Coffee-Table Notes

When Muireann Kelly moved to Glasgow from County Mayo in her native Ireland, she was all too aware of some of the differences, as well as the similarities, between her birthplace and her adopted home. One of these was in the way history and mythology is dealt with, particularly in relation to how incomers from other places are treated. More specifically, while the actress and theatre director had long been aware of a major tragedy in 1937, when ten young boys from Achill island in County Mayo were killed in their bothy in a fire in Kirkintilloch during potato-picking season, she discovered that few people she met in Scotland had heard of the story. The 1937 Kirkintilloch disaster is at the heart of Scotties, a new play co-written by Kelly with Frances Poet, which opens in Glasgow next week as part of a tour presented by the Kelly-led Gaelic-based company Theatre Gu Leor (Theatre Galore). Supported by the National Theatre of Scotland and the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Scotties aims

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,