Coffee-Table Notes

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars   As gossipy Magic Circle members might tell you, Derren Brown’s feats of mental skulduggery he bamboozles his fan base with aren’t anything new. Brown himself admits in the second half of his latest theatrical extravaganza that the hardest thing for him to do during his two and a half hour performance is to keep an eye on a deck of cards to see which way one lands. The fact that he tells us this via subtitles on a screen that covers the Playhouse stage’s entire back wall while those cards are shuffled speaks volumes about Brown’s exemplary shtick. And while those self same Magic Circle members may be correct in their professional observations, if they ever let slip how Brown’s tricks actually worked, chances are such a breach of protocol would see us all have to do a disappearing act.    Things begin quietly enough with pre show phone footage testimonies from a stream of satisfied but bewildered customers about how Brown appears t...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh  Four stars   In the city there are eight million stories. Edinburgh being Edinburgh, it would probably like to boast it has a fair few more. Given the Athens of the North’s Jekyll and Hyde style credentials, whereby it puts on a pretty facade for the tourists, while the real tall tales emerge from more intimate exchanges out of sight behind closed doors, this might well be the case.    So it goes with Lyceum at Home, an initiative spearheaded by the capital theatre’s artistic director James Brining, who commissioned four writers to create a quartet of thirty-minute monologues. With each set in Edinburgh, in a project led by outgoing associate director Zinnie Harris, these were then performed around town in people’s living rooms, where sofa bound audiences were unavoidably up close to the action. Now the mini tour is over, the quartet of new works were brought back home to the theatre that sired them, where they were performed on the s...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars    Electricity is in the air when Robin meets Iris at a 1990s student party for her 21st birthday. As opposites attract, the pair find common ground of sorts over a broken guitar displayed like a trophy. What might have ended up as one night of drunken passion becomes something else when the pair make a vow never to touch.    Thirty years later, and what was an unforgettable moment for him and one more rash promise for her brings Robin and Iris together once more. As their worlds collide in a courtroom cafe where both are involved in the consequences of actions not of their making, their criss-crossing lives catch up with each other across generations and wake up something in both of them.   What initially looks like an extended episode of what might be styled as This Mid Life in the first act of Douglas Maxwell’s emotionally ambitious play gradually evolves into something more expansively contemporary in the second.  R...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Three stars   Hear ye this. When a town crier and a court jester gather as one for the pleasure of the king, soothsaying and hilarity will ensue. Or sometimes not. Such is the way in Nay Dhanak’s mini epic, the latest comic extravaganza to grace A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s current lunchtime theatre season. Here we find our ad hoc double act both out of a job, and reduced to telling their respective stories with a little help from some life size puppets and framed as a comedy masterclass.    As they ply their past their sell by date wares with a stream of verbiage and well worn gags, the duo’s slapstick interplay becomes part of a mediaeval quest in search of a second sun to offset the unfortunate eclipse back home. Instead they find themselves thrown into the future, where the news is relayed in a million different hi-tech ways, punchlines are ten a penny, dragons aren’t so easily slain and Siri has an answer for everything.    Dhanak ...

When poet Roddy Lumsden died in 2020 aged 53, it called time on a mercurial figure, whose work impacted worlds beyond the rarefied literary circuit. This should be in evidence at Mischief Night, which commemorates what would have been Lumsden’s sixtieth birthday in the same venue he launched his first collection, Yeah Yeah Yeah, in 1997.   Named after Lumsden’s 2004 book, while Mischief Night will of course feature poetry, there will also be a focus on his other obsessions. This will come in the form of a quiz, and will feature a soundtrack drawn from his substantial collection of 7-inch singles. The latter will be played by those behind a weekly event called Sleepless Nights. This was a Thursday night vinyl only happening that took place at Edinburgh’s now long lost St. James Oyster Bar, and which featured the sort of left-field obscurities that fired Lumsden’s own musical tastes. Requests are being taken on the event website.   As unofficial writer in residence at St. J, Lum...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Five stars   The vintage microphone that hangs down centre stage may be designed for old school crooners in Linda McLean’s adaptation of Denise Mina’s true crime novel, but as it swings between those confessing not quite all, those behind it tell a far darker story.    It is 1958, and in a world where gangsterism and civic entrepreneurism rub shoulders in spit and sawdust bars and after-hours members clubs, William Watt has been released from prison after being tried for the murder of his wife, daughter and sister-in-law. Determined to clear his name, the Lanarkshire businessman ends up on a twelve-hour bender with Peter Manuel, who will later be convicted and hanged for these and other killings.    Over two intense hours, Mina’s story flits between the trial and a speculative dramatisation of what may or may not have happened during Watt and Manuel’s epic session. The result in Dominic Hill’s main stage production is a slow burnin...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars    Love hurts in D.C. Jackson’s potty-mouthed sitcom writ large. This is something to do with the succession of studiedly adolescent one-line gags peppered throughout as much as the growing pains of impending adulthood, not to mention the hangovers that go with both. Either way, it’s complicated.    This is how it rolls for Tom and Amy, the terminally feckless thirty something duo whose drunken one-night office amour helps stave off grown up responsibilities. Until, that is, they have no choice. Inbetween, Jackson has his sort of happy couple rewind on assorted teenage romances that left their mark like a bad home made tattoo. With Tom and Amy’s messy story told by each in turn as they narrate their own unreliable memoirs, we get to see their warts and all destiny from all sides until they become entwined forever.    Johnny McKnight’s revival of Jackson’s 2010 mini series in waiting stays true to its overriding ridiculousnes...