Coffee-Table Notes

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   A decade has passed since Ken Loach and Paul Laverty introduced the world to Daniel Blake, the Geordie carpenter stymied into submission by a welfare system that sees his life degenerate into a Kafkaesque nightmare. We know this by the recorded voices speaking the words of former UK prime ministers that are beamed onto a battered billboard throughout this equally powerful stage version by Dave Johns, the original Dan on screen. Given the amount of ex PMs racked up over the last few years, Mark Calvert’s production has had his work cut out to updating their verbatim platitudes, which now includes missives from Downing Street’s latest incumbents. That the action on stage remains unchanged speaks volumes about the state we’re still in.    For those who haven’t seen it, Dan has been signed off work by his doctor after a heart attack. This isn’t good enough for the powers that be, however, who are adamant on cutting every benefit they can...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow  Four stars   Teenage dreams come dead on arrival in Simon Longman’s blistering study of wasted youth, first seen in 2018 and revived here in dynamic fashion by director Anna Whealing and producer Aila Swan. This is delivered by an electrifying trio of young actors who, over the production’s relentless eighty-minutes, don’t let up for a second.    As Longman’s title suggests, the scene is a town on a barely inhabited island where a population of dead end kids alleviate their dead end lives by getting out of it on cheap cider and whatever substances they can get their hands on. Kate, Sam and Pete also have each other, clinging on for life itself with a no holds barred gang mentality that sees them rage with unfocused energy in search of something better.    Having left school with what careers advisors would call no prospects, and with brutal family lives only offering violence of one sort of another, the unholy trinity form a kind of s...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars    When Scott meets Jess across a messy dancefloor on an Edinburgh night out, it is lust at first sight. A one-night stand before they both go off to university is all well and good, but what happens next turns both their lives upside down and binds them together forever.    Nathan Scott-Dunn’s new play for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s lunchtime theatre season taps into the well worn unplanned and often unwanted baby trope that pretty much fuelled the black and white world of so called kitchen sink drama in the 1950s and 1960s. Mercifully things have moved on considerably in Scott and Jess’s twenty first century world, and while the couple’s experience is no less of a shock to them, some kind of happy ending is very much on the cards.    Edoardo Berto’s production opens with Scott and Jess preparing a time capsule type video for their newborn. This framing allows them to rewind their story to its neon lit beginnings all the way up...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars   Heroines - or protagonists as Abigail Dooley and Emma Edwards would have it - don’t always wear capes in the duo’s mythological rummage through what it means to be a woman of a certain age. Sometimes they get to wear beige Marks & Spencer’s long length cardigans, better known here as the Cloak of Invisibility. As fashion tips go, such apparel may not be what every woman wants, but they do come in handy sometimes.     Dooley and Edwards arrive on stage from behind a set of ancient stones that appear to be made of cotton wool wearing costumes seemingly leftover from a low budget 1970s kids sword and sorcery serial. A three headed Hydra sees visages of Vivienne Westwood, Dolly Parton and Kathy Burke gift them an all purpose tongue sharpener for answering back with style, and a pair of glasses for seeing straight.    Kitted out with such luxurious accessories, the pair embark on a gloriously hand knitted comic ...

As Scotland’s theatre season moves into spring, a mix of old and new works packs the schedules across the country, with a potent mix of comedy, tragedy, musicals and high drama at play to keep audiences enthralled.     The High Life: The Musical – Still Living It! Dundee Rep until 4 April; Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 7-11 April; His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, 14-18 April; Eden Court, Inverness, 29 April-May 2; Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 12-23 May. To some, putting a short-lived thirty-year-old sit-com onstage may not be the sort of classic fare one has in mind when one thinks of a national theatre’s repertoire. Then again, the National Theatre of Scotland’s staging of Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson’s camp in-flight fare has reunited Cumming, Masson and fellow original cast members Siobhan Redmond and Patrick Ryecart for what promises to be a mid-air romp in a show co-created with the mighty Johnny McKnight. Co-produced by the NTS with Dundee Rep in associat...

The Studio, Edinburgh Three stars    Raskolnikov is a man alone in Laurie Sansom’s new adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 750 page nineteenth century epic, which sees the ascetic student’s attraction to seemingly mindless violence usher him into a moral maze that becomes a dark investigation of his inner soul. In Connor Curren’s mercurial portrayal, Raskolnikov is what newspaper reports might call a loner, who lives largely in his own head, plotting and scheming the downfall of everyone who isn’t him. When he kills, it comes from a mixture of thinking he’s better than his victims that runs parallel with a pathological envy of those in high places he so craves to sit among even as he loathes them.    Performed by just three actors in Sansom’s own production for the Yorkshire based Northern Broadsides company, this is Dostoevsky stripped bare. This is the case both in the focus on Raskolnikov’s angry young man style sense of superiority, as well as the way it leaves its...

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 ...