Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars Everybody can be prone to putting their life in boxes. Magda, the elderly Croatian émigré in Sylvia Dow’s new hour-long play, takes such a notion to extremes in a show that lays bare the emotional detritus we gather up along life’s way, using those boxes as a fortress of self-protection as we go. At some point, however, there has to be a clear-out. In Magda’s case it takes an intervention from social worker Jackie to open the door to a new-ish kind of life. This involves a reunion with Magda’s estranged daughter Chrissie, and above all a casting out of the figure of her dead mother, an opera singer who was killed in the Balkan war. All of this is woven into a handsome looking and heart-felt production by Muriel Romanes for her and Dow’s new Sylvian Productions company. At its centre is a moving central performance from Carol Ann Crawford as Magda, who is given ample support by Romana Abercrombie as Chrissie, Pauline Lockhart as Jackie

It took twenty-eight years for Neil McPherson to write It Is Easy To Be Dead, the writer and artistic director of London’s Finborough Theatre’s homage to First World War poet Charles Hamilton Sorley, which arrives in Scotland this week for a short run in Aberdeen and Glasgow following the play’s West End success. McPherson’s original idea as a young actor in 1988 was to write and perform a one-man show about Sorley’s better known contemporary, Wilfred Owen. A director told McPherson that there were lots of plays about Owen already, and that he should do one about Sorley instead. McPherson had been running the Finborough Theatre for seventeen years by the time he began what would become It Is Easy To Be Dead, and programmed it as part of a season to commemorate the 100 th anniversary of the war. Keen to come at things from a different angle, McPherson’s 2014 season included the English-language premiere of German playwright Rolf Hochhuth’s Summer 14 – A Dance of Death, which looke

King’s Theatre, Edinburgh  Three stars An actor’s life can go in many ways. Adrian Edmondson and Nigel Planer’s co-written vehicle for themselves makes this abundantly clear in their portrayal of a couple of old luvs who left Rada at the same time and end up reluctantly reunited in Iceland on the set of the latest instalment of the hokey sci-fi franchise that gives the play its title. The difference is that where Planer’s Hugh Delavois is a cast regular and impeccably bland example of a very English form of thespian, Edmondson’s Gary Savage is a hard-drinking loose cannon who once flew high with the Hollywood bad boys. Now, alas, Savage has crashed back down to earth with a bump and a one-line bit-part as an unlikely alien monster with an outfit that makes 1970s Dr Who appear sophisticated. Out of this comes a bittersweet comedy of late-life ennui among the creative classes seen through a trailer darkly even as things take a real-life seismic turn that puts both men on t