Coffee-Table Notes

Perth Theatre Five Stars A heart-rending finale closes this third and final part of Oliver Emanuel and Gareth Williams’ music theatre trilogy designed to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the First World War’s own end. As the strings and piano of Jonathan Gill’s five-piece chamber ensemble accompanied by the twenty-strong 306 Choir swell with Williams’ score, the 306 men executed for cowardice and desertion are finally given voice by way of a moving chorale in stunning fashion. With the play’s predecessors set during the war itself and its immediate aftermath, The 306: Dusk focuses on the present day, when remembrance has become an annual ritual. Into a landscape where bullets and blood once flew step three people on very different pilgrimages. Rachel is a pregnant teacher leading a school trip, but with the echoes of the war impacted on her life down the generations. Keith is an Iraqi war veteran, a living piece of collateral damage who has being to

When The 306: Dusk opened at Perth Theatre this week in a co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland, it marked more than five years since Oliver Emanuel and Gareth Williams began working on the 306 project. Since then, Emanuel and Williams have created an epic First World War-inspired music theatre trilogy, which has put some of the 1914-18 war’s less sung stories into the spotlight as well as its long-term fall-out. Emanuel began his saga in 2016 with The 306: Dawn, which was set during the war itself. The play focused on some of the 306 men who were court-martialled as traitors and shot by a firing squad, recognising that the men were likely victims of mental trauma and miscarriages of justice. It’s follow-up, The 306: Day, followed the lives of the women caught in the emotional and psychological crossfire of the war and struggling to cope following the loss of their men, either in battle or through execution. This third and final play brings things up to date, and

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars The earth moves ever so slightly in Clare Duffy’s new play, commissioned for this Traverse Theatre production by Edinburgh’s new writing theatre with the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities while Duffy was a fellow there. The action takes place in the bathroom, where mother and daughter Margret and Ella are preparing for Ella’s temporary departure from the isolated Scottish island where they both live, with Margret left holding the baby. Ella is not going to her best friend’s wedding as she says. She is going to save the world, an environmental activist standing firm on the frontline, protecting the earth’s natural resources from being plundered by oil-hungry forces for whom money is all that matters. But what about everything she leaves behind, Margret and her baby included? What or who matters most? As Margret locks them both in the bathroom, this age-old conundrum between personal and politic