Coffee-Table Notes

“What's gallus?” Catherine Johnson asks, unprompted. The writer behind ABBA-based hit musical Mamma Mia! is contemplating how one of her characters for her earlier play, Shang-A-Lang, has just been described to her by the team behind Rapture Theatre's touring revival, and isn't quite sure how it translates into her own west country patois. When it's explained to Johnson that somebody who is gallus is someone with attitude, swagger and cheek in abundance, it seems to hit the spot. “That's Lauren,” Johnson says of one of three middle-aged women in the play who go on a bender at a 1970s revival weekend at Butlin's holiday camp, where a Bay City Rollers tribute act are headlining. Over the course of the weekend, Lauren and her pals, Jackie and Pauline, have assorted epiphanies as they encounter a couple of equally ageing rockers. “I'd been thinking about writing a play set in a holiday camp for some time,” Johnson explains about the roots of Sh

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars The cricket chirrups and increasingly loud coyote howls that punctuate this all too rare revival of Sam Shepard's 1980 trawl through the dark heart of America may sound real in Phillip Breen's production. In the end, however, as Max Breen's cinema-scope design makes clear, we all know it's as make-believe as a movie. The quest for authenticity is what drives Eugene O'Hare's bookish Austin, who, on the verge of a life-changing deal, has holed himself up in his mother's place, tapping out an old-time love story in suburban bliss. Austin's world is turned upside down when his deranged petty thief brother Lee turns up out of the blue from his desert hidey-hole. Where Austin peddles implausible dreams on the page, Lee's manic, booze-soaked stories of a wilder world beyond convinces Steven Elliot's hustler producer Saul to take a chance on his pop-eyed take on blockbuster sensationalism over art. As th

Perth Theatre Four stars When well-heeled novelist Charles and his second wife Ruth tell their whirlwind of a maid Edith to slow down at the opening of Noel Coward's psychic-based comedy, they could be having a word with Coward himself. Because, rather than the normal cut-glass gallop through the French windows which the play is driven by, Johnny McKnight's production slows things down to a stately amble that lends things a more serious intent. As Charles attempts to cop a few moves for a story by inviting local psychic Madame Arcati to conduct a séance, he gets more than he bargains for when his dead first wife Elvira appears. While only visible to him, Elvira nevertheless wreaks havoc on Charles and Ruth's seeming domestic bliss, with Charles clearly relishing two women fighting over him from beyond the grave. While relocating things from Kent to Perth doesn't add much to a play that simply can't avoid its poshness, there are nevertheless some quietl

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Three stars When Tony Roper wrote his 1950s-set comedy more than a quarter of a century ago, it was his experience as an actor he brought to it rather than a rarefied literary sensibility. Yet his yarn about four women putting their dirty washing out to dry in a public steam room on Hogmanay is as plotless as Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot, which was famously described as a play where 'nothing happens twice.' Like Godot, however, there is a lot more going on here, and not just via both plays' love affair with music hall. As with Beckett's existential double act of Vladimir and Estragon, Roper's women are terminally optimistic co-dependents in search of a future. Where Beckett's universe is vague and zen-like, Roper's is rooted in a sense of fast-fading community where a sense of sisterhood is slowly trickling down the class scale. As Ken Alexander's revival makes clear, Roper's play is essentially a set o

This  is the full transcript of an interview with Maxine Peake and Adrian Anthony Flanagan of ECCENTRONIC RESEARCH COUNCIL, which was conducted to coincide with the ERC performance of  1612 Underture, an  analog synth/spoken word suite inspired by the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612, at the National Gallery of Scotland on October 31st 2013 as part of the Halloween: By Night Event. Neil Cooper: First of all, could you tell me how you first got involved in 1612 Underture? Maxine Peake : It was all the fault of a well known networking site. I'd just been to see Chrome Hoof at Islington Mill in Salford and had typed a little paragraph of praise when I had a message saying if you like them you'll like my band. it was a Mr Adrian Anthony Flanagan. We had a brief conversation about our respective music tastes, and then he enquired if I would appear in his video, which involved donning a rabbit suit and charging around Kersal Moor in Salford. After four months of intensive filming i

Maxine Peake had always been aware of the Pendle witch trials when she was growing up in Bolton. The actress and star of television dramas such as Silk and Shameless never expected, however, to be spending Halloween performing a politically charged spoken-word reclamation of the seventeenth century trials of nine women and one man from the north of England who were executed for apparently murdering ten people using unspecified powers of witchcraft. Yet that's exactly what Peake will be doing tonight at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. As part of the gallery's latest after-hours event, Halloween: By Night, Peake fronts experimental electronic pop collective, The Eccentronic Research Council to perform Pendle-based spoken-word suite, 1612 Underture. “ The Pendle witches had always been part of the folklore when I was growing up,” Peake says. “No one had ever explained to me their story properly, so I just deducted there was a hill not too far away where witche

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars At first glance, the well-choreographed burst of jumping, jiving life from the young cast of this new stage version of E.R. Braithwaite's autobiographical novel about his experiences as a black teacher in a run-down east end London school looks like a piece of all-singing, all-dancing youth theatre. For all their brash bravura, there's something initially one-dimensional about the larger than life cockney urchins that doesn't always ring true in Mark Babych's production of Ayub Khan Din's new adaptation of Braithwaite's book for this Touring Consortium and Royal and Derngate Northampton co-production. If this rubs off on the grown-ups in the play, the over-riding lightness gradually matures into something with depth as well as warmth. Ansu Kabia plays Ricky, an ambitious and educated Guyanese ex-pat who takes up teaching as a last resort in a post Second World War London riddled with prejudice. The school he en