Coffee-Table Notes

MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling Four stars In small town life, everybody knows your business. More importantly perhaps, they also know your name. So it goes in the rural 16 th century French community that occupies Ellie Stewart’s dark and elegant mystery as it investigates the existential human consequences of stepping into someone else’s shoes. The cuckoo in the nest here is Arnaud, Thoren Ferguson’s rugged stranger who fills an absence left by the disappearance of Bertrande’s husband when he wandered off into the hills seven years before. Never, Bertrande presumes, to be seen again. Until now, that is. Like Arnaud says, he’s returned a new man. Drawn from various takes on the real-life story of Martin Guerre, Stewart has constructed a dramatic smoke-screen of beguiling beauty and shadowy erotics. Philip Howard’s touring production for the Inverness-based Eden Court Theatre wraps this in a slow-burning musicality pulsed by brooding cello drones created live by Greg Sincl

Dundee Rep Four stars If there was any justice, what happens in play-writing class should stay in play-writing class in Ira Levin’s 1970s comedy thriller, revived here by Dundee Rep Ensemble in Johnny McKnight’s forensically dissected production. There’s no chance of that, alas, in veteran pulp thriller hack Sidney Bruhl and his young charge Clifford Anderson’s world. Sidney has lost his mojo following a series of flops, but when he reads a play called Deathtrap by wannabe genius Clifford, he smells a hit. With wife and apparent accomplice Myra in tow, Sidney concocts a half-jokey plot to kill the kid and pass off his play as his own. What follows as Levin’s yarn twists and turns its way towards a not entirely inevitable denouement is so darn knowing it practically winks at an audience who lap up this sort of thing. Like an extended episode of Inside No 9 as directed by Ryan Murphy, Levin’s post-modern high-jinks are plotted like a well-oiled if somewhat eccentric machine p

When Denise Johnson decided she wanted to record an album, she thought she might do a set of covers of songs by female singers from her home town of Manchester. It would have been a tribute to where Johnson came from, both in terms of geography and as a woman, Except – “I couldn’t find any,” says Johnson, as she prepares to headline Edinburgh-based music multiple artform mash-up, Neu! Reekie!’s February Fling tomorrow night. “The only one I came up with was Elkie Brooks, and she’s not even really Manchester.” Veteran blues diva turned MOR crooner Brooks was born in Salford, and raised in Prestwich. Both places may only be a stone’s throw from their big city neighbour, but these things count in the north. Johnson is from Hulme, the inner-city one-time brutalist rough-house turned bohemian playground. She also spent time in Whalley Range, the nearby suburb notable for a nineteenth century heritage that includes a strata of Victorian women living there being empowered to vote.  

Johnny McKnight wasn’t aware of Deathtrap when he was asked to direct it at Dundee Rep. Given the writer, director and co-founder of Random Accomplice Theatre Company’s pop cultural roots, this was a surprise to him as much as anyone else. “I’d never heard of it,” he says of American writer Ira Levin’s Tony-nominated play, which still holds the record as the longest running comedy-thriller on Broadway. Four years later it was adapted for a film starring Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve and directed by Sidney Lumet. “One of my favourite films is Charade, which is both a comedy and a thriller, and that’s what I liked about Deathtrap. There’s loads of twists and turns, there’s a touch of humour, and it’s loaded with really sharp dialogue. “It also felt really modern. I was surprised it was from the late 70s, because it looks more like a post-modern take on Dial M for Murder or something like that. It feels as well that somebody who knows that genre really well and gave it a w

“There’s a danger of being too respectful to the story,” says playwright Conor McPherson. “For something to live, it needs energy, or else it can end up being set in stone, and end up pretty soulless.” McPherson is talking about The Weir, the Dublin born writer’s Olivier award winning break-out play that first appeared at the Royal Court in 1997, before transferring to both the West End and Broadway. As with much of his work in the twenty-one years since the play’s debut, story-telling is at the heart of The Weir. Set in an isolated rural pub which gives the play its title, three local men attempt to impress a young woman who’s just moved into the area from the city by telling an increasingly fantastical set of supernatural-tinged tales. When the woman tells her story, she upstages the lot, and the bravado and banter that powered the men’s conversation takes a more redemptive tone.   As with the stories in the play, McPherson doesn’t mind a spot of embellishment to give it co

Robert Wilson’s appointment as the new chair of Creative Scotland was announced last week as Scotland’s hapless arts quango floundered once more in a crisis of its own making. The much-delayed announcement of the latest round of grants to Regularly Funded Organisations (RFOs) should have been a cause for celebration. After organisations had been warned of potential cuts to Creative Scotland’s overall funding, a Scottish Government uplift of £6.6 million should’ve meant that everything was hunky dory. As it turned out, Creative Scotland snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, cutting funds for several major organisations, including all disabled theatre companies, all children’s theatre companies and Transmission, the pioneering artist-led gallery that helped put Glasgow’s art scene on the map. This latest bout of accident-prone managerialism appeared to deflect from other Scottish arts crises, including the ongoing shambles following the closure of Inverleith House, the internationa

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars “The fashionable life is a scream,” beams Edinburgh New Town ingénue Lady Frances Touchwood at one point in director Tony Cownie’s tartan-tinged reimagining of Hannah Cowley’s eighteenth century rom-com romp. By this time, Helen Mackay’s previously prim Lady Frances has been led well and truly astray by Mrs Racket and Mrs Ogle, a pair of grand dames about town who show their new charge the livelier sights of auld and new Reekie. Meanwhile, dashing Doricourt is back in town swishing his way around like a peacock-coloured pop star on tour, with even his reluctant betrothed Letitia unable to resist his charms despite herself. As various schemes are hatched around these parallel plots, happy ever afters may be inevitable, but it’s the women who run rings around the hapless men-folk. Cowley’s original script may date from 1780, but even pushed forward a few years as it is here in Cownie’s well turned out production, it remains a pro