Coffee-Table Notes

Arts at Loaningdale, Biggar  Four stars   Hollywood is a long way from rural 1920s Clydesdale in Martin Travers’ new play for the Braw Clan company, set up in 2023 to produce plays in Scots. In a cramped cottage, teenage Nancy’s fantasies of becoming a star of the big screen like her silent movie idols beamed into the local picturehouse are all she has to escape the everyday drudgery she looks set to be stuck with forever.    With her mother Annie out at church and her bedbound granny wheezing her way to oblivion in the other room, Nancy is free to sing, dance, put on lipstick and cut her hair, with only the mirror on the wall for an audience. Only a mountain of dirty laundry is holding her back from making the big time. Five years on, and a prodigal’s return in the wake of the talkies sees Nancy’s sister Wee Moon harbour her own dreams of fame as history looks set to repeat itself.    There is something Tennessee Williams-like about Travers’ heroines in Rosalind Sydney’s production, b

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   As the artists formerly known as The Smiths bicker over who holds custody of their name, what of the children? What became of the effete youths who found solace and salvation in the band’s miserablist anthems as they came of age?    Theatre director Ben Harrison was one such soldier, as the Smiths appropriated title of his autobiographical mash up of stories and songs from his formative years make clear. As the archetypal small town teenager in search of a cause and a love affair to call his own, Harrison’s fictionalised self portraits recall an awkward young dreamer with stars in his eyes and a habit of falling for older women of twenty-one. Such defining moments are laid bare inbetween breaking into his school to hang communist flags and painting his bedroom red and black.   Set against lighting designer Simon Wilkinson’s wall of wine bar neon in Scott Johnston’s deftly woven together production, Harrison’s Proustian patchwork is knitted together by

Dundee Rep Four stars   Ghosts are very much in the house in Alan Ayckbourn’s 2002 play. The garden too for that matter. And the tennis court. Not to mention what might be lurking at the bottom of the well. This is something the two middle-aged sisters at the play’s centre must square up to when they are reunited in their childhood home following their father’s death.    High flying Abigail is making a prodigal’s return after years of collapsed businesses and broken relationships while living abroad. This left her sister Miriam to tend to their now dearly departed dad while putting her own life on hold. Or so it seems. Only the old boy’s nurse Alice knows the full story, and she wants a cool hundred grand to keep it to herself.    What follows is a series of double bluffs, things that go bump in the night and daddy issues galore as what looks suspiciously like a case of accidental murder unfolds alongside a series of increasingly troubling true confessions.    In Emily Winter, Deirdre

Pleasance Courtyard, Pleasance Two Three Stars   Randy Thatcher is a bedroom bound songwriter who thinks he just penned the greatest musical the world has ever seen. Playing to his invisible audience (not an impossibility at this time of year), 21-year-old Randy wears his heart on his sleeve in his science fiction based showtunes, in which our alien hero, the tellingly named Gazandy, finds true love in a way Randy can only yearn for. Like a musical theatre Daniel Johnston with a penchant for sock puppets, Randy is every showbiz wannabe who eventually has to face the music.   Real life New York songwriter Matt Haughey’s solo show shines an incisive spotlight on the perils of trying to get a foot in the door of an industry where everything is a talent contest these days. Accompanying himself on piano in Travis Greisler’s production, Haughey ramps up Randy’s high anxiety in what might well be regarded as a twenty-first century take on a backstage musical, with the talent hawking their war

Roundabout @ Summerhall Four stars   When a man steps on stage and starts talking to us, he conjures up a picture of an entire world in every day turmoil. What follows in Sam Ward’s latest excursion into the imagination under his YesYesNoNo banner is a devastating dissection of how the world can be turned upside down in an instant.    It begins with a dead body, on a normal street in a normal town populated by a cast of seemingly ordinary people. As Ward rewinds on the events leading up to this, he casts the audience as the townsfolk, whose lives are changed when a stranger arrives at a party.    While the inadvertently prescient allegories aren’t hard to spot, Ward is never obvious in his telling, commanding the stage with a quiet authority as he lures his audience into his conspiracy. A slow burning air of alluring ambiguity drives Ward’s play about community, disruption and fear of change, as the tragic consequences that follow all but destroys that community.    If one is reminded

Assembly George Square Four stars   Pro Wrestling, from World of Sport to WWE, has always had a form of mythology at its heart. It’s not that big a choreographed leap, then, to present the Norse myths as a series of bodyslams and forearm smashes in a battle royal to end them all.    Seconds out, then, for this epic spectacle brought to the squared circle by writer, director and real life grappler Ed Gamester and his well toned ensemble of fellow grunt and groan merchants. As they apply their larger than life mix of gymnastics and pantomime showmanship, the scenario looks not unlike Game of Thrones re-enacted in a local sports hall.    Gamester is Odin, as the likes of Thor, Loki and others ham it up as opposing warriors in a series of solo assaults and mixed tag matches to illustrate classical narratives honed into theatrical rhetoric. This set up is akin to when Marvel comics introduced the same set of gods into the mix, making them more accessible for school age superhero fans and gi

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   Everything is up in the air for Jay and Jamie, the two strangers living parallel lives in Visible Fictions’ ingenious meditation on love, luck and the crash landings of everyday life. Jay is one of life’s natural high flyers, seemingly breezing through life unscarred. Jamie, on the other hand, has stumbled her way through her days with a glass is half empty attitude and an aptitude for disaster. As the pair find themselves sat next to each other on a doomed international flight, their lives flash before the audience’s eyes as their very different fortunes are revealed.    While all this would be interesting enough by itself in a more conventional production, director Douglas Irvine and company lift things into the stratosphere. This is done by having actors Zoe Hunter and Martin McCormick not just give voice to Jamie and Jay, but by bringing the entire scenario to life from behind a table using model planes, Barbie dolls and toy animals.    Hunter and