Coffee-Table Notes

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars Mothers and sons can be a toxic mix. So it goes in Jonny Donahoe’s emotionally charged new play, which will hopefully have a longer life beyond its lunchtime slot as part of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest season and its subsequent Edinburgh and Paisley dates.    When Mark Barrett’s presumably sole son and heir of Blythe Duff’s solitary matriarch turns up unannounced for the first time in eight months, he finds her burning her back pages on a garden bonfire. Given that some of those pages may involve him, this very Zen gesture of purging has an even greater if largely unspoken resonance. Given that the son’s arrival is because he has something to say to help find some kind of impasse beyond their estrangement, this is even more problematic. As the pair attempt to navigate their way around their differences over the next hour in what looks like an extended co-counselling session, some kind of bridges are eventually built.    As Duff and ...

Scottish theatre is on something of a roll just now in a series of hit shows that mark something of a return for big plays with big ideas that don’t tell you what to think. Long may it continue.   Tristan & Yseult  Citizens Theatre, Glasgow until 3 October; Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh,  2-24 October . Theatrical maverick Emma Rice scored an international hit back in 2003 with her epic take on the much adapted mediaeval romance about an illicit liaison between a Cornish knight and an Irish princess. If that sounds old hat, thing again, as Rice transforms the ancient yarn into a circus-like caper that roars with life in the show’s first outing for almost a decade in this latest reboot by Rice’s own Emma Rice Company.   The Steamie His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen until 3 October. King’s Theatre, Edinburgh,  5-10 October ; Pitlochry Festival Theatre,  20-24 October ; Alhambra Theatre, Dunfermline,  29-31 October ; King’s Theatre, Glasgow,  2-1...

Four stars   Speculative Fiction has been predicting the future for several centuries now. This is to the extent that much of the hi-tech machine age prophecy highlighted on the page and on screens great and small as they were invented is now science fact.    So it goes with the six short films produced by the National Theatre of Scotland and BBC Scotland currently on a short tour of cinemas prior to a digital release in January 2027. Developed as part of the NTS’ 20 th  anniversary, each commission pairs already accomplished stage writers and directors with equally skilled film makers.   B ed to the Future finds a male couple embark on purchasing a new bed to rest their weary heads, only for one of them to be lurched forward in time. Written and directed by James Ley,    the narrative sees  Martin Quinn    and    Jay Newton as the couple find comfort away from the future shock witnessed.   Broth finds Carmen Pieraccini’s TV news re...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four Stars   Showbiz secrets didn’t come much glitzier than those of Liberace, the piano playing artist christened Władziu Valentino, who dropped his first names and became a superstar. As the young writer who greets us at the start of Martin Sherman’s new play also makes clear, as far as he is concerned, Liberace’s refusal to acknowledge his homosexuality throughout his life was a betrayal of all those who were out and proud. His successful 1959 court victory over the Daily Mirror’s allusions to his sexuality is key to the writer’s contempt. Liberace’s death in 1987 from causes of AIDS with his gayness still unacknowledged fuels the writer’s ire even more.   As if accidentally summoning a genie, the writer’s angry ruminations about having to write about someone he hates prompts Liberace to swoop in from the heavens and grandstand his way into his affections. What follows in this production co directed by Pitlochry Festival Theatre artistic...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Five stars   The Club of the Unloved is already in full swing as the audience enter for this touring revival of Emma Rice’s twenty-first century reboot of the mediaeval love story that refuses to lie down. As Les Baxter’s lush lounge core sounds are swapped for Wagner on the vintage record player at the side of the stage, the mini mob of geeky ‘love spotters’ and the live junkyard band above them usher in a romp of all romps that turns to tragedy within a broken heartbeat.    In short, when John Leader’s French speaking knight has a dangerous liaison with Nandi Bhebe’s Irish princess Yseult after fetching her for Edward Rowe’s good King Mark following an altercation with her country's comedy gangster invaders, a heady brew of emotions burst forth. The ill fated pair cavort gymnastically throughout choreographer Etta Murfitt’s routines on a circular stage in Bill Mitchell’s original set design. Refreshed by Vicki Mortimer for this latest iteration...

Òran Mór, Glasgow  Three stars   When the Reverend John Home’s play, Douglas, first appeared in 1757, its romantic verse drama was a sensation. Arriving at the vanguard of the Scottish Enlightenment, Home’s play was hailed as the future by those hanging on to its commercial coat tails, while at the same time outraging those who saw any theatre at all as the Devil’s work.    Probably Douglas’s greatest gift to popular culture is the phrase called out by a fired-up audience member that gives Brian Logan’s new play its title. Several centuries on, history has largely forgotten Home’s opus, with the last professional Scottish production dating back to 1989, when Robert David MacDonald directed it at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre.    This is a useful marker for Logan’s back stage romp, which charts Douglas’s irresistible rise through the eyes of Home, his play’s champions who think they are about to hit the big time, and the naysayers who effectively had him chucke...

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 ...