Coffee-Table Notes

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four stars   Down by the docks they’re talking tough in James Graham’s stage adaptation of Alan Bleasdale’s classic twentieth century TV drama. For the unlikely Liverpool lads thrown on the scrap heap in the thick of 1980s Thatcher’s Britain, all that talk won’t pay their rent or feed their kids. As each man moves from dole office to cash in hand desperation to an increasingly volatile home life, the Kafkaesque absurdities of the dole office ‘sniffers’ become the enemy.    Licking their wounds from the disaster of a get rich quick job a year ago, Chrissie, Loggo, Yosser, George, Dixie and Dixie’s son Kevin’s lives collapse like the wall on the dodgy building site that kills old George’s political firebrand son Snowy. Beyond ideology, the survivors are felled by a kind of collective emasculation.   While Graham’s script remains faithful to Bleasdale’s original, Kate Wasserberg’s production steps out of its naturalistic roots with a series of the...

The Pavilion, Glasgow Four stars   American dreams don’t come much more broken in Arthur Miller’s slow burning 1949 tragedy, brought to life here in Andy Arnold’s mighty production, led by a towering performance from David Hayman at its centre.    Hayman is Willy Loman, the veteran salesman as past his sell by date as some of the wares he’s been hawking for more years than he can remember. Where once he was apparently a hot shot, charming the buyers in Boston and beyond, now he can barely earn enough to pay off all the things he and his wife Linda have bought into. This built in obsolescence of a clapped out fridge and other domestic goods becomes a symbol of the ruthless disposability of consumer capitalism. Willy may be over the hill, but next year’s model will be along any second.    Throw in the terminal underachievement of Willy and his wife Linda’s two sons, Happy and Biff, the missed opportunities with his brother Ben, and the guilt of being caught out in...

Perth Theatre Four stars   When D.H. Lawrence wrote his novel The Rainbow in 1915, his tale of three generations of working class lives saw it hauled before the courts on obscenity charges. More than a thousand copies of the book were burnt, rendering it unavailable in the UK for eleven years in an early example of cancel culture.   Given such an extreme response, one can only speculate what cultural gatekeepers might have made of writer Nicola Werenowska and director Jo Newman’s audacious new stage version, which rips into Lawrence’s story to focus on the three women at its heart.   Lydia is the widowed Polish refugee who lands in rural mid nineteenth century Nottinghamshire where she marries Tom, sevral years her junior. Anna, Lydia’s daughter from her first marriage, inherits her mother’s individualism as she embarks on her own domestic battle. By the time Anna’s own daughter Ursula comes of age, the new freedoms she embraces appear to make anything possible. What foll...

David Keenan’s debut novel, This is Memorial Device (2017), erupted into view like a counter cultural dam bursting. The book’s wild depiction of small town Scottish post punk pop life was based around the short lived crash and burn of a group called Memorial Device.   Keenan’s epic immortalisation of the ultimate legends in their own living room seemed to come from the inside, as Keenan conjured up an entire parallel universe. When the stage adaptation of the book was first performed at Edinburgh College of Art’s Wee Red Bar, a poster for a Memorial Device show remains there to this day.   After five more novels in as many years, such devotion to detail can be seen and heard in Volcanic Tongue – A Time-Travelling Evangelist’s Guide to Late 20 th Century Underground Music. Keenan’s bumper-sized compendium of music writing culled from his years as the Wire magazine’s evangelist in chief is accompanied by a compilation album of the same name. This features the sort of no-fi auteu...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   Storm clouds are gathering in Tim Foley’s new play, set on a beach in North East England that becomes both sanctuary and battleground for the two brothers who reunite to bury their father. Mark is the reluctant prodigal, the one who got away to find success, freedom and a life a million miles away from the now dead end town he couldn’t waiter get away from. Tiny is the one who stayed behind to look after his old man, hanging on his stories, with the big bad world a restless ocean away. For now, at least, the tide has gone out enough to leave them space to try and soothe troubled waters.    Foley’s two-hander is brought to full roaring theatrical life in this touring co-production between the Wigan based ThickSkin and Shropshire sired Pentabus companies. Directors Neil Bettles and Elle While pull out all the stylistic stops to make it work, with he first thing that greets the audience the rolling waves of Sarah Readman’s video backd...

  Jack Vettriano  -  1951–2025    Jack Vettriano, who has died aged 73, was one of the most successful contemporary Scottish artists ever. His often erotically charged studies of brooding figures posed in scenes that seemed to draw from pulp fiction book covers and film noir stills sold in huge amounts. His 1992 painting, The Singing Butler, went at auction in 2004 for £744,500, at the time a record amount for any painting by a Scottish artist, and any painting ever sold in Scotland. It went on to become the best selling art print in the UK.   Celebrity collectors of Vettriano’s work include Jack Nicholson, Sir Alex Ferguson, Terence Conran and Tim Rice. Other fans included actor Robbie Coltrane and Scotland’s former First Minister, the late Alex Salmond. In 2010, Salmond used Vettriano’s painting, Let’s Twist Again, as the image of his official Christmas card. When the original was sold a year later, it raised £86,000 for charity.   His 2013 exhibitio...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Five stars    It is just shy of seven years since Isobel McArthur’s poptastic reimagining of Jane Austen’s girl powered nineteenth century novel burst into riotous life at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre in the fledgling Blood of the Young company’s original smash hit production. Since then, McArthur has picked up the directorial baton for a scaled up version that has toured the UK, wowed the West End and picked up an Olivier award for what has become a fully fledged theatrical phenomenon. One might wager as well that bringing Austen’s work to life in this way has done more for the Brit lit classical canon than more traditionally inclined heritage industry homages that intermittently light up stage and screen.    Now here we are for this latest tour coming home to roost in a much bigger Glasgow space than the one where it all began, with McArthur drafting in a brand new young team of all singing, all dancing, potty mouthed performers to pick up the mant...