Coffee-Table Notes

A pick and mix ethos has always pervaded at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, which opens its annual summer season this weekend with an all singing, all dancing production of Kander and Ebb’s musical, Chicago. As pretty much the only old-school repertory company in the UK, over the next five months, the resident ensemble of seventeen actors will move between six different productions performed in rotation.  This year will also mark the first season since the departure of John Durnin, who, over his fifteen years as artistic director, attempted to push the perceptions of what was possible in PFT’s riverside auditorium. This has included the introduction of a large-scale musical to open each season, as well as initiating a new autumn strand. Durnin also introduced a Christmas show into the programme. As if to illustrate the enticing range of work on show, this season, programmed by Durnin before his departure, even features a play called Quality Street. The original plan was that J.M B

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Matters of life and death are an everyday experience for Daniel Pearce, the doctor at the centre of Allan Cubitt’s little-seen 1991 play, in which the good doctor must face up to his own mortality. As all the women in his life – his lover, Jane, sister, Ruth and nurse, Kate – flock to his bedside, Pearce falls down a Hogarthian rabbit hole inspired by the painting that hangs on the stairwell of St Bart’s Hospital, and which gives the play its title. The delirium that ensues throws up a vivid scenario in which Pearce poses as Christ for Hogarth’s painting, while his real-life loved ones are reinvented as a parade of eighteenth century good-time girls and fops. It takes more earthbound associations with a bottle of Polish vodka provided by Callum Douglas’ hospital porter Simon and a meeting with a former patient, however, to put Pearce’s priorities into harsh perspective. The play marked the first sighting of Cubitt, who rapidly moved into

T om Murphy, playwright Born February 23 1935; died May 15 2018 Tom Murphy, who has died aged 83, was a towering figure in Irish theatre. His plays were fired by a rage that influenced a younger generation of writers such as Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh, who perhaps recognised a kindred spirit in a man regarded by many as Ireland’s greatest playwright on a par with Brian Friel. While Murphy didn’t attract as much attention as his near contemporary, he blazed a fiercely individual trail over more than half a century. The tone was set from the controversy caused by his second play, A Whistle in the Dark, a volatile look at an Irish family in exile. Kenneth Tynan declared the play “arguably the most uninhibited display of brutality London theatre has ever witnessed.” Over more than twenty plays and a sole novel, The Seduction of Morality, published in 1994, Murphy filled the imagined lives of his characters with compassion, even as they roared and howled at the world t

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars Imagine a country ripped in two as easily as you’d tear a piece of paper in half. Then imagine hundreds of thousands of people displaced from their homes and forced into the other half of the country. Fast forward a few years, and think about what might happen if some kind of prodigals’ return ushered in an uneasy peace of sorts. That’s only part of the complex, still unfinished history of Cyprus, the former British colony (natch) riven by divisions between Greek and Turkish Cypriots that have resulted in invasions, land grabs and a mess of collateral damage. The deeply personal consequences of all this are explored here by the Edinburgh-based Ludens Ensemble. With support by the European Capital of Culture Pafos 2017 and the Greek arts-based Syn Festival, a four-strong ensemble present a semi-verbatim collage of anecdote and experience drawn from testimonies from both sides of the divide. Accompanied by live video feed, shadowplay and