Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars The Tron’s socially-minded Mayfesto season may have been scaled down for this year’s incarnation, but it has continued to throw out an array of theatrical fire-crackers regardless. Many of these have been brand new Irish works by writers and companies little-known or seen in Scotland. So it goes with Gavin Kostick’s blistering little solo piece about an on-the-ropes young boxer who finally squares up to his entire family to prove he can go the distance. Michael Sheehan plays Dan Coyle, a one-time middleweight contender who blew it aged twenty-two. After six years of flabby living, however, he’s match-fit once more, whatever his estranged old man might think. Over the course of a week-long work-out before he steps back into the ring, we’re let into Dan’s world, a high-octane mix of back-street macho pride, hand-me-down defiance and a rediscovering of his mojo via a steadyish relationship and the kid who came with it. If Dan has been shadow

When Molly Taylor performed Love Letters To The Public Transport System just over a year ago as part of the National Theatre of Scotland's Reveal season, it was advertised as a work in progress. While such a safety net covered everybody's back in case things went wrong, what audiences got instead was a lovingly crafted semi-autobiographical monologue performed simply and beautifully by Taylor in one of the most fully-rounded productions of the entire Reveal season. Taylor's real life quest to track down the drivers of buses and trains who led the Liverpool-born performer to significant moments, and indeed significant others, returns for a short run of schools and public shows prior to a full Edinburgh Festival Fringe run as part of this year's Made in Scotland programme. Any fears that such a bespoke success story has been transformed into an all-singing, all-dancing spectacular are mercifully unfounded. “It feels like Love Letters is about to take off on

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars The spectre of the 1998 Omagh bombing casts a long shadow over the Irish Troubles last bloody gasp, even as it ripped a community asunder forever. The collective sense of shell-shocked grief that followed is unlikely to be captured better than in Ross Duggan’s perfectly pitched elegy told through the words of three survivors of this all too pointless atrocity. First seen on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2011, Duggan’s trio of criss-crossing monologues relate the events of what became a weekend off to remember for all the wrong reasons. First there is Lizzy, the little girl for whom a trip to the shops will never be the same again. Next comes Mari, whose husband Brian went out for a thirtieth wedding anniversary present and ended up saving Lizzy’s life at the expense of his own. Finally, there is Conor, the young lad caught up in the romance of a cause he didn’t really understand, and ended up a bomber. With actors Claire Hughes, Eimea

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh 5 stars Thank God for writers like Howard Brenton. Because, as English Touring Theatre’s revival of Brenton’s mighty history play for Shakespeare’s Globe testifies to, there are few artists who could combine political intrigue, religion, tragedy and high comedy to make a twenty-first century epic to die for. The audacious sweep of John Dove’s production helps, from the moment the period-frocked actors wander into the auditorium to engage with an audience perhaps expecting a heritage industry view of Henry VIII’s second and seemingly most heroic, not to say epoch-changing, spouse. From Anne’s double-bluffing opening address, however, things couldn’t be more different, as the action dovetails between timelines framed around James I’s private investigations into Anne’s rise and fall en route to authorising a new bible. As Anne navigates her way through the uneasy coalition between church and state, she not only wraps David Sturzaker’s Henry aro

History's a funny thing for Howard Brenton. As The Globe's touring revival of of Anne Boleyn, the veteran playwright's most recent original work arrives in Edinburgh this week, Brenton's depiction of Henry VIII's second and most misunderstood wife is a deeply serious study of a woman whose apparent flirtation with then outlawed Protestantism suggested a steely revolutionary zeal. By juxtaposing Anne's story with that of a wilfully outrageous James V1, himself in the throes of political intrigue even as he investigates Anne's legacy, the portrait that emerges of this most turbulent period of English and Scottish history is more audacious than most. “ I'd wanted to write something about the Tudors for years,” says Brenton on a break from work on his next play, “but I couldn't find a way in. I had a mad idea to do something called Tudor Rose, and have one actress play all the monarchs, but I couldn't make it work. Then the Globe aske

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars When a microphone is passed out to the audience in the second half of Egyptian playwright and director Laila Soloman’s all too personal set of testimonies from the frontline of her homeland’s revolution, the effect is both moving and powerful. As each reads from a sheet of paper demanding justice for named ‘martyrs of the revolution’ killed by one form of state oppression or another, the communal litany that gradually forms is a very quiet form of solidarity that challenges the oppressors even as it bears witness. The first half that precedes it finds three Egyptian actors – one man, two women - sitting on chairs recounting their own knitted together experiences without fuss or anger in their native language as English subtitles flash up on a screen behind them. An everyday tale of Molotov cocktails, incarceration, military brutality and bombs made of tea, there is little need for dramatic embellishment in Soliman’s compendium of first-ha

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars There’s something of the Wild West in Martin Travers’ brutally intense play that is the flagship production of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Reveal 2012 season of new work. It’s not just the long leather coats and customised bowler hats that give Amanda Gaughan’s production the sort of rough-shod stylistic trappings that Sam Pekinpah would be proud of. As the play’s quartet of transients seek sanctuary in the gloom beneath a crossing they’re seemingly destined not to make, it’s the sense of a frontier lost to things not of their own making that gives it such a widescreen feel. All the more remarkable, then, that Travers has set his brooding tale of bargains made and secrets spilled in rural Lanarkshire in what he calls ‘another Scotland’. It’s a place where the brave new world that was promised presumably never happened, and where Ryan Fletcher’s ruthless Robert John and John Kielty’s more humane Andrew live off scraps in-between