Coffee-Table Notes

It’s hard to be a parent these days. Just ask Frances Poet, whose new play, Gut, opens at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh this weekend in a production directed by Poet’s fellow writer Zinnie Harris. Gut is a sadly familiar sounding story about what happens when a couple take their three-year-old son to a supermarket café, and what may or may not have happened after an incident that shatters their faith in those closest to them. “I wrote it when I was in the eye of the storm of raising two young kids,” says Poet. “My youngest was two and my eldest was four, and at that point I only had one day a week to write. Most of my week was playdates and chatting to other parents.” Poet watched a Facebook link to a breakfast TV experiment, in which the children of parents who were confident their children would never go off with a stranger watched film of an undercover social worker approach them in a play-park. Nine out of ten of the children did the opposite. “The woman presenting

Stephen Greenhorn has a lot to celebrate just now. The playwright and TV and film writer may be chained to his desk working on a new high-profile project for the small screen, but two significant anniversaries this month should hopefully see him cut himself enough slack to celebrate. First up, Dundee Rep’s new production of Passing Places sees Greenhorn’s ‘road movie for the stage’ come of age in director Andrew Panton’s twenty-first anniversary revisitation. In the play, small town Motherwell lads Brian and Alex go on a voyage of discovery in a stolen Lada, having their horizons opened forever en route. Meanwhile, a few nights later in Leeds, West Yorkshire Playhouse’s revival of Sunshine on Leith, Greenhorn’s Proclaimers-soundtracked musical opens a major UK tour eleven years to the day since it originally premiered in Dundee, where West Yorkshire Playhouse artistic director James Brining was then in charge. Since then, of course, Sunshine on Leith has gone on to be seen in

George Costigan doesn’t sound like a man who’s just come out of a gruelling rehearsal of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Eugene O’Neill’s devastating epic of addiction, dysfunction and self-destruction among a family dominated by ageing thespian, James Tyrone. Nor, for that matter, does Brid Ni Neachtain, the veteran Irish actress charged with playing Mary Tyrone, the drug-addicted wife of James, played by Costigan in the Citizens Theatre’s new revival directed by Dominic Hill in co-production with Home, Manchester. As James, Costigan may rule the roost with an iron rod, but he sounds more concerned with the then impending football derby between Liverpool and Everton, with his beloved Blues seemingly the underdogs. “I hope we lose,” he says. “That way it’ll shake things up and they’ll have to try and sort it out.” Such bullish pragmatism may or may not be the answer to EFC’s woes, but it’s an attitude that might also be useful to solve the bombastic war of attrition that fuels