Coffee-Table Notes

Frank Dunlop – Theatre and opera director   Born February 15, 1927; died January 4, 2026     Frank Dunlop, who has died aged 98, was a maverick theatre director, whose seven-year stint as director of Edinburgh International Festival between 1984 and 1991 brought major world theatre to the festival. Work by international heavyweights such as the Berliner Ensemble, Ingmar Bergman, Andrzej Wajda and Yukio Ninagawa was programmed alongside major revivals of Scottish classics. The latter included Tom Fleming’s epic staging of Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaites, Sydney Goodsir Smith’s version of The Wallace, and James Bridie’s Holy Isle. Dunlop brought both strands together in his own 1987 production of Schiller’s Mary Stuart, which featured a large Scottish cast led by Hannah Gordon as Mary.     Dunlop’s first year as director also featured a ten-day Samuel Beckett season at the Churchill Theatre, Morningside. The latter included works by New York’s Harold Clurman...

The Georgian House, Edinburgh Four stars   The sins of rhyme, as Robert Burns calls his craft in this new dramatisation of the bard’s words, have much to answer for. Burns himself was an all too familiar bundle of contradictions in his output. On the one hand, he had a common touch that tapped into the collective consciousness enough to take poetry into the mainstream. On the other, his feckless shagabout ways left much domestic mess in his wake. This is before the one about the slave trade the cash-strapped people’s poet almost signs up with to help escape his lot.   All of this and more is addressed in James Clements’ hour long compendium of words and music which returns to the Georgian House’s Robert Adam designed Edinburgh New Town des-res in the run up to Burns Night following last year’s Fringe run and recent tour. With the audience seated the length of a dinner table laid out with all the accoutrements, the traditional Burnsian gathering is duly upended by Clements...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   The world is full of Basil Fawltys these days. Half a century after John Cleese and Connie Booth’s savagely funny portrait of middle aged male neuroses was unleashed kicking and screaming onto prime time Sunday night TV, Basil walks among us once more, as pompous, repressed and set to spontaneously combust as he ever was.    Cleese’s hit stage version of his creation has already proven to be far more than the pension plan nostalgia fest it might initially look like, with the series of note perfect impressions from director Caroline Jay Ranger’s young cast capturing every madcap nuance of his creations as they reboot them with new life.   For those for whom what has been designated to be TV’s greatest sitcom may have passed them by, Basil and his wife Sybil run a sleepy hotel in Torquay, where maid Polly keeps things together as Basil, Sybil and Spanish waiter Manuel attempt to serve a series of increasingly unwelcome guests. ...

Now panto season is more or less over, the year begins with some big hitters on the touring circuit as well as a couple of more intimate affairs before the theatrical floodgates fully open in February.   MAMMA MIA! The Playhouse, Edinburgh until January 4; His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, January 27-February 7. As reviewed on these pages only last week, Catherine Johnson’s ABBA powered dramady sired in the girl powered 1990s is now more than a quarter of a century old. This makes for several layers of nostalgia in Johnson’s marriage of Benny and Bjorn’s greatest hits to Brit-flavoured prime time drama in a yarn about ex pat Donna and her daughter Sophie as they prepare for a Greek wedding that causes Sophie to ant to find out who her dad is. Cue three gentlemen callers from Donna’s past showing up in a show with women’s independence at its heart and some of the best ever 1970s pop bangers thrown in. Following its last few days in Edinburgh to see in the new year, Phyllida Lloyd’s p...

Holly Howden Gilchrist had yet to graduate from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland when she was cast as Catherine in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge at the Tron Theatre in February this year. By that time, the then twenty-year-old had already won both the Donald Dewar Award and the Pauline Knowles Scholarship at RCS.     As the daughter of actors Kathryn Howden and Gilly Gilchrist, Howden Gilchrist comes from a strong pedigree.   Since A View from the Bridge, Howden Gilchrist has toured in Sylvia Dow’s play, Blinded by the Light, and appeared in Small Acts of Love, Frances Poet and Ricky Ross’s play that was the first production to play at the reopened Citizens Theatre in Glasgow.   Howden Gilchrist returns to the Gorbals for the Citz’s festive production of Beauty and the Beast. All of which makes for quite a start for what looks like a bright future ahead. The List, December 2025   ends

Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow Four stars   “We’re Saving Grace,” says a playful Robert Plant midway through a set of lesser known folk, blues and rock-pop covers presented with the superlative quintet the former Led Zeppelin vocalist turned global village explorer has been playing with for more than half a decade. “We’ve come to help.”   By this time in the Glasgow leg of what has been dubbed the Ding Dong Merrily tour to accompany the release of the band’s eponymous named album, Plant and co have sauntered through Kentucky blues, English trad, contemporary Americana and more. This wide reaching songbook has been brought to life by way of a meticulously arranged mix of Tony Kelsey’s acoustic and electric guitars, Matt Worley’s banjo, Barney Morse-Brown’s cello and Suzi Dian’s accordion, all powered by Oli Jefferson’s skittering drums.   The heart of this on versions of Addie Graham’s The Very Day You’re Gone and English folk song The Cuckoo is Plant’s vocal duets with Dian,...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Five stars    A wing and a prayer are everything in Morag Fullarton’s ingenious reimagining of one of the festive season’s most loved feelgood films. Celestial interventions aren’t just the order of the day for George Bailey, the small town saviour about to throw himself off a bridge at the start of the play as life gets too much to bear. They are there too for the show itself, which Fullarton confesses to the audience prior to its first night curtain hasn’t had a proper dress rehearsal due to assorted technical glitches. This is all done in mutual good humour, but Fullarton needn’t have worried, as what follows on Oran Mor’s tiny stage is one of the most joyously inventive theatrical experiences on show anywhere just now.    The can-do attitude of Fullarton and her company of four actors is a reflection of the show itself, which opens as a quartet of old school cinema usherettes attempt to pick up the pieces after a screening of Frank Capra’s 1946 ...