Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   The sun may be shining at the start of Kathy McKean’s devastating version of Euripides’ tragedy, but it doesn’t last in this revival of Bard in the Botanics production, originally seen in 2022 in the up-close confines of the Kibble Palace. This tour of more formal theatres unleashes the full fury of McKean and Euripides’ heroine whilst retaining the play’s sense of intimacy amidst the emotional fallout.   Under lighting designer Benny Goodman’s Mediterranean skies hanging over the mix of the monumental and the domestic on Carys Hobbs’ set, Isabelle Joss’s Nurse picks up the pieces of the break up of her mistress and her former squeeze Jason, who is about to wed a younger and more local model. When Medea finally swishes and simmers into view, despite her anguished noises off, she is a sunkissed vision about to explode into gold coloured flames.   What follows in Gordon Barr’s production is an extraordinary depiction of a woman left ...

When Franz Ferdinand sang of going to a party at Glasgow’s Transmission gallery in their 2005 hit single, Do You Want To? the libidinous lyric was not only a cheeky nod to the band’s roots in the city’s underground art scene. It was also an example of how that DIY scene had flourished enough to go global by way of several Turner Prize winners as well as Franz Ferdinand themselves.   Back then, Transmission’s King Street home was one of a cluster of artist led spaces occupying rough and ready premises on and around Trongate in the Merchant City. As is the way with areas that become a home for artists, cheap rents had attracted a natural influx of artistic activity that worked from the ground up in a self-made cultural village – please, let’s not call it a hub.   In September 2009, following around £8 million worth of long-term public investment, what had originally been a series of three six storey B listed former Edwardian warehouses opened as Trongate 103. This took the idea ...

The arrival in Adelaide of French acting legend Isabelle Huppert’s solo performance as Mary, Queen of Scots in American visionary Robert Wilson’s production of Mary Said What She Said is a major event. Touring intermittently since 2019, Wilson’s production taps into the doomed Scottish monarch’s inner world via a remarkable fusion of word, image, movement and music.   “The feeling is comparable to being in Mary's head in the moments before she was beheaded,” explains Charles Chemin, the show’s dramaturg, co-director, and long-term collaborator of Wilson. “ One can witness a whirlpool of thoughts and memories in a very direct and immediate way. The experience is then focused on the intensity of the emotions, rather than on their theatricality. It allows a freedom to Isabelle to also act as herself, while being traversed by the poetics, a process that Wilson was particularly fond of, maybe with Isabelle even more than with other actors.”   Mary’s three Adelaide da...

Big plays of all kinds abound on Scotland’s stages this month, with some but by no means all of the wonders opening highlighted here in the hope that readers will try and see as much of this as possible.     Waiting for Godot Citizens Theatre, Glasgow until 14 March. Samuel Beckett’s twentieth century classic is brought to life by Matthew Kelly and George Costigan in the Citz’s brilliant new main stage production. Beckett’s darkly comic piece of existential vaudeville has long attracted major actors to playing his double act, and Kelly and Costigan’s longstanding friendship and working relationship going back half a century sees them spark off each other in tragicomic fashion in this co-production between the Citz, Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre and Bolton Octagon.   Saint Joan Perth Theatre, 7 March; Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, 12-14 March; Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 18-21 March. George Bernard Shaw’s 1923 play about Joan of Arc, was probably last seen on the Citizens’ Theatre...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Five stars   World Book Day arriving on the same day as the official Edinburgh opening of the latest tour of Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin’s epic stage musical of Roald Dahl’s 1988 novel was a perfect piece of synchronicity. Matilda, after, all, features one of the most bookish heroines ever imagined.    Inexplicably born into a family of knockabout telly addicts, five-year-old Matilda Wormwood buries herself in books, with her precocious intellect channelling increasingly fantastical tales of acrobats and escapologists that she tells to Esther Niles’ librarian, Mrs Phelps. At school, meanwhile, Matilda is caught between the nurturing hand of Tessa Kadler’s angelic Miss Honey and the brutal regime of Richard Hurst’s monstrous Miss Trunchbull. Somehow Matilda quietly inspires her fellow pupils to rise up as she discovers the value of defiance early on.   Dahl’s tale of a damaged little girl who finds salvation through a mix of knowledge, i...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Three stars    Life is one great big action movie for Davie and Sean. It’s always been that way, ever since they met across a garden fence when they were wee. Davie reckons he’s seen every film ever made, so it’s only right that he calls the shots, and they become Butch and Sundance to the end. Or at least until their playacting leads the pair down a darker road, and they end up in the same prison.    It is Davie who ends up being the first of the gang to die, alas, prompting a still incarcerated Sean to give his best friend the legendary send off he deserves. He even has the dearly departed around in celestial form to tell him what to do as he always has. For now, anyway.    Stephen Christopher and Graeme Smith’s new play for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s lunchtime theatre season follows their success with The Scaff and Dancing Shoes with a fantastical rites of passage that takes Sean on a wild goose chase from prison cell to funeral pa...

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...