Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   The power is failing in Enda Walsh’s play, set in an inner city tower block where a woman called Isla awaits her ticket out of what appears to be a life long stretch in solitary confinement. Is she a princess being held prisoner and in need of rescuing by the hapless Young Man observing her through a bank of screens in another part of the building? Are we witnessing a state sanctioned experiment in human behaviour with both Isla and the Young Man cast as guinea pigs to see how much isolation they will tolerate before doing a runner? Either way, that diminishing power is about a lot more than the shonky electrics that cause the lights to fail and assorted screens to freeze.   First seen in Galway in 2016, Walsh’s play slows down his more recognisable torrent of words to be found from his 1996 breakout hit, Disco Pigs, onwards, for a less frantic if just as elliptical set of exchanges. Not that there is anything sedate about the Glasgow b...

James Brining has had quite a couple of weeks. First up, the artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh opened his first show since he took up office six months ago after picking up the baton from David Greig. Brining’s eloquent, witty and really rather lovely production of Chekhov’s play, The Seagull, stars Caroline Quentin as Arkadina, an actress of a certain age who holds court in the midst of a changing society as her would-be playwright son explores the shock of the new.   While Brining’s production was in rehearsals, the Lyceum  announced Lyndsey Jackson as new Executive Director, with Brining becoming the theatre’s sole Chief Executive following the departure of Mike Griffiths. Jackson will take up her post in January after departing her  role as deputy chief executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society. Her appointment at the Lyceum comes following five new board members taking up post earlier this year.   On the artistic side, this week...

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...