Coffee-Table Notes

Assembly Hall, Edinburgh Three stars Winners and losers are everywhere in Johnny McKnight and Anita Vettesse’s new play with songs for a co-production between Grid Iron and Stellar Quines theatre companies. It’s bingo night, and hopes are high for the regulars who flock to the local Mecca. Desperate thirty-something Daniella especially has her fingers crossed after a financial mess of her own making looks set to catch up with her. With her hatchet-faced mother Mary and her best pal Ruth in tow, it’s eyes down for an all or nothing game to end them all. As it stands, Jemima Levick’s loose-knit production tugs in so many directions it’s as if those creating it got bored with their own initial idea and decided to ramp things up to preposterous proportions in order to make things more interesting. One minute it’s a girls’ night out style feel-good romp; the next it’s a turbo-charged fantastical sit-com, barely based in reality and peppered with potty-mouthed one-liners, pink-st

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars One kiss is all it takes for everyone to understand each other in Catriona Lexy Campbell and Mairi Sine Campbell’s new play. Linguistically that is, as ancient and modern are brought to rollickingly intimate life by the Gaelic-based Theatre Gu Leor (Theatre Galore) company in the Tron’s Vic Bar en route to an extensive cross-Scotland tour. The set-up is the sort of ghastly tartan-draped corporate function whose perma-grinning hostess Lisa makes bogus claims of preserving culture while blatantly intent on flogging it off to the highest bidder. Think McWetherspoon by way of Trumpageddon. With the audience ushered into a cabaret table arrangement by Lisa’s step-daughter Eilidh and serenaded by Eddie’s oh-so-couthy accordion playing, the dirt from Harris is unearthed along with a bottle of David Beckham-branded whisky. This causes the corporate shindig to be disrupted on an epic scale by seventeenth century poet Mairi Ruadh. Which is when both th

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Ex-con Jackie says it with flowers when he’s reunited with his addict girlfriend Veronica at the start of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ bleakly funny 2011 play. That’s about as sweet as it gets, however, in Andy Arnold’s new production of a piece seen here for the first time in the UK outside London. When Jackie spies a stranger’s hat amongst the debris of Veronica’s apartment, any hopes of a loving reunion are turned upside down as he lets off steam, first to his seemingly squeaky-clean AA sponsor Ralph D and his wife Victoria, then to Cousin Julio, who gives him some healthy if funny-tasting food for thought. What follows over the next 100 minutes of this co-production between the Tron and the Cardiff-based Sherman Theatre is a series of potty-mouthed rapid-fire exchanges, with Jackie falling off the wagon en route to discovering some painful home-truths. This makes for a series of street-smart verbal riffs soaked in downbeat New York gallows humo

Imagine a ceilidh that could wake the dead. That’s exactly what Gaelic-language-based theatre company Theatre Gu Leor have done in Ceilidh, a new play by Catriona Lexy Campbell and Mairi Sine Chaimbeul, which the company take out on an extensive cross-country tour from this week as its biggest work to date. Despite the implications of the show’s premise, the dead are only stirred from their celestial slumber to reclaim a once spontaneous social gathering which has been hi-jacked by big business types. Such shameless profiteers are intent on shoving out the local villagers on Harris to make way for luxury bothies and an exclusive golf course to entertain the high-end tourist trade. Only flame-haired 17 th century poet Mairi Ruadh, it seems, can stop such cynical efforts to co-opt culture as a means of gentrification and social cleansing. “In the Gaelic landscape she’s pretty much an icon with legendary status,” says Ceilidh’s director Muireann Kelly of Ruadh Mairi Ruadh, or,

Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh Five stars Pull back the gold curtain and you’re in another world for what might be a never-ending screening of Spite Your Face, Rachel Maclean’s troublingly incisive thirty-seven-minute film-based fantasia, which comes home to Talbot Rice after first being seen in Venice last year. Drawn from The Adventures of Pinocchio, the Italian folk-tale charting the adventures of the little puppet-boy whose nose grows every time he tells a lie, Maclean’s dark reimagining is as shockingly un-Disney in its depiction of greed-induced brutality as the moment when Bambi’s mum got shot. Maclean focuses on the rise and fall of Pic, a shell-suited urchin who buys his way into a blinged-up wonderland of glam-tastic delights, only to discover his celebrity lifestyle is on credit, and has been built on the flakiest of falsehoods. All of Maclean’s pop-cultural tropes are intact, from its candy-coloured kids’ TV animated back-drops, to its ugly excursions into S

Last week’s unprecedented snowmaggedon may have caused Edinburgh to resemble a ghost town in what was pretty much a locked-down country, with shops and schools closing early, and public transport at a minimum. Anyone frequenting Meadowbank retail park, however, will be aware that at least one institution remained open for business. That was the local bingo hall, whose regular patrons can be found day and night taking a breather in-between games, usually shrouded in a fug of cigarette smoke. The image of such a gaggle of frozen gamers is a pointer as well to some of the thinking behind Bingo!, a new musical comedy which sees Grid Iron and Stellar Quines theatre companies team up to present what promises to be a riot of extremes penned by Johnny McKnight and Anita Vettesse, This is clear from early rehearsals in a church hall on the fringes of Edinburgh’s New Town, where director Jemima Levick and composer Alan Penman oversee the ensuing mayhem of what happens when a group of women

Jo Beddoe  -  Theatre and arts producer Born August 7 1944; died February 20 2018 Without Jo Beddoe, who has died aged 73 following a long battle with cancer, there are several now thriving artistic institutions that would probably be closed. Beddoe’s straight-talking, no-nonsense approach to getting things done and tenacious and visionary way of managing organisations which others might have ran a mile from has left its mark, both on the organisations she helped transform, and on everyone she worked with. This was the case whether navigating 7:84 Scotland through troubled waters, establishing the Centre for Contemporary Arts as a major force, or else bringing Liverpool’s Playhouse and the Everyman theatres back to life. In an expansive and nomadic career, Beddoe was a pioneer of female-led artistic management. Beyond high profile ventures on the West End and Broadway, she was steeped in a grassroots sensibility that those she worked with found inspirational. This was no doub