Coffee-Table Notes

Lyra, Edinburgh Three stars   The studio of the former school transformed by the Lyra organisation into Scotland’s first dedicated theatre for children and young people resembles a playroom prior to Bruno Gallagher’s new show for this year’s Manipulate festival of visual theatre and animation. Young audience members try on masks and costumes that sit on hangars waiting to transform the wearers, who pose for dramatic selfies. Other props sit on tables waiting to be perused. Wild images of surreal characters line the walls, while all the while a package tour soundtrack compiled from sunnier climes plays with joyful abandon.   If this interactive pre-show spectacle allows a glimpse into what goes on in Gallagher’s head, it also acts as a trailer for what happens upstairs in the theatre by way of a quartet of what their creator calls ‘Absurdities’. These are bite-size vignettes inspired by Gallagher’s wanderings in Europe played out by an array of creatures that have effectively b...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Three stars    After more than fifteen years creating once in a lifetime musicals out of thin air and audience suggestions, the Olivier award winning, BBC Radio 4 friendly comic troupe The Showstoppers will know to always expect the unexpected. Even so, when on tour, they should always brush up on the local landmarks, lest someone throws out some serious googlies.    Such was the hilarious case on Friday during the first of the Showstoppers two-night run at the Citz, when co-director and mine host for the evening Adam Meggido was taken somewhat by surprise on several counts. Firstly, while asking for suggestions of a location for his company’s still unwritten opus, the suggestion of Haven Caravan Parks threw him. As the purveyors of static caravan summer breaks are a UK wide operation, his reaction probably says much beyond geography. More pertinently, perhaps, when the Barras was suggested, it was clear that  Glasgow's world famous mar...

Scotland’s theatres are well and truly open to all manner of shows in February. Here are some that shouldn’t be missed.     When Billy Met Alasdair Theatre Royal, Dumfries, 7 February; Macrobert Arts Centre, Stirling, 13 February; Eastgate Theatre, Peebles, 21 February; Adam Smith Theatre, Kirkcaldy, 27 February; Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, 28 February; Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, 28 March. Alan Bissett’s speculative conversation between Billy Connolly and Alasdair Gray  at the launch of Gray’s novel, Lanark, in 1981 at Glasgow’s original arts lab, the Third Eye Centre was a hit on the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Bissett brings two artistic greats to life with the sort of imagination used in his novels alongside a fearless performative flair. Bissett fans might also want to head over to the Memorial Theatre, Arbroath on February 20th for the last ever performance of Moira in Lockdown, the third and final part of The Moira Mon...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   Birth, sex and death are pretty much the driving forces in one form or another behind most human drama as we know it. They are the heart of the matter too in the life cycle of a puppet as laid bare in absurdist maverick Mamoru Iriguchi’s latest creation, which previewed in the Citz Studio over the weekend prior to a forthcoming short run at Edinburgh’s Manipulate festival of visual theatre.    Here, Iriguchi and fellow performer Julia Darrouy are Tangerine and Sunshine, a pair of life size puppets playing versions of each other. Introduced by a much smaller narrator puppet that then proceeds to keel over, Tangerine and Sunshine are then taken under the wing of the narrator’s now fully proportioned ghost, who takes them on a trip in which they get to explore all puppets great and small by way of different size versions of themselves.    As opposites attract and one size most definitely does not fit all in certain situations,...

Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh  Four stars   When Iddo Oberski  suffered a stroke in 2009, his whole world was turned upside down. While he could now only walk with two sticks, this didn’t stop the then academic from exploring notions of freedom stemming from the ideas of nineteenth century spiritual guru and author of The Philosophy of Freedom, Rudolf Steiner. Oberski also began to explore the history of his own family in the Netherlands who were victims of the Nazi Holocaust.   Seventeen years on since his accident, Oberski has channelled his various experiences and researches into a deeply personal meditation that fuses memoir, history lesson, puppetry, music, and film in a slow burning line of enquiry that suggests emancipation comes in many forms. Over the seventy minutes of a production co-directed by Oberski and collaborator Mark Kydd, this evolves into a one man philosophical cabaret that takes in card tricks, live flute interludes and an ongoing dia...

Leith Depot, Edinburgh Four stars   When Dan the man left his Edinburgh home for Iceland in 2015 to study graphic design, it was the beginning of a great adventure. Here he was, out on his own and off the leash with his whole life in front of him, and his cheeky Scottish charm seemingly a passport to anywhere. Reykjavik was buzzing, and so was he, and for a giddy moment, Dan was truly living the dream. Unfortunately in Heidi Docherty’s new short solo play performed by herself, it doesn’t last.    What follows is an unflinching portrait of how a fun loving cheeky chappie has his already fragile confidence dented by the voices in his head who over the next few years mark out Dan’s struggles - with money, his course, his numerous jobs, his love life, his family, and ultimately with himself - until he can’t take anymore.    The result is a tragic indictment on the perils of young people overwhelmed by anguish even before you realise that for Docherty this is painful...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow  Four stars   Old ghosts are everywhere in this latest tour of the late Stephen Mallatratt’s ingenious staging of Susan Hill’s best selling 1983 gothic horror novel, in which an ageing solicitor called Arthur Kipps attempts to lay those ghosts to rest. He does this by telling his story of what happened years before after he was dispatched to a marshy godforsaken landscape to sort out a deceased recluse’s affairs. Here, the spectral figure of the woman who gives the show its title haunts the town into submission, with portents of doom at her every fleeting appearance, as Kipps learns to his cost.    Back in 1987, Mallatratt took Hill’s already spooky yarn and set it in an empty theatre, where Kipps has hired a young actor to play out his past in an attempt to exorcise his demons. Originally intended as a low key entertainment performed in the theatre bar, in director Robin Herford’s hands, Mallatratt’s creation took on a life of its own, and up ...