Coffee-Table Notes

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh  Four stars   As any armchair radical knows, if you can’t dance to the everyday insurrection you’re at the vanguard of, it’s not a real revolution at all. This grade A manifesto is taken to the max in Kate Prince’s smash hit musical based around the figure of Sylvia Pankhurst, the real life suffragette who campaigned in the UK during the early years of the twentieth century for votes for women. As the daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, who might be regarded as one of the mothers of the women’s movement, Sylvia is a chip off the old block. Later, alas, she finds herself at odds with her family for not taking a by any means necessary approach to her activism, but gets the vote anyway.    If all that sounds rather dry, think again. With music by Josh Cohen and DJ Walde to go with Prince’s lyrics and a book penned with Priya Parmar, this is history told in the form of a non-stop mash up of hip hop, soul, funk and gos...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   If a working class hero is something to be, then why does so much theatre still sideline the so-called lower orders as servants, sidekicks or light relief doing the dirty work or else playing the donkey for their masters and mistresses ad nauseam? While lead stage roles are left to the posh boys and girls, the common people remain cast as criminals and crooks.   Or maybe that was just William Shakespeare, who gets caught bang to rights in Martin O’Connor’s ingenious peek behind the curtain in A Play, a Pie and a Pint's latest edition of lunchtime theatre. Here we find A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Rude Mechanical and wannabe thespian Nick Bottom, who seems condemned to play the fool forever.    Debbie Hannan’s production begins with Bottom the jobbing actor auditioning for the play within a play that features in Shakespeare’s play when Bottom gets to live the high life for a while. By turns nervous, apologetic and desperate to impres...

The Studio, Edinburgh Four stars   Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but when an out of work actor is approached by a mysterious stranger to role play some dark past in Tim Foley’s play, the experience awakens subterranean forces that rise from the grave in a terrifying display of nocturnal psychic terrorism.    No, this ingenious bite size production by the Wigan based ThickSkin company isn’t a reboot of The Woman in Black or any of the other hammy horrors doing the rounds over the last few years. Rather, Neil Bettles’ production of Foley’s late night yarn is an altogether more up to date take on supernaturally inclined pulp fiction.   Our host Joe wears baggy jeans and works in a bar to make ends meet. His posh boy ex represents everything Joe hates in the cliquey theatre scene, so when even posher local David hires Joe to pretend to be a ghost to scare David’s nieces holed up in his country pile, it looks like a pretty lucrative gig. Once Joe gets on site, ...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars    A school reunion opens the National Theatre of Scotland’s suitably monumental looking twenty-first century reboot of Muriel Spark’s classic novel. Beside a semi circular coliseum style staircase that dominates the stage, a grown up Sandy Stranger and her less likely peers from the girl gang once known as the Brodie Set rewind on their between the wars adolescence that shaped them. This, as we know, was down largely to the mercurial figure of Jean Brodie, the self mythologizing libertine whose every inspirational utterance in David Harrower’s simmering new adaptation sounds like a victory speech.   Gayle Rankin’s chic and sensual Brodie first appears striding down the steps of Chloe Lamford’s epic set looking part Hollywood diva, part demagogue. Her students follow, initially looking more St. Trinian’s than Edinburgh’s Marcia Blaine School for Girls. This is a fleeting pre-cursor in Vicky Featherstone’s production for when they...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow  Four stars    The world has been turned upside down a million times over since Ayub Khan Din’s tragicomic portrait of multi racial back street Britain caught some kind of zeitgeist three decades ago. The play was successful enough to be turned into a hit film three years later. Both showed off what at the time was a milieu rarely seen on stage. Set in 1971 Salford, Khan Din’s study of chip shop owning Pakistani Muslim, George, his English Catholic wife Ella, and their noisy brood of British born mixed race children tapped into a volatile melting pot of cross cultural, pan generational family life.     Half a century on from the play’s post 1960s setting, this new production comes with several lifetimes of cultural baggage in tow. Kash Arshad’s revival - a co-production between  the Citizens, Bolton Octagon and Wiltshire Creative in association with Derby Theatre - stays true to the play’s roots in a bright, funny an...

The decision by Pitlochry Festival Theatre and its assorted producing partners not to allow critics to review brand new musical, Ceilidh, during its Pitlochry run is a strange and baffling affair. As already highlighted by Brian Ferguson in the Herald, the new show by Scott Gilmour and Claire McKenzie, aka Noisemaker, about Scotland’s ceilidh culture was originally announced to open in September on PFT’s main stage. A press night was set for October 1st. This was later moved without notice to Pitlochry Town Hall for an October run, with press invited on October 10th. London dates and a tour of Scotland’s cities follow.    For critics with an already packed schedule of theatre openings, the goalposts being shifted in such a way may have been irritating, but was manageable. Then came last week’s declaration that no reviews of Ceilidh would be allowed during its Pitlochry run. This was tempered by the offer to of an all expenses trip to London to review Ceilidh at Shoreditch Town...

Eva Marie Saint – Actress Born July 4, 1924; died October 6, 2026     Eva Marie Saint, who has died aged 102, was an actress who won an Oscar for her very first film role in On the Waterfront (1954). As Edie Doyle, the quietly determined sister of a murdered New York dockworker, Saint provided understated but steely ballast to the machismo of Marlon Brando’s punch drunk Terry Malloy in director Elia Kazan’s blue-collar epic. Brando may have ripped up the screen as Terry took on the mob-run union he’d become a patsy for, but it was Saint’s portrayal of Edie that gave the film its moral centre, as she became a translucent force for good in a brutalised world.   It was a startling big screen debut that gave a wider audience for Saint, who had already made her mark on stage and television, where she was spotted by Kazan in Horton Foote’s play, The Trip to Bountiful. Kazan cast Saint in favour of Elizabeth Montgomery. As well deserved as her Best Supporting Actress Oscar undou...