Coffee-Table Notes

Around the time Alan Wilkins decided he didn’t want to be an actor, he thought he’d get out of Glasgow and earn some money to fund the Teaching English As A Foreign Language course he planned to study. For the next three summers he worked in bars in small towns in North West Scotland that had once been thriving fishing communities. By the time Wilkins got there, however, other, less well-publicised industries had taken root. One night, after-hours in someone’s cottage, the idea was to stay up and drink whisky. One of the party, however, confessed to being a rum drinker, whereupon the host took it upon himself to drive fifteen miles to pick up an optic with his guest’s beverage of choice. Somewhere along the way on his round trip the host decided it would be an even better idea if other substances were also on the menu. This exposure to the black economy in Scotland’s depressed rural heartlands became the protracted inspiration for Offshore, Wilkins’ new play for the Birds Of Paradi

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh 3 stars One can only wonder what poet WH Auden, the original lyricist of Dale Wasserman’s 1965 musical, would’ve made of this Spanish Inquisition-set play within a play. As a writer himself, in having an incarcerated Cervantes attempting to save his skin (and his unpublished manuscript) by acting out Don Quixote’s hapless adventures in a world gone mad, Auden’s approach might have been somewhat darker than Joe Darion, who got the gig with composer Mitch Leigh if he’d not somewhat ironically been taken off-project. As it is, much of Martin Duncan’s boutique revival is an appealingly knockabout if throwaway romp with the air of an extended Two Ronnies sketch. Only in the second half does Quixote/Cervantes argue that solely through poetry and fantasy can life’s pains be forgotten. True as this may be, such notions of freedom of expression sound like a voguish fancy of the play’s 1960s origins. Indeed, beyond its call to creative arms for real-life impr

Theatre Workshop, Edinburgh 2 stars Politics and theatre, when mixed right, can play a vital part in national debate. Plays about politicians on the other hand, are often tedious and sexless affairs. Such is the material writers must work with, and, in the current climate, any attempts to satirise the joke-free shenanigans of Holyrood and Westminster are doomed to failure. This is the only sliver of sympathy one has for Green Party MSP Chris Ballance, whose monologue concerning a plucky new female member’s rise and fall is spectacular solely for its obviousness. This is a shame, because, while no Vaclav Havel, Ballance is more qualified than any of his colleagues to engage with cultural matters. Long before he moved into parliament, Ballance was an award-winning writer of considerable quirkiness. Here, alas, while some of those linguistic tics remain, they’re served up in a loosely-knitted mish-mash of insider wise-cracks that are as empty as a front-bencher’s rhetoric and even les

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh 2 stars One of character comedian Steve Coogan’s less celebrated moments was a TV series called Dr Terrible’s House of Horrible. Each episode was a pastiche of the sort of hammy horror films that kept the British film industry on life support in the early 1970s. The series failed because its subjects weren’t any good in the first place, and only appealed to middle-aged film geeks of Coogan’s generation who could spot the references. Much the same could be said of Charles Ludlam’s self-styled 1984 ‘penny dreadful’ – bizarrely once the most performed work on the American stage – which takes Rebecca as its starting point, then throws a pot pourri of vampires, werewolves, bleeding portraits and Egyptian Mummies into a cauldron that even allows for a leg-crossing Basic Instinct gag and Deliverance style duelling dulcimers. The conceit here is that the whole shebang is performed by two actors who cross-dress as assorted lords, ladies, simpleton servants an

The Bongo Club, Edinburgh 3 stars They’re serving apples as main course down in Eden, and Adam and Eve are about to have a belly full of each other. Under the roguish eye of a musical waiter, this Adam and Eve are hungry to find somewhere they’ve never been before beyond mere comfort food. Such is Genesis as depicted in writer Leeala and her Elements World Theatre company’s laterally minded contribution to the capital’s Middle East Festival Of Spirituality And Peace. Moving downstairs from The Bongo Club’s actual café place to its main nightclub space, the audience are led through a rough and not always ready experience which, subtitled A Scene From The Café Of No Tomorrows, suggests an excerpt from a far larger work. What Leeala (aka Lee Gershuny), and director Corinne Harris are actually up to beyond the hand-me-down spirituality is create a piece of generic Zen philosophy concerned with living in the moment and with each other in a rich but always tempting world. With actors R

Mansfield Traquair, Edinburgh 3 stars When The Go! Team’s hyperactive chanteuse and cheerleader-in-chief Ninja uses a red feather boa as a skipping rope at the end of the band’s set, it’s a perfect Go! Team moment. The Brighton based troupe’s debut album, Thunder, Lightning, Strike was a hyperactive cut n’ paste sugar-rush of playground anthems acquired from Charlie Brown cartoons and low attention-span party tunes thrown into its kitchen-sink mix. In the flesh, the band that began life in guitarist Ian Parton’s bedroom, where Thunder, Lightning, Strike, was recorded, look like they’ve stepped straight out of an estuary-styled version of Sesame Street. Multi-cultural, multi-instrumentalist and multi-tasking, the 6-piece are a retro sound-clash riot of 70s grooves and kindergarten show tunes. It’s a fine climax to this Smirnoff sponsored evening of Electric Cabaret, a series of shows aiming to mix and match a live light entertainment experience with weekend clubbing. With the venu

When Cathy Ann MacPhee takes the stage next week in TAG’s production of There’s No V In Gaelic, it will be the first time she’s acted on a stage in Scotland’s central belt for 18 years. Then, with her roots as an internationally renowned Gaelic singer, and following stints acting with the Gaelic company Tosg and the late John McGrath’s original 7:84, it was with the late Jimmy Logan, in a production of Whiskey Galore at Glasgow’s Mitchell Theatre. Now, it will be in this new work written by Gaelic writer Seonag Monk. For Monk, also a veteran of Tosg, There’s No V In Gaelic will be her first stage play to appear for more than a decade. Given the respective pedigrees of both McPhee and Monk, for such talents to effectively disappear from the cultural map seems a curious state of affairs. Then again, this is Gaelic theatre we’re talking about here, which, in terms of a written archive, appears to be one of the most undocumented pieces of cultural heritage around. Of course, given the fa