Coffee-Table Notes

‘What do we do about obscene phone calls?’ This was a question Harry Mould encountered while researching their debut play, The Brenda Line, which opens at Pitlochry Festival Theatre this month. The question came from some of the women manning the phones for the Samaritans, the charity set up in 1953 to provide a sounding board and emotional support for those in distress, feeling suicidal, or who just needed to talk. The answer to the question came in 1958, when the service that gives Mould’s play its title was set up. The Brenda Line (originally the Brent Line, until that district office objected) existed for the next three decades before being scrapped in 1987. For Mould, channelling its history onto the stage comes from a very personal place.   ‘ My mum was a Samaritan when she was very young,’ Mould says. ‘When she was about nineteen or twenty, she was the youngest Samaritan in Wales, and she had these funny little anecdotes she would tell us from around that time. One of these was

Summerhall Five stars   Charlene Boyd didn’t so much discover country music for herself as be spoon-fed it from the cradle. Several decades on from watching her mother sing in a wedding band, and with a break up, two kids and an empty high rise for company, she has clearly enough living behind her to make up a country song to call her own.    Or, in this case, a play, as Boyd pays homage to country legend June Carter Cash after finding a signed copy of her autobiography in a charity shop. This leads her on a personal pilgrimage to discover the roots of Carter Cash’s little heralded but crucial role in a scene dominated by cowboys, with women like June - and Charlene - left on the sidelines. Boyd also overcomes her imposter syndrome to point up the parallels with her own life as a working class woman trying to make her way in a man’s world.    Boyd tells it how it is as she navigates the speakeasy cabaret table set up of  Cora Bissett’s production for the National Theatre of Scotland an

Traverse Theatre Five stars Fear of the blank page is both the greatest fear and ultimate liberation for every creative writer. It is all too appropriate, then, that Adam Rapp’s slow burning meeting between the minds of two novelists from different generations begins and ends in an empty space. Our narrator is Bella Lee Baird, a fifty-something Yale creative writing professor with a stage two cancer diagnosis in tow and a back catalogue of three slim volumes. Her story comes in the form of Christopher Dunn, a hyper intelligent if somewhat eccentric student with a Crime and Punishment obsession and a desire to write his own book. As with Bella’s novel, he gives his main character the same name as his own, in a possibly autobiographical yarn that has yet to find an ending.  As Bella recounts her meetings with Christopher, she imbues their fleeting intimacy with an air of mystery that becomes a matter of life and death for them both.  It is easy to see from its UK premiere why Rapp’s play

Traverse Theatre Four Stars Old friendships are forever changing in Douglas Maxwell’s new play. This is brought home when Davie and Liane visit life long pal Milo for a carry out and wine. An unexpected guest comes in the form of Greta, who’s half the age of everyone else in the room, and who, in Liane’s eyes, at least, might just be filling an all too recent void that goes way beyond mid life crisis to something far deeper.     Such are the assorted gauntlets thrown down by Maxwell in a play that taps into the all too fragile tensions of so called domestic bliss, the ever widening gulf between the generations, and the inter personal wounds opened up by different responses to grief.    Over its non stop eighty minutes, Gareth Nicholls’ perfectly poised production – a collaboration between the Traverse, the Citizens theatre and Raw Material - gives vent to Maxwell’s firecracker dialogue with a maturity and discipline that sits well with the play’s themes. Maxwell knows a punchline when

The Studio Five stars   Life’s great adventure starts early for Kim after her dad disappears from the family home they share with Kim’s mum and her oddly wise kid brother Davey. As outlined in the letters he sends her, her dad is now Mr E, on a mission to get a briefcase to the elusive Mr Jones, and must embark on dangerous train rides, tame wild animals at the circus and so much more as he completes his mission to get home in time for tea. Except, the reality isn’t really like that at all, and when Kim finds out the truth she falls in with a bad crowd just as outside forces are wanting to tear her family apart.    The tone is set for the 1927 company’s latest fusion of live action, animation, music and storytelling by two figures in number covered dunce hats handing out pencils to the audience. What follows moves from spy thriller pastiche to contemporary urban fable, all delivered with a fantastical sense of magic at the show’s heart.   With co-directors Suzanne Andrade and Esme Appl

Royal Lyceum Theatre Four stars Blood and roses are two sides of the same coin in cutting edge Amsterdam based director Eline Arbo’s new look at German literary provocateur Heinrich von Kleist’s already taboo busting 1808 play. With Von Kleist having already subverted the myth of Penthesilea, the Amazon wonder woman whose female tribe can only have sex with men they have defeated in battle, Arbo transforms it into a gender bending goth opera, in which guitars and drums are flown in from the heavens on Pascal Leboucq’s industrial set.   Arbo’s Dutch language adaptation for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, presented here with English surtitles, sees the Amazons strike assorted poses beforetheir queen makes a stadium-sized entrance and takes the microphone. With Achilles a handsome heel who does likewise as he and Penthesilea spar, songs are used as weapons of intent before becoming a soundtrack for disaster.   This makes for a pretty wild affair, as the cast of nine stalk the stage like

Churchill Theatre Five stars When the young woman at the centre of Stef Smith’s adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s unflinching tale of addiction and redemption declares how she wants to experience everything, her mantra sums up an entire millennial generation’s struggle for pleasure. The agony and ecstasy that follows in Vicky Featherstone’s devastating production that forms the flagship of Edinburgh International Festival’s drama programme roars with that same sense of yearning.  It begins and ends on Orkney, where the woman was born and grew up, before escaping to the mainland and a big city full of possibilities. The hedonism that initially fires this the woman almost destroys her before she returns to her roots to find unexpected sanctuary in a different kind of wildlife.  Eight years on from the 2016  publication of Liptrot’s memoir laid bare her story, Smith, Featherstone and their brilliant company of six actors and a five strong choir have transformed it into a delirious spectacle tha