Coffee-Table Notes

Tramway, Glasgow until June 23rd Four stars Pia says relax. Mexican artist Pia Camil doesn’t actually appropriate Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s much replicated Katherine Hamnett-styled 1980s slogan and design for life. Symbolically, however, such international lingua-franca springs to mind on stepping into Camil’s monumental installation of sewn-together secondhand t-shirts that hang beside each other. Tramway’s main space becomes a dormitory of giant hammocks, or tarpaulins providing shelter for dodgy market dealers flogging knock-off or bootlegged goods on the cheap. Beneath them, pairs of jeans are stuffed inside each other and piled up like cushions of disembodied cowboy mannequins collapsed around the campfire like double denim bean-bags. Each hammock/tarpaulin is colour-coded, with the neck-holes of each t-shirt enabling viewers to pop their heads through to get a closer view of the stitching. At first glance, Camil’s first UK solo show makes for interactive adventure pl

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four Stars Once upon a time, it felt like Dario Fo's anti-capitalist classic was common fare on Scotland’s stages in every sense. The 1970s sex comedy styled soundtrack that opens Johnny McKnight's new take on the play might suggest a retro style revisitation, but in truth, McKnight's pop culture peppered update of Joseph Farrell's translation couldn't be more of the moment. It's not just the everyday thrill of looting the local supermarket that makes Julie Wilson Nimmo's Toni and Sally Reid's Maggie such a vitally gallus double act in Rosalind Sydney's production for Glasgow Life in association with the Tron as part of the theatre's Mayfesto season. Nor is it the street-smart references to everyone from Ally McCoist to Judy Murray as Toni and Maggie attempt to hide their booty from their seemingly more conformist men-folk.  For all the run-around of Toni and Maggie’s increasingly desperate measures to try an

When Patrick Marber got involved with his local non-league football team, he wasn’t looking to write a play about it. As it is, when it was first seen in 2015, The Red Lion became one of Marber’s biggest hits since his early plays such as Closer and Dealer’s Choice caught the 1990s zeitgeist. The Red Lion, however, is a grown-up play of a different kind, as Rapture Theatre’s revival should make clear when it goes out on tour next week. The company’s series of away away games go further afield than Marber’s beloved East Sussex based Lewes FC have ever ventured. This is unlike his ‘first’ team, multi-nationally owned big-hitters, Arsenal, who went global even before the north London club made the move from Highbury to the club’s home since 2006 at the Emirates Stadium. It is such a disconnect between big business and community-based clubs like Lewes FC that fires The Red Lion. “It was a surprise to me I came to write the play,” says Marber on a Saturday morning the day before Ar

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four Stars To paraphrase a non-pictorial edition of the Kama Sutra, and perhaps drag it into what may or may not be more equality enlightened times, a man and a woman will never win each other without a great deal of talking. Such a philosophical take on intimacy hangs over much of Abi Morgan's play, adapted from the anonymous memoir of a real life non-couple, who took a business-like approach to their non-relationship to the extent of drawing up a contract. Said document decreed that the woman known only as She would be paid to be the mistress of her non-partner, known as He, with no visible strings attached. Over snapshots of the next thirty years or so, we see She and He before and after sex, recording onto cassette every piece of verbal horseplay from 1981 onwards. Cal MacAninch and Lorraine McIntosh never make heavy weather of things in Eve Nicol's Scottish premiere of the play for the Tron's Mayfesto season. This is despite such se