Coffee-Table Notes

When Dermot Bolger was first approached to write a stage adaptation of  Ulysses, James Joyce's epic free-form novel set on the streets of Dublin, the playwright and novelist's immediate reaction was one of “sheer palpable terror,” as he remembers it some eighteen years later. “The novel is 265,000 words long, so to adapt something like that for the stage is a huge thing to do. But I remember that I was initially terrified of writing plays and poems at all, so I try and do the things I'm terrified of.” Bolger has had to wait until Andy Arnold's forthcoming production at the Tron to see a full staging of his terror-induced take on Joyce's modernist classic, which charts a life in the day of Leopold Bloom via an experimental stream of consciousness technique that both scandalised and revolutionised contemporary literature. Bolger's original commission from the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, where Joyce's original manuscript is stored, came at a

HMV Picture House, Edinburgh 4 stars The two cuddly toys perched side by side on a stool at the front of the stage don't really fit in with the mirror ball and after-hours pink lighting that sets the mood with the sort of contradictions which has defined Marc Almond's career, from the kitchen-sink sleaze of Soft Cell to torch singing drama queen and beyond. Last year he performed at the Traverse Theatre in Ten Plagues, a darkly dissonant song cycle by playwright Mark Ravenhill and composer Conor Mitchell. For this current Pop Troubadour, Hits and More Tour, Almond has lightened up considerably to revisit a back catalogue that stretches out over more than thirty years. He opens with the call to arms of The Stars We Are, a sweepingly rich scene-setter that already sounds triumphant. Sporting a shimmery black shirt that billows as he strikes poses, Almond is backed by a piano-led band augmented by accordionist and larger than life support act Baby Dee, last seen i

Perth Theatre 3 stars The Trivial Pursuits being played during the girls night say it all about Neil Simon’s mid 1980s female-led reboot of his 1965 New York flat-sharing comedy. Because, rather than the laddishly perennial poker school of the original, it’s that more voguishly faddish game which makes it look more of a period piece than it should do. That’s not necessarily to the detriment of Rachel O’Riordan’s bright and at times extremely funny new production. Just don’t mistake the primary colours and zingy period soundtrack, led by Cyndi Laupa’s gloriously inevitable Girls Just Want To Have Fun, as some cheap date hen-night extravaganza is all. Simon, and indeed O’Riordan, are smarter than that. Here, then, Olive is the slobby singleton holding court to a diverse mix of gal pals on the run from various states of marital harmony. When neurotic drama queen Florence turns up having been unceremoniously dumped after fourteen years, the unholy alliance the pair forge wh

Platform, Easterhouse 4 stars A sense of balance is what’s yearned after by the four women in Linda Mclean’s remarkable new work for Magnetic North. If such a yearning is evident in the cascade of chairs suspended in infinite mid-air above what could be dance-floor, chess-board or op-art installation in Claire Halleran’s design, it pours through the torrent of words that present four very different but umbilically connected portraits of a woman’s world at different points in the twentieth century. All in different ways are struggling, be it for simple pleasure, escape from their lot or else out and out transcendence. As each tries to better themselves, through the liberty of earning their own living, the promise of domestic bliss or an education and the exotic allure of other cultures, their ambitions are thwarted, sometimes brutally. Rather than fake an attempt at Sunday serial naturalism the above might suggest, McLean’s writing itself steps beyond its immediate mili

That there is no main-stage swan-song directed by National Theatre of  Scotland artistic director Vicky Featherstone in her final season before departing to run the Royal Court speaks volumes about her tenure over the last six years. Because it isn't any single production which has defined Featherstone's role. Rather, it is an all-embracing vision which has enabled artists to be bold and to think big while Featherstone has taken on a more diplomatic role protective of her charges. Indeed, it could be argued that Featherstone's own creative work has been neglected because of this. Of the season itself, if there is an element of baton-passing, with associate director Graham McLaren being particularly prolific, there is also a sense that theatre in Scotland has become increasingly exploratory. If the NTS has the resources to raise the bar, then the talent is already there to take advantage of it. It is an attitude the ongoing national embarrassment that is Creat

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars If Clare Balding wasn't already considered a national treasure, her ubiquity anchoring this year's London Paralympics has confirmed it. This may be why her autobiography, the tellingly named My Animals and Other Family, has been number one best-seller for the last two weeks. For a woman whose entire life has been spent in a horse-racing world where competition and the thrill of the chase means everything, one suspects these sorts of things matter to Balding. By the time she ambles onstage for this sold out talk sporting sloppy sweat shirt and jeans, Balding has already done a signing in St Boswell's, with one in Milngavie to go as part of a suitably marathon tour. Over an hour, Balding relates in impeccably jolly hockey-sticks tones a life which sounds not unlike one great big Girl's Own adventure, from posing for pictures astride legendary race-horse Mill Reef aged eighteen months, to being suspended from the same board

Sex and God are quite understandably all over Linda McLean's new play  for Nick Bone's Magnetic North company, which opens this weekend in Easterhouse prior to a short tour as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival. Despite such strong transcendent themes pulsing the worlds of the four twentieth century women from different time-zones who occupy McLean's play, she had never considered it for a title. Only when McLean's son asked her what the new work was about did it become obvious. “I said it was about sex and God, but didn't have a title,” McLean explains, “and he said 'That's it!'” McLean's work is full of little eureka moments like this, in which characters in seemingly domestic situations are enlightened somehow. While you could say this about most drama, over the last decade or so McLean has quietly become one of the most experimental playwrights in the country. Her subversion of dramatic form has been subtle, h