Coffee-Table Notes

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars  A night at the theatre never quite works out as planned if you are Inspector Morse. So it goes with what thus far remains the sole stage play drawn from characters created by the late Colin Dexter’s series of thirteen novels based around the man who went became telly’s most cultured copper in the small screen adaptations made between 1987 and 2000.   House of Ghosts was scripted by Alma Cullen, the Liverpool born Edinburgh émigré who penned four episodes of Morse’s TV adventures. Her original play first appeared in 2010, around the same time she was writing some of her final works for the Oran Mor based A Play, a Pie and a Pint lunchtime theatre initiative in Glasgow.   As a theatre writer immersed in Morse’s DNA, Cullen sets her play on the stage, where a co production of Hamlet acts as the prologue to what turns out to be an accidental Oxford University reunion between Morse and his peers. While he signed up with the police after...

Smile! was one of the hits of the 2025 Adelaide Fringe. Marcel Cole’s solo homage to Hollywood’s great silent movie clown Charlie Chaplin returns to tell Chaplin’s story by way of a mix of mime based routines drawn from Chaplin’s films, biographical material taken from Chaplin’s memoir, and audience interaction The result brings Chaplin’s prevailing image of the little guy in the baggy suit with the moustache, hat and umbrella to vital new life.   “I was already a Chaplin fan after seeing his films, and I loved his book,” Cole says of the roots of Smile! “I never knew he had made talkie films and full length feature films as well as the silent movies, so I was very inspired by that.”   Cole came to Chaplin after training as a ballet dancer before switching to mime based comic performance after studying under legendary French clown Philippe Gaulier. Smile! follows his first self-penned show, Ukulele Man, about English music hall star George Formby.   Cole’s fascination wit...

The Poetry Club at SWG3, Glasgow Four stars   A giant inflatable heart leftover from Valentine’s hangs down in the Poetry Club bar prior to the performance of Kathryn Mincer’s bite size new play in the main room next door. While the audience are encouraged to write down what they wish they had asked their ex, it is perhaps worth considering that the trouble with inflatable hearts is they either burst or else slowly deflate and lie limp.    One or the other appears to be what has happened to Alexa and Thomas, the not so happy couple driving each other crazy in Mincer’s play, brought to life in Dominique Mabille’s production by a young international company with their sights clearly set on something bigger.    Alexa and Thomas aren’t crazy the way they were on their first date, nor when one of them told the other they loved them for the first time, and the other one loved them right back. After just shy of seven years together, alas, it might just have someth...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow  Five stars   The stage curtain creaks as it rises with painstaking slowness on the barren twilight zone occupied by Samuel Beckett’s most forlorn of duos in Dominic Hill’s moving new production for the Citz. Here, George Costigan and Matthew Kelly embody Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s mould breaking piece of mid twentieth century existential vaudeville with a tragicomic rapport that comes through a lifetime of shared experience.    All dressed down and wildly bearded, the pair look more like redneck hobos living in the woods than the silent movie double act they are often presented as. Only through the terminal sense of tragicomic pathos that they hold on to throughout all the brilliant bickering Beckett has concocted for them do they find some kind of accidental salvation.    Jean Chan’s set looks like some battle scarred lower depths, with Costigan and Kelly guarding it through the night like long lost casualties of a war no...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Three stars   When Paul McCartney decided to get his head together in the country in the aftermath of the Beatles splitting up, this took him and his then wife Linda to the wilds of his Campbeltown farm. This eventually sired their band Wings’ 1977 Christmas number one, Mull of Kintyre.    Before all that, however, Fab Macca had Kathy and Jack to contend with. As the now seventy-something grandparents to Molly explain to her for an oral history project in Milly Sweeney’s new play, it was Beatles daft Jack’s idea for the couple to go on holiday to Campbeltown. It was the long hot summer of 1976, and Jack had a vague but determined notion of meeting his pop idol. What happens instead is a series of more everyday epiphanies that force the young couple to navigate their often fractious relationship while making a set of memories that will last a lifetime.    Sally Reid’s production for this first show in a new season of lunchtime theatre prese...

Tramway, Glasgow Four stars   Sex and the disabled has long been considered by some as a taboo topic, with presumptions that those with disabilities don’t have sexual feelings, let alone act on them, still prevailing in some quarters. Such ideas should have been put to bed after the screening of The Skin Horse, an impressionistic 1983 Channel Four documentary on the subject that was co-scripted by the late Nabil Shaban, who also appeared in it prior to becoming a familiar presence on Scotland’s stages later in his career.    More than four decades on, the subject is still hot property, as this new play from disabled based theatre company Birds of Paradise demonstrates in a work co-written by Hana Pascal Keegan, Gabriella Sloss, and BOP artistic director Robert Softley Gale.   The play’s main focus is Ben, a nineteen-year-old wheelchair user who has barely left his parents house for six months following an incident in a Liverpool nightclub. With his only real human co...

It was George Costigan’s idea that he and Matthew Kelly should do Waiting for Godot together as Vladimir and Estragon, the two men waiting for the title character who never comes in Samuel Beckett’s play that revolutionised twentieth century drama. Watching these two very different veterans of stage and screen spark off each other as they riff on Beckett’s piece of existential vaudeville in which ‘nothing happens twice’, you can see why it was such an inspired notion.   “This is a play about love,” says Kelly of Godot, in which the everyday chemistry between life long friends is laid bare in all its mundane glory. “For two people like us, who’ve known each other for fifty eight years – and I think Vladimir and Estragon have known each other for that long - it’s kind of an ideal time for us to do it. And we might get it right this time.”   Dominic Hill’s new production that opens at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre prior to dates in Liverpool and Bolton will be the fourth time Kelly ...