Coffee-Table Notes

Òran Mór , Glasgow Four stars   What happened one sunny day in 2021 on Glasgow’s south side when agents of the UK Home Office were thwarted from removing two Sikh men of Indian descent from their homes has become an inspiration for our times. The spontaneous show of mass solidarity that rose up that day has already been documented in Felipe Bustos Sierra’s film, Everybody to Kenmure Street. Playwright Simon Jay has here picked up the baton with a verbatim approach to his new play drawn from the day’s events. The result in this latest lunchtime production for A Play, a Pie and a Pint mixes interviews and anecdotal accounts with a little old school polemic to tell the story.    Key to this is the song by Kenmure Street residents Craig and Rachel Smillie written within days of the event, and which here acts as a folksy refrain as actors Nesha Caplan, Kal Sabir and Betty Valencia replay what happened. This moves from the initial response to the eventual release of the men fro...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars   For those on side, Cowdenbeath Football Club may never have been premiere league material, but they have always occupied a field of dreams. This is made clear in Gary McNair’s wonderful new stage adaptation of Ron Ferguson’s 1993 book, ostensibly a love letter to the club that becomes a funny and profound meditation on the collective power of football fandom as a form of everyday devotion.   So it goes with McNair’s version, which sees Cowdenbeath native Sally make a reluctant prodigal’s return to the Fife mining town following the death of her football daft dad. The deal is that Sally is to scatter her old man’s ashes onto the pitch at CFC’s home ground of Central Park, but only after they win a game. As historical statistics show, alas, the 1991/92 season when Sally made her promise wasn’t exactly a walk in the park in terms of getting a resuls, which is why she finds herself spending more weekends than she bargained for on t...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh  Four stars   Everybody wants a piece of Jenna in Jessie Horton and Sara Bareilles’ smash hit musical, which celebrates its tenth anniversary on its latest UK tour. Based on the late Adrienne Shelly’s film of the same name, writer Horton and composer Bareilles’ confection is a bittersweet affair served up in Abbey O’Brien’s all singing, all dancing restaging of Diane Paulus’ original production with all the trimmings.    Jenna is the waitress of the show’s title, who may bake the best pies in the American South in Joe’s Pie Diner, but who remains stuck in a dead end marriage with abusive husband Earl. With a baby on the way, Jenna looks set to be even more trapped. Also working in the diner are Becky and Dawn, with whom Jenna forms an unbreakable trio in the face of assorted men folk. While Jenna finds Dr. Pomatter has an impeccable bedside manner, geeky Dawn does a whole lot of re-enacting with oddball Ogie, while Becky gets behind the ...

Perth Theatre Four stars   Everyone is a star in Morag Fullarton’s latest remake of a Hollywood classic. Following Casablanca The Gin Joint Cut and It’s a Wonderful Life… Mostly, this reimagining of Billy Wilder’s 1950 showbiz noir  is scaled up to something more suitably epic after being  first seen back in 2015 as a lunchtime show at Oran Mor.    The appeal of putting it back on stage isn’t hard to fathom. Here, after all, is a big picture that mythologises its own world by way of what happens to screenwriter Joe Gillis. Gillis has become the accidental toy boy of faded silent movie queen Norma Desmond after being drafted in to write her back into the spotlight. While Norma is watched over by her devoted butler, Max, Joe teams up with script reader Betty Schaefer, who has her own plans for Joe.    As if such a tangled web wasn’t already a multi-tiered potboiler, Fullarton gift-wraps her production by framing it with Wilder casting his new opus, and t...

Water is at the centre of Sarah Calmus’s world in Right to Roam, as the Edinburgh based artist follows up on her recent multi-screen intervention, Uisge, viewable on Potterow in Edinburgh, with a full-on immersive experience. Calmus’s exhibition takes its title from the internationally recognised notion of a public right to access public and privately owned land. Focusing on the River Forth, she utilises moving image, sculpture, sound and screenprints to take a deep dive into environmental pollution, climate change and how the natural landscape is threatened.   “I wanted to talk about this idea within the lens of water,” Calmus says of an exhibition that has its roots in a residency in Sweden. “I swim in the Forth quite a lot, and I also row, and because of where I live in Newhaven I see the river every morning, so I'm all about the water, so I thought I would hone in on this conversation about the right to roam and really focus on water. We're all made of water, and the tides ...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars   A big blood red spotlight engulfs the stage as an eerie underscore plays while the lights go down on this trimmed down version of Shakespeare’s Scottish play. Arguably the bard’s best-known saga has been seen in many forms over the last few centuries. His is tale of doomed ambition and men who would be king probably hasn’t been seen that often with such rapid fire brevity as this new version by the Hove based Out of Chaos company. Perhaps with latter day low attention span in mind concerning this set text friendly epic, director Mike Tweddle here oversees a version featuring just two actors who manage to fast forward through the Macbeths rise and fall in a speedy eighty minutes.    Hannah Barrie and Paul O’Mahoney may be centre-stage much of the time as the fortune hunting Macbeths, but they also double up as a full supporting cast of assorted monarchs, thanes and soldiers in arms without missing a beat. They also do a turn as the wei...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Five stars    Sparks fly on the factory floor at the start of Joanna Bowman’s explosive revival of Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, first seen in 2015, but looking more pertinent than ever. As a portent of things to come, this opening image is as telling as the fact that the sides of Francis O’Connor’s set look like a cage, inside which, some kind of combat takes place. This is how it is, not just in the factory, but in the bar where the workers splash their wages around, and almost certainly in the prison the two young men at the heart of the play have just been released from.    The time moves between the turn of the century when it felt like people could get by, to eight years later when the world has changed. The place is Reading, Pennsylvania, a blue-collar heartland fired by iron and steel. Here, Tracey, Cynthia and Jessie spend their down time getting hammered, as do Tracey’s son Jason and Cynthia’s boy Chris. The...