Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars In the dead of night, a rickety bus speeds through a country at war with itself. The aim of the passengers on board is to get beyond the border and on a plane that will take them somewhere that’s supposed to be safer. What happens when they get there, however, is anybody’s guess. Sound familiar? If so, bear in mind that poet Nick Makoha’s auto-biographical play, commissioned and produced by Ovalhouse and Fuel, charts events that happened more than forty years ago, when Idi Amin’s despotic regime in Uganda came crashing down, creating turmoil in its wake. With just two actors, an overhead projector and a design by Rajha Shakiry that contains all the messy clutter of lives and worlds in rocky motion, Roy Alexander Weise’s production makes flesh a noisy maelstrom of eternal passengers seeking sanctuary. At the heart of what becomes a kind of dramatic suite of interlinked stopping-off points is a four-year-old Makoha and his mother, bro

Shilpa T-Hyland wants to tell stories differently. This is something that should be apparent when the Glasgow-based director opens her new production of Miss Julie in Perth Theatre’s Joan Knight Studio this weekend prior to a short tour. Zinnie Harris’ version of Strindberg’s simmering piece of cross-class passion was the play chosen by T-Hyland to bring to full production after becoming the first recipient of The Cross Trust Young Director Award. The latter is a new scheme initiated by The Cross Trust, set up by philanthropist Sir Alexander Cross in 1943 to provide opportunities to young men and women to ‘extend the boundaries of their knowledge of human life’. There are certainly plenty of opportunities for the latter in Miss Julie, a play of extremes which T-Hyland initially kept her distance from. “I was kind of frightened about it at first,” she says. “I had to choose from four plays, and I’d read the original version, and even Strindberg said it leaves a bad taste.”

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Three Stars In an increasingly apocalyptic looking world, how far do comedic provocateurs go in pointing out the inherent ridiculousness of their self-serving masters? As with most things, in terms of so-called leaders more resembling grotesque caricatures than actual functioning politicians, we have been here before. This is something Ian Hislop and Nick Newman’s timely dramatic sketch-book of the trials of nineteenth century bookseller and pamphleteer William Hone makes abundantly clear. One minute, Hone and his cartoonist comrade George Cruikshank are hustling their national lampoon of the gluttonous Prince Regent and his well-upholstered cronies to the masses. The next, Hone is hauled before the courts to answer charges of blasphemy, not once, not twice, but a suitably biblical three times in as many days. Of course, it’s a massive stitch-up designed to wear Hone out, but even the establishment’s well-worn tactic of attrition blows up in their fac