Coffee-Table Notes

Tramway, Glasgow Five stars Ebeneezer Scrooge might well hang his head at the opening of the Citizens Theatre’s revival of their seasonal offering first served up in 2014. While all about him sing of the comfort and joy found through each other in times of adversity during the festive season, Scrooge is the perfect embodiment of self-serving greed. He may have been created by Charles Dickens more than a century ago, but, arriving onstage during a time when food banks are in abundance, Benny Young’s stone-faced portrayal of the self-loathing old miser sadly looks more contemporary than ever. Scrooge himself, alas, appears terminally unrepentant in Dominic Hill’s production, reconstituted here by way of Rachael Canning’s already expansive set from the Citz’s proscenium arch to a three-sided affair that helps open the action out even more. This is helped by Neil Bartlett’s script, which is already fused with an inherent sense of playfulness in its pared down simplicity, so Hill’s

Dundee Rep Four stars Be careful what you wish for. You might end up in a splintered society where it’s always the bleakest of mid-winters with no obvious way out. Or at least that’s the case in Scott Gilmour and Claire McKenzie’s musical reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s frosty tale in which a once happy land is smashed into pieces by greed. A couple of generations on, children are disappearing and rumours are rife of a predatory monarch whisking them away to her lair. Gerda and Kai are making the best of things indoors as they play sword and sorcery type adventure games in the safety of Gerda’s granny’s house. When temptation gets the better of Kai, his disappearance leads Gerda on an adventure of her own which takes them to the sunny side, where things aren’t quite what they seem. There’s an intoxicating sense of oomph to Andrew Panton’s dazzling production of a piece co-commissioned by Dundee Rep and the Citizens Theatre Glasgow, and presented here in association

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars If genius steals, how do you split up the loot? That’s just one of the questions that Kieran Hurley pins to the wall in his new play for the Traverse, which dissects both the culture and class wars alongside the eternal contradictions of both. Under-achieving Edinburgh writer Libby is about to make the ultimate dramatic gesture when she is saved by Declan, a teenage boy from the housing schemes with a raw artistic talent that enables Libby to get her mojo back. Everything, alas, is material, especially Declan’s life. The psycho-sexual tug of love that follows makes for the perfect final gift from the Traverse’s outgoing artistic director Orla O’Loughlin. Her production takes a daring leap through the fourth wall of Kai Fischer’s framed black-box set to question who exactly owns the stories that shape us. Stage-directions are projected onto this interior, both from Hurley’s actual play as well as Libby’s soon-to-be-devastating work-in-pr