Coffee-Table Notes

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four stars Everything is council estate grey in Erica Whyman’s streetwise Royal Shakespeare Company revival of Shakespeare’s teenage gang-based tragedy, in Glasgow for the final leg of its UK tour. The brutalist steel and breezeblock backdrop of Tom Piper’s set lends the play a contemporary harshness heightened even more by the babble of criss-crossing young voices who stab out the play’s prologue like a weapon. Once things calm down, we move downtown, where, on the frontline, the Capulets and the Montagues’ unspecified beef has become a hand-me-down accessory for local youth in search of a sense of belonging and a cause to call their own, however misguided they may be in their bid to join the grown-ups. It’s this adolescent craving for attention and to be taken seriously that fires the play here, with inter-gang bantz led by Charlotte Josephine’s motor-mouthed Mercutio as he, Benvolio and Afolabi Alli’s matinee idol Romeo attempt to crash the Capu

Tramway, Glasgow Five stars Three women walk through different doors at the start of Stef Smith’s revolutionary reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s nineteenth century meditation on women, men and power. It is as if they have broken through the frames that captured their once still lives to map out a brand new story for themselves in colours of rage, making history as they go. This is just the first act of liberation in Smith’s version of the play, which puts three Noras from crucial moments in that history onstage in the first play in the Citizens Theatre’s Citizens Women season. In an equally crucial move, the three actresses who play Nora in 1918, 1968 and 2018 double up to become different versions of Nora’s former best friend Christine. With the men who control them similarly represented down the ages, Smith’s device exposes just how little has changed over the last century in terms of everyday domestic abuse. As the women are blackmailed emotionally, intellectually and se

When Patrick Hamilton’s play, Gaslight, first appeared on the London stage at Richmond Theatre in 1938, the novelist and playwright had no idea that the title of his psychological thriller would slip into more common parlance as a description for a form of manipulation. This has been the case since the 1960s, but over the last few years has come to the fore once more. While this is something Kai Fischer couldn’t ignore when he began work on his new production, which opens at Perth Theatre this weekend, he wanted to focus on the play’s noirish essence as much as its wider social significance. With this in mind, Fischer is keen not to let loose any spoilers to audiences who might not be aware of the play. “I’d known the play for a while,” he says, “and there was an idea of doing it a few years ago, so when Lu (Kemp, Perth Theatre’s artistic director) approached me to do it, I already had a connection with it. When I first looked at it, to be honest, I never thought I’d push for it,