Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre Four stars   Life is a curse for Sally in Zinnie Harris’ new play, one of the flagship productions of Scotland’s new writing theatre’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe season. Ever since Sally fell down a hole in the road outside the theatre, she’s been having visions. The damage done may be a physical reaction, but it becomes a much bigger metaphor for all the world’s ills that are dragging her and everybody else down into the underworld.    One minute Sally is stuck in the stifling first world politesse of a dead middle class marriage with Richard and all the school runs and liberal concerns that go with it. The next there are frogs at her door, a Greek chorus in her head, and she’s throwing bricks at her bigoted neighbour whose cancer scare she just foretold in-between letting loose her increasing sense of rage.    In Harris’ own production, the play’s obvious debt to the Ancient Greeks sees the play transcend its diaristic beginnings to become a ri...

Underbelly Bristo Square  Four stars   Everybody’s welcome in American writer John Kolvenbach ’s play. This is made clear by the grizzled old guy standing at a desk on the stage throughout as he invites the audience to join him in communing with - well, pretty much everything, really.    As the man engages with us directly, what follows might initially be mistaken as a freeform riff that is part performance lecture, part pop psychology self help routine, and part private confessional. While there are hints of all these things at play over the show’s 55-minute duration, what emerges out of Kolvenbach’s meticulously crafted text is a collective cry for help that lays bare the basic human need to connect.    To be clear here, this is no angst filled hippy indulgence. Rather, in Kolvenbach’s own production, presented here by Boston’s Huntingdon Theatre Company, what you get is a near Beckettian tragicomic meditation on life, love and loss born of the ...

Pleasance Courtyard  Four stars    Girls may just want to have fun in Alice Stanley Jr’s new play, but for Ava and Parker, there is a lot more drama going on elsewhere to distract them. Holed up in Parker’s bedroom, and alternating between physics text books and the golden glow of their mobile phones and the social media whirl beyond, the two teenagers are coming to terms with an attempted shooting at their high school. No-one died, unlike a neighbouring school where a bunch of kids were killed, but now THEY are getting all the likes on Instagram, and Ava, at least, feels left out of the online chat enough to want to make a statement of her own.    The everyday tragedy of school shootings that has blighted the world over is brought to life in Riley Rose Critchlow’s production with the sort of commonplace teen dream sass patented by Ryan Murphy . This is led by a pair of fearless performances from Rachael DeBoer as a more bookish Parker and Shaylaren Hilton ...

The world may be about to descend on Edinburgh for its assorted festivals, but there is plenty happening elsewhere in the country in August, as a small army of powerful women on stage appear to be taking the lead. The first four shows have their final dates this weekend, so grab a ticket while you can.   Lear Pitlochry Festival Theatre, until 1 August Maureen Beattie takes the title role in Finn den Hertog’s new adaptation of Shakespeare’s saga of sanity, madness and the family in a very personal take on the play that nevertheless remains faithful to the original. As an ageing matriarch only wanting to be told by her daughters how special she is, while Goneril and Regan tell her what she wants to hear, Ailsa Davidson’s Cordelia is having none of it. The result sees Lear lose the plot and do a runner, tended to by Cordelia’s clown doctor Fool, while her big sisters embark on a war that looks like something Quentin Tarantino might have dreamt up if he’d gone cyberpunk. This is Beatti...

The day Edinburgh photographer Sandra George’s vast archive landed on the doorstep of the then recently set up Craigmillar Now organisation changed things for everyone who was there. With one eye on the neighbourhood’s past in the form of Craigmillar Festival Society, the globally recognised community arts organisation that paved the way for everything that followed, Craigmillar Now opened in 2020, and had just established a weekly archiving initiative.   A chance encounter with George’s former partner Jimmy Hewitt saw her archive rescued from a garden shed where it had sat since her death in 2013 and put into Craigmillar Now’s care. As  thousands of negatives were digitised, a vital portrait of Edinburgh life in the 1980s and 1990s seen from the frontline of George’s lens was revealed.   Also there that day was Lee McCormack, another photographer tending to her own neglected archive after working as a photographer around the same time as George. Where George worked ...

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow Four stars     Blood is very much thicker than water in John Webster’s 17th century Jacobean revenge tragedy, in which a merry widow Duchess marries beneath her station in the form of her steward, Antonio. This is much to the chagrin of her brothers, with her twin Ferdinand and their Cardinal elder using their respective power bases to keep an eye on their sister’s most intimate exchanges through the eyes of their spy, Bosola. As the Duchess and Antonio’s cross class love story evolves into a domestic bliss that should be for life, Webster dismisses any prospect of a happy ending by killing off pretty much everyone in sight.    This is brought home in scintillating close up in Jennifer Dick’s five-actor version for Bard in the Botanics’ silver jubilee season. With assorted pairs of boots laid out at the altars that mark out the space in the Kibble Palace Glasshouse, Dick’s own production sees the Duchess’ passion for Manasa Tagica’s Antonio b...

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow Three stars   When Jane Austen wrote in 1815 of how the heroine of the novel she was about to begin was a woman ‘whom no one but myself will much like’, one might presume she was about to create a monster. As it turned out, and as was established in the book’s first line, Emma Woodhouse turned out to be ‘handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition’. She may have been the sort of beauteous untouchable who breezed through life in a way that leaves the rest of us swooning, but she’s a nice girl, really, even if she is the sort of person for whom the phrase ‘check your privilege’ was invented.   So it goes with Jennifer Dick’s new stage adaptation of Austen’s yarn, which in Gordon Barr’s open air production for this year’s Bard in the Botanics season stays true to its posh frock roots to make for a delightful summer confection.    Esme Bayley’s Emma is a thoroughly modern young woman who burls through the nineteent...