Coffee-Table Notes

Dundee Rep Four stars As lost horizons go, Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson’s short-lived 1994 sitcom could hardly be bettered in terms of rediscovery. The original saw Cumming and Masson cast themselves as Sebastian Flight and Steve McCracken, the cabin crew and in-flight double act of Air Scotia, Scotland’s best - and only - airline, in a riotous camperama that took retro styled kitsch into the stratosphere. With Sebastian and Steve aided and abetted by Siobhan Redmond’s terrifying trolley dolly Shona Spurtle and Patrick Ryecart’s space cadet Captain Duff, the sky was the limit. So too, alas, was the limbo Cumming and Masson’s sitcom maiden voyage was left in just as it appeared to be going places.  More than three decades on, and with the show’s creators flying high, they have joined forces with their natural theatrical heir Johnny McKnight to create this box set size musical reboot that sees Sebastian, Steve and the gang reunited as they set the controls for the heart of the fun ...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Five stars    Matters of life and death are all part of the daily grind for Flora, the overworked nurse who comes blinking into the light in this remarkable theatrical collaboration between Glasgow’s Vanishing Point company and Teater Katapult of Aarhus, Denmark on a new play by Josephine Eusebius. Arriving in Glasgow after premiering in Aarhus, Matthew Lenton’s production opens with Flora on a strip lit hospital roof, where she is catching a moment’s solitude as she recovers from the stresses of her latest shift with a rare cigarette to get her through. This noirish image is heightened by the row of performers who sit at microphones behind her, speaking stage directions as well as the assorted voices off demanding her attention.    For much of the next sixty-five minutes it is only Flora, played by a tireless Lærke Schjærff Engelbrecht,  who occupies the main performing area, torn this way and that by an increasingly demanding ar...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   Love and marriage initially look like old school domestic bliss in Laura Wade’s reimagining of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1926 play. Beneath the all smiles surface and art deco interior, however, lies an unspoken world of infidelity and deceit. In wronged wife Constance, we also have one of the smartest fictional independent women of her time. As played in Tamara Harvey’s production by a luminescent Kara Tointon, Wade ramps this up considerably in a way that puts Constance’s modernity to the fore. While she defends Tim Delap’s philandering husband, John, in public, she nevertheless turns the tables on him by way of Alex Mugnaioni’s fawning ex suitor Bernard.   We first meet Constance as her mother and sister plan to reveal the discovery of her husband John’s affair with her best friend Marie-Louise, played by Gloria Onitiri. As it turns out in the subsequent flashback, however, Constance knew all along. She just chose to keep it to herself r...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Three stars   Margaret has lost her way. No, not in the geographical sense. The Glasgow gay bar this American émigré of a certain age has just landed in on a rainy Friday night is a place she specifically sought out. For what, though? Comfort? A friendly face? A cheeky cocktail as she bonds with strangers? Sure, Margaret gets all of these and more eventually in Bethany Tennick’s lunchtime mini musical for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest season, but the welcome she initially gets from bar manager Dove isn’t exactly warm.    Even so, Margaret’s lack of direction comes from somewhere else. As a workaholic whose grown up offspring have decamped all the way to Australia, she has an empty spot where some kind of love used to live. Dove, meanwhile, has issues of her own to deal with, some of which may or may not be solved by the contents of the mysterious package her sidekick Si has been despatched to collect. When Si attempts to cast a spell to pur...

Since 2008 or thereabouts, MuseumsEtc has published more than 100 titles that fuse photography, social history and politics in a series of beautifully bespoke editions. This month sees the publication of three new books that sum up the quietly radical ethos of the Edinburgh based but avowedly internationalist independent imprint.   Jo Spence: The Unknown Recordings compiles transcripts of tapes made by the feminist writer and photographer that reveal an unflinching and at times painful look at Spence’s life and work as a low paid working class artist. The texts are accompanied by images taken in her cramped Islington flat that make for an intimate and unsettling self-portrait of one of the late twentieth century’s most singular of artists.   The Erasure of Palestine collects more than 80 images taken over three years by photographer Ahmad Al-Bazz of what remains of the hundreds of towns and villages depopulated and destroyed during the creation and expansion of Israel from 194...

The Pavilion, Glasgow Four stars   If ever an unsung Scottish heroine was crying out to be reimagined in a high-end historical drama it is the figure of Flora MacDonald. Here, after all, was a young woman living in eighteenth century Skye who stumbled into the history books after aiding and abetting the Jacobite cause when she helped smuggle Bonnie Prince Charlie out of the reach of government troops after he and his party were trounced at Culloden. Other than a 1948 film and a more recent appearance in an episode of Outlander, alas, Flora has remained an oddly neglected figure.    Cue Belle Jones’ suitably heroic musical romp, which arrives in Glasgow this week to reclaim Flora and give her the due she deserves after opening in Inverness last weekend. Here we see Flora across the decades, with Karen Fishwick embodying the younger woman, while Annie Grace watches over Flora’s place in history with a wizened eye. What follows in Stasi Schaeffer’s big-hearted production for...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   If we all have our crosses to bear, say a prayer for Alice Lockwood in James Reilly’s new play that makes up the latest incarnation of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s lunchtime theatre season at Òran Mór. Alice is a primary school teacher in a Catholic school, or was before she was suspended for reasons yet to be made clear. In order to get to the bottom of the incident, Alice has been seconded for a session with ex GP turned secular therapist Dr. Freer. When Father Mackin shows up to hear Alice’s story, truth becomes stranger than fiction.    Alice, you see, has been seeing saints. Fifteen of them have shown up in her classroom, proffering suitably saintly advice, with St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things and souls, even helping her find a missing ear ring under the fridge. Trouble is, she is the only one who can see her new spirit guides, and the wonderland of ecclesiastical encounters is occupied her alone. Even worse, while ...