Coffee-Table Notes

Perth Theatre Four stars   The writing is on the wall for Alanah, the sparky young woman in Matthew McVarish’s solo play, receiving its first revival since it was seen in 2012. Alanah is living the high life after a fashion, that fashion being in a twenty-storey tower block  in a concrete jungle where she moved when her husband dumped her after just three months of wedded bliss.    That was after Alanah dropped out of uni and pretty much everything else besides to make someone else’s dreams come true. Now she’s chief bridesmaid for her neurotic best mate Zoe’s forthcoming nuptials while holding down a job in the family planning drop in centre. Other people’s private lives, it seems, are demanding her attention at the expense of anything resembling a life of her own.     Just to cap things off, some would-be street poet has started graffitiing bon mots on the wall next to the lift. The fact that she can trace each phrase back to things said to her ...

The Pavilion, Glasgow Four stars   Once upon a time, history books were full of heroes, who helped sex up the humdrum realpolitik of what actually happened enough to bring it off the page and into the hearts and minds of those who might be led to take sides. So it goes with the much lauded story of William Wallace, Scottish knight, scourge of English marauders and, in Mel Gibson’s blue paint smeared eyes, Hollywood’s idea of a nation’s saviour.    Writer Rob Drummond and composer/lyricist Dave Hook take a different approach in this scaled up hip hop take on Wallace, developed out of its bite size original that first appeared at A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s lunchtime theatre initiative in 2025. Back then, it was done as a three-way pub debate between a Scotsman, a Wummin and a Sassenach. This time out there are six people in Orla O’Loughlin’s production for the Raw Material company, which takes place on Neil Haynes’ set of steps that looks somewhere between the epic courtroo...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Five stars   When a half buried Winnie asks a barely visible Willie if he still finds her loveable mid way through the first act of Samuel Beckett’s tragicomic study of still lives, it as if they are on a second honeymoon. As Winnie attempts in vain to rekindle lost passions that long gave way to the daily torpor of their routines, Willie can only hide behind a newspaper to barricade himself from her incessant chatter. In her attempts to find some kind of spark, Winnie’s free associating babble flits between everyday mundanities and half remembered moments that defined the way things once were. Unable to spell out her inner yearning, she is literally being buried alive, swamped by the sands of time as the pair go on living apart together.    Siobhán  Redmond captures the full brittleness of Winnie’s desperation as she  comes to life on designer Emma Bailey’s sand hill set in Roxana Silbert’s pitch perfect production. All dressed up in ...

When the Citizens Theatre reopened its doors in August 2025, the spruced up Gorbals based emporium promised much for what lay beyond its new glass frontage. Here, after all, was a Glasgow institution that was back after seven years following the building’s first ever major redevelopment since the building first opened as a theatre in 1878. This new makeover was to make it fit for purpose for twenty-first century audiences and artists alike.   Starting as it meant to go on, the Citz’s opening statement on stage came with Small Acts of Love, Frances Poet’s epic drama that looked at the aftermath of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Poet’s script was developed out of interviews with survivors and families of those whose lives were changed by the tragedy forever. Created in association with the National Theatre of Scotland, and featuring new songs by Ricky Ross, the result was a big, ambitious production, full of heart.   After seven years without a stage to call his own, artistic direc...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   You never met bored teenagers quite like Antigone and Ismene, the two self-mythologising sisters at the centre of Lulu Raczka’s audacious twenty-first century reboot of Sophocles’ Ancient Greek classic. First seen in 2020, Raczka’s reimagining of the original is revived here by director Finn den Hertog in an appropriately bold production that sees Eilidh Loan and Holly Howden Gilchrist bring the two girls to life in devastating and dervish-like fashion.    Stuck in their living room and caught in the crossfire of the epic family fallout turned civil war the play is hinged upon, Loan’s Antigone and Howden Gilchrst’s Ismene play at being wannabe grown ups in a sleepover like scenario. Sex, booze, older men and all the other things they can only pretend about are all on the agenda before they end up doing karaoke instead of actually indulging in such japes.    It is Antigone’s attitude problem that does for them, as she makes out ...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   Some stories should never be told. This is made clear by matriarch Marion in Izzy Gray’s new play for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s autumn season of lunchtime theatre. Given the Orkney set backdrop of Gray’s drama, one might say secrets revealed here are best left buried at sea.    So it goes with Marion, Elsie and Bess, three of the women left behind in the seaport of Hamvenroe - the ancient Viking name of what is now Stromness - when their men folk disappear for months on end on whaling expeditions. As the trio go on with the daily grind despite the absence, a communal anxiety simmers to the surface. Beyond it, unexplained mysteries on their own doorstep have a seismic effect that erupts into view, only for it to die down once more in a conspiracy of silence, as if nothing ever happened.    There is a brooding fire of unspoken dissent at the heart of Gray’s play, written in a rich Orcadian Scots that in the mouths of the three women...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   When Taylor Swift released her epic 2025 single, The Fate of Ophelia, it possibly did more to introduce the work of William Shakespeare to Swift’s school age audience than an entire term of English Lit classes. One suspects something similar has occurred with the History syllabus over the last decade since Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s poptastic celebration of Henry VIII’s six wives was performed by a bunch of Cambridge undergraduates on the 2017 Edinburgh Festival Fringe before conquering the world.    The premise is simple. Each of Henry’s exes who have been magicked together like a manufactured girl band from the grave take it in turns to tell the story of their respective wedded bliss with the king in a bid to prove who was the best queen, divorces, beheading or plain old everyday deaths notwithstanding.    The first of two sextets for this latest tour already look and sound like a stadium-sized headline act in Moss and...