Coffee-Table Notes

Tramway, Glasgow Five stars    When a man turns up at a cheap hotel in the outer edge of nowhere, the last thing he expects to find is a talking monkey, let alone one with whom he spends the night drinking while hanging on his every word. The man, a writer whose by-line we never discover, has just been in a meeting with an editor who couldn’t remember her own name.    The Monkey, a Bruckner loving beast with a hangdog demeanour and a yearning to connect, has come all the way from Shinagawa, from whence he might just be able to explain what’s going on. Not that this helps another woman called Mizuki much, let alone her long lost friend Yuko, whoever they might be.   This makes for a haunting adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short stories based around the Monkey. Knitted together by Glasgow’s Vanishing Point company in this international co-production with Japan’s Kanagawa Arts Theatre, where it premiered in November 2024, this makes for mesmerising viewing.  ...

Macrobert Arts Centre, Stirling  Four stars   When you fall down a hole it takes a devil to get you back on your feet. This is the case in James Robertson’s Booker Prize long listed 2006 novel, adapted for the stage by Matthew Zajac for the Highland based Dogstar company. Kevin Lennon’s eponymous Gideon is a free thinking son of the manse, who, for want of something else to believe in, finds himself occupying the pulpit of the Kirk in small town Monimaskit, where temptation lurks in every pew.   As we rewind on Gideon’s coming of age, from questioning teenager to Edinburgh student before settling in small town Monimasket with his young wife Jenny, world events beyond his bubble crackle through radio headlines. Margaret Thatcher’s second term as Prime Minister, The Falklands War and the Miner’s Strike are all in the mix. When Gideon disappears for three days after falling down a gorge, any threat of gritty realist nostalgia is tossed aside as we enter more metaphysical wat...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   Pop trivia nerds will have long been aware that the roots of the title for the chartbusting series of smash hit compilation albums founded in 1983 that gives this new jukebox musical its title comes from a 1920s poster for Danish bacon. As recounted by Richard Branson, whose Virgin label kick-started the series, the poster depicted an image of a pig declaring “Now. That’s What I Call Music,” as it watched a chicken singing.    With a current tally of 119 releases and rising, the history of NOW is the history of mainstream British pop. As the branding of this record company backed show suggests, NOW also provided the soundtrack to the lives of several generations of glossy pop lovers.   So it goes with Gemma and April, the two women on the verge in writer Pippa Evans’ prime time dramady set around the aftermath of a school reunion. When they were just seventeen, Gemma and April were girls who just wanted to have fun, albeit with ve...

The Studio, Edinburgh Five stars   The end of the world as we know it has been pretty much nigh for some time now. Yet despite a parallel universe load of conspiracy theories and threats of alien invasions, somehow it manages to keep on turning. But what does it take to believe in flying saucers and interplanetary interventions to a near messianic degree? More importantly, what happens when the apocalypse never comes and normal life resumes?   These were the sort of questions being asked back in the pre internet 1950s by social scientists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter, who infiltrated one such group of believers that held court in an all American suburban living room. Calling themselves the Seekers, the group put faith in the idea that an impending biblical flood was about to devastate the earth.    The good news, however, is that they believed – that word again – they would be saved by extra-terrestrials who, like thieves in the night, would be...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   Cyndi Lauper fans are having a bonanza just now. Following the 1980s pop queen’s own live extravaganza at the OVO Hydro in Glasgow last weekend, this week sees the return of Lauper’s smash hit musical of heels, deals and broken high ideals.    With a book by the mighty Harvey Fierstein, turning the true story of a traditional Northampton shoe factory that survives the post industrial downturn by making extravagant footwear for drag queens wasn’t the obvious choice for a Broadway musical.    Following the 2005 Brit-flick that first picked up on the story following a 1999 TV documentary, the show’s original 2012 production went on to become a multiple award winner before going on to wow audiences closer to its source material.    This new production originated at Leicester’s Curve Theatre prior to its current tour co-produced with the ROYO organisation. While it retains the necessary pizazz in spades to make it just a...

    The golden ages of British comics are brought to life in this glorious rustle through their back pages by the matey double act of Mark Hibbett and John Dredge, who each week review a specific issue of a classic 1970s title. This moves from old school D.C. Thomson stalwarts such as Dandy, Beano and Topper, to the more anarchic IPC new wave embodied by Whoopee! and Krazy. The riot of wild artwork and puntastic characters including Frankie Stein and Leo Baxendale’s magnificent Sweeney Toddler that followed was akin to moving from music hall to punk, with lashings of junior school surrealism thrown in.   The twelve editions so far take us from Jackpot to Cheeky Weekly, as we discover the class-based roots of many strips, with one in which a posh private school and a scruffy comprehensive are merged even being called Class Wars. Umberto Eco gets a mention, as does Trevor Metcalfe’s superhero homage The Amazing Three’s second life by way of Grant Morrison’s Zenith in 2000AD...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars   The chair that sits at the side of the stage with a bowler hat cheekily perched on it as the audience enter the Playhouse isn’t the biggest tease in this latest tour of John Kander, Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse’s now half-century-old confection of 1920s naughty fun writ large. If ever a show could legitimately be legally decreed to be sex on legs, Chicago’s high-kicking tale of showgirl Roxie Hart’s five minutes of fame after she shoots her lover in cold blood is the one, and we’re not talking about the chair here.   With roots dating back another fifty years or so to reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins’ 1926 stage play based on real life events, Kander, Ebb and Fosse took Watkins’ tabloid friendly true crime caper that already resembled pulp fiction and transformed it into a thrillingly erotic series of backstage set-pieces. The nylon-clad song and dance routines that follow in this recreation of Walter Bobbie’s original 1996 staging and ...