Coffee-Table Notes

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh  Four stars    Don’t mess with Calamity Jane. If you do, you’re likely to be shot down in a dramatic standoff you’ll never win. This is as true of any attempt at reworking Charles K. Freeman’s 1961 stage version of David Butler’s 1953 James O’Hanlon scripted movie as it is of the gal herself. As unreconstructed as this rootin’, tootin’ yarn concerning tomboyish Jane’s getting of wisdom remains, Freeman’s play is as faithful to its big screen roots as the assorted brides at the end of the play are to their various beloveds who look like they finally struck gold.   All this is driven by composer Sammy Fain and lyricist Paul Francis Webster’s wagonload of showtunes that have become sing-along classics. This is evident from the opening moments of this touring revival of Nikolai Foster’s 2014 production, first seen at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury. As a grizzled old cowboy plucks out a few notes on a banjo, it immediately prompts the audi...

The ghosts of musics past can easily send seekers down online rabbit holes in search of enlightenment. For many, this often begins with The Fall. Oh! Brother is the tellingly named show hosted by siblings Paul and Steve Hanley, who both served lengthy stints in the ultimate outsider group and lived to tell the tale.   Since 2021, Oh! Brother has seen the Hanleys engage an array of former band members, celebrity fans and other fellow travellers for discursive chats about life in and out of Mark E Smith’s ever changing ensemble. Highlights include chats with the band’s former keyboardist Marcia Schofield, ex footballer Pat Nevin, Ian Rankin and John Niven. If at times it sounds like a bunch of old blokes in a pub gathered like a post punk reincarnation of Last of the Summer Wine, that’s because sometimes it is.   Working in similar territory is Electronically Yours with Martyn Ware, with former Human League and current Heaven 17 stalwart Ware opening up his even more extensive a...

Òran Mor, Glasgow Three stars   Birthday girl Scarlet is in for a big surprise when she goes home to mum Sarah for her twenty-first. The very special present waiting for her in Jennifer Adam’s new play for Òran Mor’s current A Play, a Pie and a Pint lunchtime theatre season turns out to be something pretty titanic. To say it wasn’t what Scarlet was expecting is something of an understatement, especially as an environmental activist with big plans of her own with her girlfriend and fellow agitator Judyth. To carry out those plans, however, Scarlet needs to get her hands on her inheritance left to her by her dad, who passed away fifteen years earlier. A somewhat large obstacle, alas, is preventing Scarlet from getting her hands on it. In an increasingly hothouse environment, things go into meltdown at every level.    Adam’s play merges the personal and the political just as it fuses everyday absurdism with social realist observation. This looks to the metaphorical ridiculou...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Dead poets don’t always get second lives once they are lost to history. Once rediscovered and reclaimed, however, poetic license is up for grabs in a way where myth-making is often more interesting than the boring old truth.     So it goes with James Macpherson, the eighteenth century Scottish writer who caused a literary sensation with his apparent rediscovery of ancient Gaelic bard, Ossian. Trouble was, it was quickly debunked as fake news, with the artistic gatekeepers of the day led by Samuel Johnson dismissing Macpherson’s apparent exclusive as a hoax of the highest order.    This is the starting point for Martin O’Connor’s own dramatic poem that quickly goes way beyond Macpherson and Ossian’s place in Scotland’s cultural canon to a more personal reflection on what it means to be Scottish. In a landscape as kitsch as the tartan tat shop Emma Bailey’s set resembles, O’Connor explores his own family roots on the Isle of Lewis and t...

4 stars   Bad dreams burst through the walls in Portia Zvavahera’s exhibition of paintings, which sees the Zimbabwean artist dig deep into both her psyche and the spiritual forces that drive her. The result in Zvavahera’s first exhibition in Europe is an epic series of works driven by an unholy alliance of fear and love channelled from Zvavahera’s fevered imagination. The rats may be poised to pounce, but through the swirl of colours where they hide, her only mission is to keep her children safe from harm.   This moves from the early devotions of ‘His Presence’ (2013), ‘Labour Ward’ (2012) and ‘Labour Pains’ (2012) in the Fruitmarket’s downstairs gallery, to the more recent night terrors of works made in the last year shown upstairs. This accidentally symbolic ascension charts a journey that is both holy and possessed. With titles like ‘Fighting Energies’ (2024’), ‘Hide There’ (2024) and ‘Lifted Away’ (2024), it is no accident that the title of the exhibition is the Shona word...

The Studio, Edinburgh Three stars   Something is stirring in the depths of Loch Ness, and there’s a lot more making waves than the new hydroelectric plant that’s just opened in Shonagh Murray’s new family friendly musical. This is something would be junior marine biologist Mara finds out for herself when she discovers an entire community of little and not so little creatures hiding just below the surface where they deal with all the junk thrown into the water.    As well as a dam-building otter called Oggie and a friendly heron named Heather, there is a timorous beastie called Nessa, a one of a kind creation that evolution seems to have forgotten about as she finds shelter in increasingly stormy waters. While Mara’s mother Emma, an engineer at the plant, is forced to defend its workings in the face of nimbyish opposition, Mara’s school project sees her bullied by a boy named Ally. The tourist myth of the Loch Ness Monster, meanwhile, runs ever wilder in an alrea...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   To be young, female and with writerly intentions probably wasn’t easy in American Civil War era nineteenth century Massachusetts. This is partly why Louisa May Alcott’s much adapted semi autobiographical novel was so ahead of its time. Initially published in two parts in 1868 and 1869, Alcott’s rites of passage saga concerning four very different sisters as war rages elsewhere tapped into a radical need for women’s emancipation, literary or otherwise.    A love for Alcott’s story concerning the growing pains of Jo, Meg, Amy and Beth March is palpable at the start of Anne-Marie Casey’s adaptation, directed here by Loveday Ingram. As the girls huddle around Jo’s writing desk at the corner of Ruari Murchison’s tree lined set, this is Jo writing her way into her life. Surrounded by a mix of the natural and domestic worlds and bathed in the corn coloured glow of Mike Robertson’s lighting, it is through the subsequent loves and losses th...