Coffee-Table Notes

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   The quiet renaissance of Nan Shepherd had been a wonder over the last few years. Once neglected to the point of being erased from the twentieth century canon of Scottish letters, the belated publication of Aberdeenshire born Shepherd’s masterpiece, The Living Mountain, a personal memoir of the great outdoors that had lain unread in a draw for thirty years, tapped into a readership who similarly felt the transcendent nature of being alive with the hills. These days, Shepherd is rightly held up as great a writer as her peers, and her image can be found in the back of a Scottish five-pound note.   Richard Baron and Ellie Zeegen’s studio sized play rifles through Shepherd’s back pages for this dramatic homage that attempts to get to the heart of Shepherd while acting as something of a primer to those perhaps unaware of her life and work.    Flitting back and forth through assorted time zones between 1901 and 1981, Baron’s recast re...

Oran Mor, Glasow Four stars   Fame, as every wannabe pop star knows, costs. In the social media age, where everyone is famous for a lot less than five minutes, you can go viral as the next big thing one minute and be last year’s spam within seconds. This is the reality the two young women in Andy McGregor’s bite-size new musical are forced to square up to for this latest edition of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s ongoing lunchtime theatre season.    Jade is a serious budding songwriter with an introspective air who pens power ballads in her bedroom, and would prefer to blend into the background before heading off to university. Clare, on the other hand, may have the voice of an angel, but she‘s the life and soul of any party until she crashes. When an ill-timed incident is captured on Tik Tok, she becomes a star for all the wrong reasons. Not that this bothers her, mind you, as her craving for the spotlight makes for a lucrative if grotesque way to make the big time. Jade, mea...

Òran Mór , Glasgow Three stars   What makes a girl’s world is everything in Sara Amini’s new play, whether it is singing revolutionary anthems on the school bus with the gang, dancing at a wedding or singing at the temple of Madonna, Maria Callas and the sublime beats of Iranian pop. Unfortunately for Sara, the woman at the heart of Amini’s play, she grew up in Iran, where women aren’t allowed to sing.    Sara’s answer is to fling herself into a world where she can indulge her passions, from nightclubs to the stage in Paris, London and other hotspots where freedom isn’t frowned upon and she can chase her dreams. With her own child also coming of age, Saria must face up to choices she has no say in.    Amini and co-director Manuel Lavandera’s production sets out its store in Sara’s tastefully cluttered home in this A Play, a Pie and a Pint lunchtime presentation of a show by Amini’s Seemia Theatre company that opened at Camden People’s Theatre earlier this month....

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars    In December 1982, twelve miners descended 2000 feet below the surface of Kinneil Colliery in Bo’ness. This was no ordinary working day, however, but a sit-in protest at the announcement by the National Coal Board of the pit’s imminent closure. Two years before the Miners’ Strike, and with no support from the unions, the protest’s failure was the shape of things to come as British working class culture was transformed forever.    Almost forty-three years after the Kinneil sit-in, Sylvia Dow’s play excavates this piece of local history in a play that is both mournful and monumental. As it honours the recent past, it also looks to the future in a parallel plot in which a couple of centuries hence everyone is living underground, with the perils of outside an alluring totem of what went before.    For those who occupy both time zones in Philip Howard’s production for Dow’s Sylvian company and the Bo’ness based Barony The...

Òran Mó r, Glasgow Three stars   The heat is on when Iain meets Zainab after going in search of a place to cool down. Being downtown Marrakesh, however, things don’t quite turn out as planned. Iain is a gay man from Manchester who turns up at Zainab’s spa. Given the strict rules in Morocco regarding the rights of women, the two shouldn’t even be in the same room, let alone be preparing a very special massage. With Iain wheelchair bound and unable to bear to be touched, even that comes with complications. With protests on the streets outside, Zainab is as alive to the power of dissent as Iain is, and once both let their guard down they find a surprising amount of common ground.    Simon Jay’s new play - the latest in this season’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint series of lunchtime plays - is a warm and human take on everyday solidarity across cultures where differences might normally turn into something toxic. Jay’s script may have a polemical heart, but the way his characters m...

‘I was a bit of a force of nature when I was younger. Nobody was going to challenge me, and nobody did.’   This is Pauline Black talking about her early life in Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story, Jane Mingay’s documentary inspired by Black by Design, the autobiography of the dynamic Selecter vocalist published in 2011. Mingay’s Scottish Screen co-produced film rather handily arrives as The Selecter set out on a tour with the sort of itinerary that would make younger bands feel exhausted.   “ I still enjoy performing with The Selector,’ Black beams over Zoom like a very friendly force of nature, “and we’ll do it while we still can. I don't have any real plans for any kind of retirement, and this tour is an opportunity to celebrate our 45th anniversary of releasing Too Much Pressure. We’ve never really left those songs, even though we’ve always been recording and pushing on.’   The Selecter burst out of the original 2-Tone scene that came straight outta Coventry in 1979 with a ...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Three Stars   When the massed ranks of Scottish Brass champions the Whitburn Band join forces at the end of Lau accordionist and guitarist Martin Green’s new play, alternating with the Fife based Kingdom Brass, the sound they make together is one of unity laced with a bittersweet mix of sadness and euphoria. As the culmination of a show about working class experience in a former mining town decimated by the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike, it is a finale that speaks volumes about everything that went before.   This is embodied by the seventeen-year-old firebrand who gives Green’s play its title. Keli’s everyday life may be chaos as she tends to her mum inbetween shifts at the supermarket and a failing college course, but when she plays her tenor horn with the local brass band she comes alive. Keli’s musical skills are recognised by bandleader Brian, who promotes her to soloist for a competition at the Royal Albert Hall.    While Keli makes it t...