Coffee-Table Notes

Xana Marwick had not long given birth to her first child when she started writing the play that would become Nests, which opens in Edinburgh this weekend as part of a month long tour. The original idea was to do a new version of Hansel and Gretel enabled by a bursary from Playwrights Studio Scotland. The initial result, under the mentorship of fellow writer Clare Duffy, was by Marwick’s own admission “all over the place. I was really sleep deprived, and started writing this demented version of the story, which had this ghost boy in it.” Only later, while in residence at Summerhall, did Marwick ditch the fairytale elements of the story. This was on the advice of playwright Douglas Maxwell. “He read the play, and asked what I was actually interested in, which was the boy and this father character, and Douglas just said to forget about Hansel and Gretel and concentrate on that.” A reading of Marwick’s play at Imaginate children’s theatre festival led to an approach by Heather

Dundee Rep Four stars Like the seasons, Anne Downie’s adaptation of Betsy Whyte’s autobiographical novel about a young female traveller growing up in and around Scotland in the decades leading up to World War Two comes around as part of a slow but steady cycle of quietly poetic contributions to Scotland’s dramatic canon. First seen in 1989, Downie’s play, rendered here in a vivid production for Dundee Rep’s Ensemble company by Andrew Panton, is revealed as something of an evergreen. The story revolves around Whyte’s alter ego, Bessie Townsley, the spirited and smart-as-a-whip daughter of a family of permanent transients, whose life on the road is a hand-to-mouth existence forced to square up to everyday prejudice and suspicion. This comes from police, land-owners and Bessie’s jealous school-mates alike as Bessie discovers her powers of self-expression. Unlike previous productions, here the role of Bessie is split, with Ann Louise Ross’s older incarnation acting as narrator,

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars A killing moon beams down with various shades of intensity throughout Richard Baron’s revival of Rona Munro’s play, inspired by the last woman to be burnt as a witch. It was an execution which took place in the Highlands in 1727, just before such superstitions were supposed to have been swept away by the Scottish Enlightenment. As Deirdre Davis’ Janet Horne is tortured by the authorities in the second half of the play, however, the language used against her resembles some of the misogynist hate speech used by some men on social media to demonise women who dare to be different or else just have an opinion. At first things all look a bit Ab Fab, with Janet a free-spirited hippy mum to Fiona Wood’s scowly but practical teenage daughter Helen. Janet is wilfully singular, sexually confident and able to shroud herself with a mystique that both beguiles and terrifies the villagers. While Janet is able to intoxicate them with hallucinogens from the