Coffee-Table Notes

Ellie Stewart was in Toulouse when she first saw The Return of Martin Guerre, Daniel Vigne’s 1982 feature film set in 16 th century mediaeval France. Adapted from Janet Lewis’ novel, The Wife of Martin Guerre, and with roots in a real life incident, Vigne’s film starred Gerard Depardieu as a stranger who walks into a village where he is presented as the long lost husband of a woman whose spouse disappeared seven years previously. It was the 1980s when Stewart saw the film, and she was on a university Erasmus exchange prior to becoming a French teacher. It was more than twenty years before she returned to the Pyrenees from her Bathgate home, and things seemed as alien to her as much as they were familiar. “I was being bombarded with all these sensory memories,” says Stewart today, on the eve of her own version of the Martin Guerre story, The Return, opening a fifteen date tour of Scotland at the Inverness-based Eden Court Theatre. “From a personal point of view, I was feeling

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars As teenage baby-sitters Rita and Sue are presumed to be initiated into the ways of the world in twenty-something sleaze-bag Bob’s car, the opening of Andrea Dunbar’s still brutally funny fly on the wall study of life on the margins of Thatcher’s Britain looks like a Viz comic cartoon come to life. Played by Taj Atwal and Gemma Dobson with a fearless vivacity in Kate Wasserberg’s revival for Out of Joint, these already hard-bitten kid-ults know a lot more than they let on. Three and a half decades since Dunbar’s play first shook up the London stage, this sense of street-smart sass is what drives it, with its reflections of more recent sightings of everyday sexual grooming now looking obvious where they once hid in plain sight. Set in front of a mural-sized photograph of Bradford by night, just a few chairs and the entrance to a tenement block are onstage to house Rita and Sue’s already spartan lives. The soap opera that unfolds is far gri

When Adelle Stripe and Kate Wasserberg talk about Andrea Dunbar, they do so in the first person, as if they were mates. This is the case even though neither of them ever met the writer of Rita, Sue and Bob Too, Dunbar’s celebrated tragi-comic frontline snapshot of survival strategies in 1980s Thatcher’s Britain. Such empathy speaks volumes about the lingering power of Dunbar’s writing before she tragically died in 1990 aged just 29. Stripe’s forensic fan-girl turned academic dedication to Dunbar resulted in Black Teeth and A Brilliant Smile, a brilliant fictionalised account of Dunbar’s short but turbulent life on the broken-down Bradford estate where she lived and died. Wasserberg, meanwhile, has directed the current revival of Rita, Sue and Bob Too which arrives in Glasgow tonight as part of a tour co-produced by Out of Joint theatre company with the Royal Court Theatre in London and Bolton Octagon. Both Stripe and Wasserberg took part in a recent event at the Royal Court Th

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When David Leddy visited Barcelona to research his new play, The Last Bordello, which opens in Glasgow next week, he went in search of a brothel. In a city which has an Erotic Museum that caters to hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, Leddy was far from the first tourist to embark on such a quest in the city’s Barrio Chino red light district, and he certainly won’t be the last. Leddy, however, was looking for a very particular establishment, one which had been made famous on several counts, and which formed part of the inspiration for Jean Genet’s 1947 novel, Querelle de Brest. Genet’s existential yarn about sailors, prostitutes and drug addicts formed the basis for what turned out to be the final film directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the posthumously released Querelle. On Leddy’s arrival, the establishment in question, Madame Petite’s, alas, was no more. Bull-dozed away, the once thriving house of ill-repute had been bull-dozed away, reduced to a pile of rubble at t

Call it synchronicity, but it was a series of criss-crossing connections which have ended up causing an epic four-hour live reading of Alistair Fruish’s already expansive novel, The Sentence, to be performed in Glasgow. This includes inspiration drawn from Welcome to the Dark Ages, the twenty-third anniversary reunion of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty’s art provocateur double-act The K Foundation in their Justified Ancients of Mu guise. Fruish’s novel is enough by itself to point towards its experimental countercultural leanings. Plot-wise, The Sentence is a prison-set fantasia in which an inmate is given a drug that slows down time. It is in the story’s telling where the double-barrelled word-play of its author’s intentions become wilder and more mind-expanding. A 46,000-word opus with no punctuation and featuring words of one syllable only, The Sentence was tailor made to be read out loud, and the Glasgow date is the final show of a short tour of some of the UK’s lesser-spotted a

Perth Theatre Five stars Ancient voices seem to rumble through the fields at the opening of Perth Theatre’s revival of David Harrower’s astonishing play. First seen in 1995, on the face of it, it is a dark tale of a peasant woman’s awakening – to language, to her own sexuality and to the fire of life she slowly learns to articulate. While almost taking a leap into gothic thriller territory, in Lu Kemp’s starkly brooding and quasi ritualistic looking production, the play becomes a thing of transcendent beauty. Set in an un-named ancient landscape among the monumental greyness of much reviled miller Gilbert Horn’s work-place, into this world steps Jessica Hardwick’s Young Woman. Wide-eyed and still barely literate on the back of her marriage to ploughman Pony William, she is possessed with a ferocious but still untapped intelligence and a primal hunger for knowledge. Out of this pours a raw mix of brutal sensuality that reeks of the animalistic harshness of a daily grind b