Coffee-Table Notes

Oran Mor, Glasgow Three stars    The loneliness of the jobbing actor has been the stuff of back stage dramas for many a year. For every fairytale story of overnight stardom and hitting the big time in Hollywood, alas, the every day reality is more one of under appreciated graft. In today’s world of instant stardom, after all, if you want to be famous, the internet is where it’s at. It’s a generational thing. Maybe.    Matt Anderson’s new play for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest lunchtime theatre season takes a look at both as he sets up an overdue reunion between Gerry and Tyler. Gerry is a fifty-something actor who has just opened a smaller than small scale tour of Death of a Sails Man with his partner Peter. Tyler is Gerry’s seventeen-year-old son, a ‘content provider’ with several million followers on social media.    When Tyler turns up unannounced in Gerry’s dressing room after his first preview, it’s to relay to him a life changing offer that involv...

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Three stars    Love, sex and death are at the rotting heart of Federico Garcia Lorca’s play, in which unfinished business between families spurs on the doomed conclusion of its scattershot passions. Lorca wrote his rural tragedy in 1932, turning what could have been presented as a domestic melodrama into something more fantastical.    The play’s premise is simple enough. A young couple plan to marry. The Groom’s Mother gets wind of some gossip about the Bride, who might have once had a fling with a member of the family who killed her husband. The Bride still holds a torch for her ex, whereupon they do a runner during the wedding reception. The Groom chases after the pair, whereupon, what might have been a more regular wedding day fallout sees the bodies pile up.    Tanya Ronder’s new version of the play sees director André Agius place his cast of final year BA acting students inside designer Chantal Jared’s virgin wh...

As the theatre season moves into November, Christmas shows and pantomimes prepare to open for the festive season. More of that in December, but there is plenty to see in shows great and small before things kick in towards the end of this month.   A Play, A Pie and a Pint Oran Mor, Glasgow, November 3-22. Glasgow’s lunchtime theatre phenomenon brings their latest season to a close with three brand new shows. Death of An Influencer (November 3-8) sees Matt Anderson’s play focus on a bit part actor upstaged by his social media star son in a comic drama about success and failure within the family. Gravity (November 10-15)  sees Kevin P. Gilday set his new play in an about to be demolished high-rise block where one man refuses to leave. Only social worker Joanne can save the day. Finally,   Strangers in the Night (November 17-22) is a play by Alan Muir set in a retirement village where two people find solace in each other’s stories before one of them must decide whether to lea...

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Four stars   Blood is a lot thicker than water for Oskar and his new friend Eli in Jack Thorne’s stage version of Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist’s much-filmed teen vampire novel. Revived here by director Finn den Hertog in a production performed by final year acting students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Oskar is a teenage schoolboy bullied by the tough kids at school. Eli appears to be the girl next door who can more than hold her own in a scrap.    As their friendship clicks, the pair tap out after dark messages to each other in morse code on the bedroom wall they share. When the local murder rate increases at the hands of some kind of blood sucking serial killer, alas, for Eli and Oskar, the going gets weird.   Den Hertog has his cast play out Oskar and Eli’s slow burning rites of passage at an almost funereal pace that at times resembles a Scandi-noir thriller rather than the spate of supernatural...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars   “Welcome to Dreamland” says the host known as the Engineer in this rebooted production of lyricist Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel  Schönberg ’s Vietnam war inspired musical. Originally produced by Cameron Mackintosh, who is still on board with fellow producer Michael Harrison now in charge, Boublil and  Schönberg ’s epic update of Madame Butterfly is now a staggering 36 years old.    The atrocities of Vietnam and the subsequent fallout that rocked America throughout the 1970s may be getting further away in time, but even on this year’s fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, remains in living memory. Whether Boublil and Schonberg’s vision is an accurate part of that memory is up for discussion, but it remains a theatrical phenomenon that still fills main houses.    Inspired by a photograph of a Vietnamese woman leaving her child at the gate of the airport en route to live with their American ex GI fat...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Five stars   “Four scruffy working class oiks?” says one of the the posh twits who have just accidentally ended up managing one of the most incendiary musical forces of the 1960s. “It’s the new thing.” So it goes with the history of British pop since some of those oiks first strapped on a guitar. The story of The Kinks is a quintessential part of that history. It is also one that should be required reading at all music industry teach-ins lest a younger generation of wannabe rock stars get caught up in a similar mire. In the case of the Kinks, preternatural talent and working class ambition are put through an industry wringer of success, exploitation, burnout and a residue of cynicism that sits alongside a brilliant and era defining back catalogue.    This is hardly the stuff of dancing in the aisles jukebox musicals, perhaps, but as Edward Hall’s production of Joe Penhall’s script has shown since it was first seen more than a decade ago, it has mad...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars    Halloween is about to bite, the party frocks are on, and a creepy time is about to be had by all round at Auntie Sandra’s place. Such is the state of play in Éimi Quinn’s new comedy for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s ongoing season of lunchtime theatre. Sandra and her niece Lisa are dressed to kill, and judging by the fact that Sandra has just battered Lisa’s cheating husband into the kitchen Lino, death very much becomes them.    But what to do with the body? The only solution, it seems, is to do a Sweeney Todd and cut their prey into enough tiny pieces to fill up several bin bags. If only the duo’s stream of gentleman callers weren’t constantly interrupting them from the task at hand, be it busy body neighbour Dennis, whose sole saving grace is his intimate knowledge of bin collecting times; or crap clairvoyant Mark, who seems intent on attempting the exorcise the place. With an unseen builder also trying to get through Auntie ...