Coffee-Table Notes

Òran Mór , Glasgow  Four stars   Coming up for air isn’t always easy for Michael and Pat, the cross generational duo at the heart of Séan O'Neil’s new play, the latest lunchtime offering at A Play, a Pie and a Pint. If Michael can hold his breath in a bucket of water, he’ll get into the Guinness Book of Records. As his coach, Pat can share in some of the glory. The people from Guinness, alas, are running late. While this doesn’t prevent Pat from necking down several cans of the black stuff, when Pat’s daughter Grainne shows up at the pool, it becomes clear that all concerned are drowning in a mire of grief from which they will never fully surface.   What begins as a comedy fused by Michael and Pat’s deadly exchanges in Fraser Scott’s production gradually morphs into a meditation on loss, guilt and the extremes one pushes oneself to in order to try and get beyond the absence. Michael and Pat’s pursuits may seem trivial, but at the heart of their endeavours t...

‘The Royal Scottish Academy,’ as captioned by way of explanation at this group show curated by its former president, Arthur Watson, ‘is made up by artists and architects elected by their peers and is in essence a collective.’ As the caption also points out, George Wyllie, in whose honour the building we are in was created, was considered an anomaly. As a     customs officer and jazz musician turned late blooming sculptor, he was a wild card and joker in the pack who was nevertheless welcomed into the RSA club with open arms.     For all Wyllie’s bunnet and overalls bonhomie that came with his work, it must never he forgotten that his environmental sculptural interventions are some of the greatest public artworks of recent times. He is also  probably the only RSA member to have a purpose built museum created in their honour.   This show was brought together by Watson to celebrate the RSA’s 200th anniversary with something of a greatest hits compendium that j...

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Four stars   Election fever may feel somewhat tepid just now in these parts, but with populism on the rise from all sides and out and out crazy people in power, in terms of the future, the bigger picture continues to look increasingly scary. It is not, thank goodness, beyond satire, as Justin Skelton’s DIY construction proves in tuneful fashion with a full six-piece band delivering his song cycle.   Skelton is Beldon Haigh, a former spin-doctor thrown into the industrial prison complex somewhere in Midlothian at the behest of one President Blame. This suspiciously familiar looking demagogue may only want to Make Dystopia Great Again, but his one actual redeeming feature is that he probably plays saxophone better than Bill Clinton.   Like some fantasy latter day San Quentin concert, Beldon hooks up with some of his fellow inmates to form a supergroup of felons that includes a rhythm section of a chicken dancing Donald Trump on bass and a meaty...

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 ...