Coffee-Table Notes

Giles Havergal – Theatre director, Actor, writer   Born June 9, 1938; died August 23, 2025     Giles Havergal, who has died aged 87, was a towering figure in Scottish theatre. As co-artistic director of Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre for thirty-three years, Havergal helped redraw the theatrical map of Glasgow, Scotland and the world. Working alongside writer/director Robert David MacDonald and designer/director Philip Prowse, from his arrival in the Gorbals in 1969 to his departure in 2003, Havergal blazed a trail of radicalism that reinvigorated the Citz as an international powerhouse.   The tone was set from the start with Havergal’s 1970 all male production of Hamlet that featured nudity, sex and swearing. With the press as outraged as some of the city high hid yins,  some schools cancelled their planned visit. The attention this brought to the production made it box office gold, with many school pupils going to see the show of their own volition.  ...

3 stars    A death in the family does funny things to people. Take Sara and Saskia, two very different sisters who are about to commemorate the first anniversary of their mother’s passing. With Sara camped up in her mum’s old flat, high-flyer Saskia turns up unannounced ready to party, with boyfriend Mark – or is it Mike? - following shortly after. There are ashes to spread and speeches to be made. If only they’d remembered to invite anyone.     Francesca Davies-Cáceres’ production of Florence Lace-Evans’ play hits the ground running in an old school one-room drama that throws a cast of disparate personalities together in a sit-com style set-up. This involves a phallic balloon, a bowl of trifle, a bow and arrow, and a squirrel called Gerald. This makes for some turbo charged sparring between Lace-Evans as Sara and Alexandra O’Neill as Saskia before Jonas Moore provides a gormless foil as Mark.    Developed with SOHO Theatre Labs, Lace-Evans’ script begins w...

3 stars     Sophia Wolbrom is going places. She may not have arrived yet in this sparky New Yorker’s debut show, but she’s getting there. Wolbrom’s autobiographical monologue charts her rites of passage, from musical loving weirdo kid growing up in straight laced Westchester, to where she is now, a real live performer doing her thing on the Fringe. Inbetween are everyday tales of rock school, summer camp and assorted detours inspired by friends, mentors and sheer determination to succeed.    It’s the sort of story that a million others in Edinburgh are living out right now in their own way, and perhaps Wolbrom’s tale should be used as a teach-in for similarly starstruck ingénues about to embark on the same road. Wolbrom is very much her own person here, however, and tells her story with a mix of intimacy and charm that draws you in to her world.    With direction by Kevin Qian for Wolbrom’s Know Smoke Events company, Wolbrom punctuates her st...

4 stars  Poor old Sherlock Holmes. The one and only self styled consulting detective comes home to roost in David Stuart Davies’ hour long concoction that looks at what is effectively Holmes’ last trip in more ways than one. It’s 1916, and Holmes returns to the rooms in Baker Street he once shared with Dr. Watson. Holmes has just been to Watson’s funeral, and all he has left now are old war stories he regales to the thin air where he conjures up the spirits of Moriarty, Inspector Lestrade and a cast of thousands.    Originally written for the late Roger Llewellyn, Holmes is resurrected in Gareth Armstrong’s gothic looking production by Nigel Miles-Thomas, who brings a steely and gimlet-eyed presence to Holmes. While Davies’ script has enough familiar yarns to keep Sherlockians happy, it goes beyond a greatest hits set to bring some of the personal frailties of the man to the fore as he attempts to numb the roar of the modern world.    This is brought ...

4 stars    The sixties may swing in Emily Woof’s new solo play, but while the doors of perception are opened, women are treated as sexual playthings in the name of so called liberation.    Plus ca change for Jane, a woman clearing out her dead mother’s things while recovering from the collapse of her marriage. A job in TV on a documentary about the women of the sixties, however, looks like a big break. As Jane looks into her mum’s history as a teenage Beatles fanatic, beyond the records and love letters to John Lennon, a more troubling past is revealed. Enter Valerie Solanis, whose attempt to blow Andy Warhol out of the New York underground has an effect on both women.    Hamish McColl’s Shared Experience production uses vintage news footage and a rousing fab four soundtrack to illustrate a tale of three women down the decades and the institutional and personal abuse they are forced to accept.    Woof throws herself into each role with an initial ...

4 stars  Lily has had enough in Gabrielle Beasley’s new solo play, in which a lone blow for womankind becomes a call to arms as Lily unexpectedly finds her tribe. As she singles out the men who at various points abused each of her mates, Lily becomes a one-woman vigilante squad who resembles a south London Valerie Solanas. It is the revelations of what happened to Lily and her mum to push her to such extremes, however, that gives the play its meaning.    As Lily ‘fesses up to her actions, Beasley uses the voices of her assorted mates by way of the dick head men who finally meet their match. When Lily joins forces with a support group of kindred spirit super heroines, references to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charlie’s Angels are telling.      Beasley’s street-smart delivery in Bethany Pitts’ production resembles the sort of punky feminist theatre that came out of the 1970s alternative cabaret circuit. Given the context of a modern world where wom...

4 stars   A photograph of blues legend Robert Johnson is projected onto the back wall at the start of this epic homage to some of rock and roll’s more precocious talents, who all breathed their last aged just 27. As Johnson’s Crossroad Blues is reinvented by the band on stage as a barroom rocker, it sets the tone for a seventy-minute power through as many greatest hits by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse as time will allow.    Zac Tyler’s production for Australia’s Amplified House company bring together what amounts to an Aussie supergroup, with vocalists Dusty Lee Stephensen (Wanderers), Kevin Mitchell (Jebediah, Bob Evans), Carla Lippis (Mondo Psycho) and Sarah McLeod (The Superjesus), leading the charge.    With line drawings of the dead icons projected behind them, rather than attempt some Stars in Their Eyes type impressions, each singer stamps their own personality on the classics to make them their own. Like the word...