Coffee-Table Notes

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   Don’t mess with the Hens in Debbie Hannan’s new play, the latest lunchtime epic to grace A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s current season. As Jade, Amber and Lilac gather for their best pal Coral’s weekend extravaganza, they are already a force to be reckoned with. Once Coral’s so called cousin and unexpected guest Luna checks in with the WhatsApp group, however, by the end of their 48 Hours of regimented fun in the Athens of the North, they will have become goddesses.    This is brought to mercurial life by three of the finest female acting talents of their generation, with Danni Heron as Jade, Laura Lovemore as Lilac and Anna Russell-Martin as Amber joining forces as a chorus to end them all on Heather Grace Currie’s celestial looking set. As the trio double up as Coral and Luna in this co-production with Assembly Roxy in Edinburgh, the level of female energy on show goes stratospheric in its mix of ancient...

Big grown up plays are very much the order of the day in Scottish theatre’s homegrown summer seasons throughout June. Significantly, perhaps, only two of these are musicals, demonstrating that it is still possible to create powerful theatre without making a song and dance about it.    Stand & Deliver: The Lee Jeans Sit-In Cumbernauld Theatre, 6 June; Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock, 9-10 June.  Final dates for Frances Poet’s musical play about the 1981 strike by women workers in the Greenock Lee Jeans factory in what should be a powerful return home to the place where it all happened. This co-production between the National Theatre of Scotland, and the Tron Theatre, Glasgow was developed out of conversations with some of the 240 women involved in the strike, the play looks at how they stood up for themselves and each other over the seven-month dispute. The Herald called it ‘a spirited tribute to the power of the people’.     Sweat Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburg...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   As Scotland’s latest World Cup hopes come into view over the next few weeks, Joe McCann’s debut play is a timely look at one of the country’s lesser-spotted footballing greats. Back in the nineteenth century, Andrew Watson arrived in the UK from Demerara, British Guiana, the mixed race son of a wealthy sugar plantation owner father and a Guianese mother. While at university in Glasgow, Watson discovered football, and went on to become the first black player in association football at international level, who became star striker and captain of Queen’s Park. Watson also captained Scotland’s national team in three games that saw them hammer England twice, with the first game, a 6-1 victory for Watson’s team, remaining a record home defeat for England.   This is more than enough to get the faithful rallying behind Watson in McCann’s play, performed with heart by a solo Dayton Mungai, who begins with a question to the audience. Several others fol...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars    Relocation, relocation, relocation is the order of the day in this new stage adaptation of Barbet Schroeder’s 1992 schlocky horror psycho-sexual thriller. Drawn from John Lutz’s novel from two years earlier, SWF Seeks Same, the story imagines what happens when a woman’s new flatmate turn out to be mad, bad and very dangerous to know.    Moving house is not only theprime drive for Lisa Faulkner’s Allie as she and her teenage daughter Bella move into a building with seriously shonky electrics after Allie finally ditches Bella’s feckless dad, Sam. Nor is it just about Allie’s new lodger, Hedy, played by Kym Marsh as a Yorkshire sired cuckoo in the nest.    Writer Rebecca Reid has taken the steamy stateside des-res of the film and moved it lock, stock and homicidal kitchen knife to what appears to be a collapsing British suburban tower block. Not only that, Reid has whooshed things forward a few decades from the angsty and ...

Factories have been working overtime in my mind of late. As the Herald’s theatre critic, I recently watched the National Theatre of Scotland and the Tron Theatre’s production of Frances Poet’s new play, Stand & Deliver, take a musical look at the 1981 sit-in at Greenock’s Lee jeans factory.  A week later, I saw Sweat, the Citizens Theatre Glasgow and Royal Lyceum Edinburgh’s revival of Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize winning 2015 play about what happens to a mid American steel town when the plug is pulled on the factory that gave that town its economic lifeblood.   My more personal interest in factories just now is to do with The Machine Stops. This is a project I'm part of that is set to take place as part of Hidden Door, the grassroots Edinburgh arts festival that takes over abandoned buildings and transforms them into unique temporary venues.   This year’s Hidden Door returns to The Paper Factory, the vast former cardboard packaging plant close to Edinburgh Airp...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   You know the craic. You step into a late night music bar, the joint is jumping, and you walk out with your life turned upside down. Or at least this is what happens to the Dublin troubadour at the heart of Enda Walsh’s musical stage version of John Carney’s hit big screen romance. The catalyst for this wake up call is a turbo charged Czech pianist who tunes into his sad eyed laments and decrees they make an album together. Rounding up a group of misfits Commitments style, an all night burst of creativity sees them set down a classic before everything has to change once more.   As those who have seen either the film or John Tiffany’s Tony award winning Broadway production will already know, beyond the pair’s obvious chemistry, it’s complicated. For one unrepeatable moment, however, the international language of music and the emotional sparks that fly from it are the only things that matter.    As an opening gambit for Alan Cummi...

Dundee Rep Four stars   When Willy Russell's Pygmalion like tale of a working class hairdresser’s getting of wisdom by way of an Open University literature course run by a pickled ex poet first appeared in 1980, social mobility and education for all was still a possibility. If set today, lecturer Frank would have long been made redundant, while Rita’s thirst for knowledge would likely have been thwarted by fees that would have left her in debt forever. More recently, Rita’s spirit has been brought bang up to date in Jade Franks’ Edinburgh Festival Fringe hit, Eat the Rich (but maybe not me mates x), and it is only a matter of time before Franks slips into Rita’s scuffed shoes and plays her dramatic ancestor for real.    In the meantime, we should be grateful for this latest incarnation of what is now a period piece that remains a glorious riff on the old adage of how a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, be it for better or worse. Debbie Hannan’s production sees Frank ...