh venues lack. The Cabaret Stage took over the building’s former canteen, with highlights including the emotional bombast of Porridge Radio, Glasgow skronk power trio, AKU! and Edinburgh electronic duo, Maranta. Chamber pop combo POZI’s vocalist Rosa Brook, meanwhile’ sported a t-shirt of the poster for one of post-punk Edinburgh’s s...

Space is very much the place at Hidden Door this year, as Edinburgh’s grassroots festival moves into the John Hardie Glover designed former Scottish Widows building on Dalkeith Road now rechristened as The Complex. Music acts may remain the festival’s high profile public face, but dig deeper, and there is a whole lot more going on with other art forms at ground level and beyond. The hive-like hexagonal shape of Glover’s construction, which opened in 1976, lends itself to all manner of underground interventions.   This should be clear from The Environments, a series of immersive voyages that invites audiences to move through hill, post-nuclear wasteland, garden and forest. This leads to the less familiar sounding terrain of aphotic archaeology – the aphotic zone being the portion of a lake with little or no sunlight - and Holocene, or current geological epoch.   Dance is to the fore in The Environments, with new works by choreographer Roisin O’Brien and composer Rowan McIlvride...