Coffee-Table Notes

Sylvester McCoy is perched beside the Tron Theatre bar at the end of the day's rehearsals for J.C. Marshall's new play, Plume, in which he plays a man grieving for his son killed in a terrorist attack twenty years before. As McCoy sips on a gin, fellow cast member Finn Den Hertog is expounding on something which appears small from the outside, but once inside is infinitely more expansive. “Now, where have I heard that before?” deadpans McCoy before picking up his gin and his walking stick en route to the theatre's boardroom, which for some reason has had it's full-length table removed. The effect, while no TARDIS, makes its space too seem far larger than it actually is. McCoy's wry little in-joke may refer to how a certain generation of science-fiction geeks know him best for his 1980s stint as Dr Who, but as his role in Plume proves, there's been a working life since playing the iconic Timelord, and there was certainly one before it. While he&

Dundee Rep 3 stars In the corner of Dundee Rep’s upstairs bar, a nail emporium has opened up shop to buff up the digits of any passing ladies in need of sharpening their claws. Such an indulgence is the perfect pre-cursor to Robert Harling’s so feel-good it hurts 1980s play set in blonde bombshell Truvee Jones’ shocking pink beauty parlour in America’s Deep South. Not that Harling’s best-known work following its adaptation into a hit big-screen tear-jerker starring Julia Roberts and Dolly Parton comes out fighting in any way in Jemima Levick’s faithful, funny and at moments quietly moving production. Quite the opposite, in fact, in what at one time might have been referred to as ‘a woman’s play’. from Ouiser’s back-woods coarseness to Clairee’s stateswoman-like demeanour and all points in-between, the pan-generational sorority that flit around Truvee’s place find comfort from each other beyond the hair-do’s and healing treatments they’re ostensibly there for. Central

The Arches, Glasgow 3 stars Agent 160 don’t do things by halves. Or at least that’s the impression from this inaugural project from this newly constituted UK-wide women’s writer led company. Over two nights, twelve new playlets by the same number of writers were presented on the final dates of a three-leg mini-tour. If the quality and verve of the scripts on the first night came even close to Part Two, then artistic director Lisa Parry and dramaturg Louise Stephens Alexander have tapped into something special. In the first half, Branwen Davies’ Genki? is a Welsh bi-lingual study of one woman finding herself abroad, The Red Shoes is Sarah Grochala’s estuarised fantasia concerning a teenage mum finding consumer comfort of a fantastical kind, and A Modest Proposal by Lindsay Rodden looks to Animal Farm in a warzone. The second half opens with Parry’s own piece, Nancy, in which a middle England grand dame squares up to the recession as well as the rabbits in what’s left of

1 Two nights ago, Facebook was alive with responses to this year’s Brit Awards, that great barometer of mass musical appeal, cultural relativism, and - above all - units shifted - which has turned that very marketable concept of British pop into an establishment-based respectable spectacle. The winners – Coldplay, Adele and co – came as no surprise.  They’re what most people – the man and woman on the street, presumably – like to hear. But are they any good? There’s nothing wrong with being popular, after all. Shakespeare, Picasso and The Bible have all taken complex works of art chock-full of difficult ideas into the mainstream, and have retained an integrity beyond the heritage industry that hi-jacked them. But this is Coldplay and Adele we’re talking about, remember. 2 One of the most telling Facebook observations of the 2012 Brit Awards came via a posting of some film footage taken at the 1992 Awards. It was ostensibly a performance

His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen As sacred cows of Scottish pop culture go, Robin Hardie’s 1970s post counter-culture big-screen pagan romp The Wicker Man has become an icon of weird Caledonia. Greg Hemphill and Donald McLeary’s approach to the film’s legacy is to take screenwriter Anthony Shaffer’s original yarn about a virgin copper who uncovers a ritualistic conspiracy while investigating a young girl’s disappearance on a remote island, and turn it into a very camp piece of music hall absurdism. The conceit in Vicky Featherstone’s National Theatre of Scotland production is to focus on a rubbish fictional am-dram group’s own ludicrous attempt to put The Wicker Man onstage, with all the cack-handed egomania one might expect from such a ruse. The result, as Sean Biggerstaff’s too cool for school TV actor Rory is hired to give the show some kudos, is a curious mish-mash of drug-induced Noises Off style backstage shenanigans and Singalonga Wicker Man. As a half-hour extended

Cal MacAninch has played both upstairs and downstairs in the last year. On the one hand, the former star of Holby Blue and Wild at Heart has just been seen playing a troubled footman in the second series of Sunday night posh frock sensation, Downton Abbey. On the other, the Glasgow-born actor is currently in rehearsals at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre, where he's playing an Oxford educated publisher in Betrayal, Harold Pinter's1978 play about a love triangle amongst three close friends who flit around literary society. If this sounds like some common or garden bourgeois adultery yarn, think again. Because Pinter adds spice to a story that looked to his own extra-marital affair with writer and broadcaster Joan Bakewell for inspiration by having the action move backwards in time. This dramatic device lets the audience in on a complex web of secrets and lies told in Pinter's elliptical pared-back style. “It's a lot harder than I thought it'd be,” MacAn

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars Everyone's on the make in John Steinbeck's recession era novella that doubles up as a play, revived here in his latest look at American classics by director John Dove. Migrant workers George and Lennie may only want to earn an honest buck when they land on a Californian ranch to work the land, but the crop of malcontents they fall in with occupy what is essentially a microcosm of assorted American dreams that have been warped by capitalism. The solidarity and brotherhood that George and Lennie represent is considered suspicious by the rest of the workers, a menagerie of lost souls trying to protect the little they have. Candy is marking time until he's put out to grass, racism is legitimised, while Curley's wife is a wannabe starlet who, in Melody Grove's portrayal, sashays her way to her doom. Such, then, is the state of play during a recession. All of this beautifully realised on Colin Richmond's wood-lined shack of a s