Coffee-Table Notes

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars We only fleetingly see the figure of Charles Hamilton Sorley as a fatally wounded captain in Neil McPherson’s dramatic homage to the Aberdeen-born poet who was killed in the frontline of the First World War in 1915 aged 20. Up to that point, Alexander Knox plays Sorley as a bright eyed boy hungry for life, with the world seemingly at his feet and beaming with precocious charm as he moves from Marlborough College to teenage travels in Germany before enlisting for his final fate. The wounds of this unnecessary loss are etched on the faces of Charlie’s parents, who, played here by Tom Marshall and Jenny Lee, open the play by having to take receipt of the inevitable telegram that becomes the final dispatch from the frontline among a bundle of exuberant letters home. As the play flits seamlessly between Charlie’s confidences and his parents’ attempts to keep his memory alive by publishing his short life’s collected works, the poems become totems, not just

Leith Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Alarm bells sound from the off for the official Armistice Day opening of this spectacular rendering of Austrian writer Karl Kraus’ post First World War epic, presented in a brand new translation by Patrick Healy. Opening more than three hours of cartoon-like sketches that make up an explosive Dadaist/Brechtian live art cabaret take on twentieth century history, the bells may be calling time, but they add a sense of urgency to this international co-production that sees the first theatre production in Leith Theatre for almost three decades. Spearheaded by co-directors John Paul McGroarty of the new Yard Heads company alongside Yuri Birte Anderson of Germany’s Theaterlabor, companies from France, Ireland, Poland and Ukraine take part in a devastatingly cynical take on how the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo set in motion a set of events from which the world is still reeling. Elites, fake news and a whole lot of other contem

John Paul McGroarty was 19 years old when he last saw a major stage production inside Leith Theatre, the former town hall building gifted to Leith following the Burgh’s incorporation into Edinburgh in 1920. After being used as a music venue and theatre space, the building lay empty for three decades before being recently opened up by both the Hidden Door festival and Edinburgh International Festival care of Leith Theatre Trust. The play McGroarty saw was Russian director Yuri Lyubimov’s Taganka Theatre production of Alexander Pushkin’s play, Boris Godunov, which was programmed as part of the 1989 Edinburgh International Festival. Two years earlier when McGroarty was a teenage drama student in Ireland, the first play he saw was Frank McGuinness’ First World War drama, Observe The Sons of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme. Having been profoundly affected by these formative dramatic experiences, three decades on, the spirit of both look set to trickle down into McGroarty’s own st