Coffee-Table Notes

Scottish theatre has eight million stories. Some of them can be heard in A History of Scottish Drama in Six Plays, theatre critic Fergus Morgan’s boldly named six-part podcast that starts this week. Developed from a bursary from the Scottish Society of Playwrights’ SSP @50 Fellowship Awards, Morgan’s take comes from a desire to discover for himself the sometimes lost history of the world he is now steeped in as The Stage’s Scottish theatre critic.   ‘ The idea,’ says Morgan, ‘was to tell a history, not the history. Obviously you can't tell a definitive history when there are so many different strands to each story, but I wanted to try and tell a hopefully fairly comprehensive history of Scottish drama, principally from the point of view of playwrights, but weaving in all sorts of things along the way.’   To this end, Morgan bookends his series with A Satire Of The Three Estates (1540) - or Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaites if you will - and Black Wa...

Cumbernauld Theatre Four stars   It’s all going on down in Timbernauld, where grand dame carpenter Gepetta tends to her wares, kept company by the grandson she magicked into being with a carving knife and a not entirely pure imagination. While their flea ridden dog Mozart lollops about indoors to its heart’s content, Pinocchio longs to step outside to the big bad world he can only see through the window. A conscientious cricket called Hingmy, meanwhile, only wants to come in from the cold.    Gary McNair’s seasonal spin on Carlo Collodi’s much Disneyfied children’s story is both faithfully familiar and knowingly irreverent in its cheeky reimagining for this four-actor version brought to bright and energetic life in Laila Noble’s production.    As Julia Murray’s wide-eyed Pinocchio embarks on an adventure that sees him conned by radges and kidnapped by human traffickers, Cole Stewart’s Gepetta holds court with Caitlin Forbes as Mozart and Stephanie MacGaraidh as ...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It’s a rum old do down at Admiral Benbow’s Home for Reformed Pirates, where Duncan McLean’s new adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s swashbuckling romp first embarks. The seemingly washed up old sea dogs cared for by young Jim Hawkins band together to tell their story, as Jim, Lean Jean Silver and a puppet puffin set sail from Leith for the Orkney islands in search of buried booty.    Such is the playfully irreverent license taken by McLean in Wils Wilson’s rollickingly riotous production, set on Alex Berry’s galleon sized set of ropes, ladders and sails. What follows is a supremely daft take on Stevenson’s yarn that sees McLean tap into the ridiculous spirit of The Merry Mac Fun Co, the punky 1980s theatre troupe he co-founded, performed with and wrote for.    This is evident in some of the verbal riffs between the six actors on stage as well as some very silly song lyrics set to composer Tim Dalling’s Tom Waitsian junkya...

Dundee Rep Four stars   Oor Wullie without his bucket is like Christmas without a comic book annual. Dundee Rep’s revival of Noisemaker duo Scott Gilmour and Claire McKenzie’s musical reimagining of Scotland’s’s favourite cartoon boy is something of a double whammy in this respect.     As our spiky haired hero has his bucket poached from beneath him, prodigal daughter Nilo returns to Dundee to see her dad, though not before she is gifted an Oor Wullie annual by a mysterious woman on the train who goes by the name of Ms Watkins. As the book’s cover star steps out of the annual’s pages and into Nilo’s domain, Wullie rides again.    Andrew Panton’s production has been substantially rejigged since its first outing in 2019. While the quest for the missing bucket by Wullie and his pals remains the same, the changes in plot and characters maintain the show’s very meta take on family and friendship.    Much of this comes through the script’s Peter Pan like por...

When Kirsty Findlay finishes up playing the lead role in The Sound of Music at Pitlochry Festival Theatre at the end of December, it will be the end of a very special year for the Glasgow based actress. Prior to becoming the solution to the problem of Maria, Findlay appeared in three Pitlochry productions over the Perthshire theatre’s  summer season.  While Findlay shone in both Sense and Sensibility as Elinor, and as small town bad girl Ariel in Footloose, it was her magnificent embodiment of singer/songwriter Carole King in Beautiful that showed off Findlay’s full range as actress, singer and musician. Findlay was on stage throughout in Sam Hardie’s production of Douglas McGrath’s play, and despite playing piano in front of an audience for the first time ever, rarely has an actor looked so at ease with what she was doing in a bravura performance that might just be the best of the year.   ‘ I never thought in a million years I would get to do all the shows I’ve done over...

14. Carla J Easton & Blair Young First time feature filmmakers Easton and Young garnered huge acclaim for Since Yesterday, their film about Scotland’s lost girl bands, which premiered at Edinburgh International Film Festival. Eight Years in the making and inspired by Easton’s own experience in all woman band TeenCanteen, the duo have created a vital document of hidden history. 17. Sett Studios The artist run Leith Walk gallery and studio space has produced a huge turnover of exhibitions and events over the last year. Founded by a core group of Abi Lewis and Rehan Yousuf, with support from Steve Robb at Settlement Projects, there are currently seventeen artists on board in a vital non-hierarchical space.     31. Flannery O'kafka Flannery O’kafka’s exhibition, For Willy Love and Booker T: Blue babies do whatever they want, made full use of the Sierra Metro gallery’s space during its Edinburgh Art Festival run. The show’s mix of photography, film and a cosily carpeted en...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars    Elizabeth Newman’s final show as Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s artistic director is the last in a hat-trick of in-house musicals that follows Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and Footloose. All three have featured Kirsty Findlay as their female lead. Here she completes a magnificent season as Maria, the untameable force of nature who becomes governess of uptight widower Captain von Trapp’s seven children. Maria’s presence brings the growing pains of all into sharp focus, as love and liberation blossom even as the Nazis muscle in and annexe Austria. For the von Trapps, the hills and exile beckon.   Newman has invested Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s perfectly constructed adaptation of the real Maria Rainer’s memoir with a freshness and a poignancy that makes for a moving and irresistible experience. With a cast of twenty singing and playing all instruments in what has become Pitlochry’s house style, from the show’s tit...