Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Four stars The Cambridge ladies of Girton College do much better than their male contemporaries in Jessica Swale's 2013 dramatisation of the struggle to have students graduate from the UK's first women-only seat of learning. Their academic achievements don’t do them much good, alas, in Swale's timely lesson in how, more than a century after the play is set, equality on campus and everywhere else besides should never be taken for granted. The ensemble of fourteen final year BA Acting students who add fire and passion to Becky Hope-Palmer's production seem understandably galvanised by such a fiercely intelligent work. The play focuses on four young science students at Girton, whose enquiring minds are only occasionally distracted by the over-privileged boys who they must keep a respectful distance from. In the main, however, Tess, Carolyn, Celia and Maeve keep their eyes on the stars that could lead them to infinite poss

Elizabeth Newman is in love. This is the impression the dynamic new artistic director of Pitlochry Festival Theatre gives on the eve of her inaugural season opening with her production of Summer Holiday. As opening statements go, the musical stage version of the classic teen travelogue Brit-flick will undoubtedly be a feel-good extravaganza. Coming at a time when international travel looks set to be restricted, the show’s depiction of carefree youth in transit has other underlying resonances. “Summer Holiday is a story about young people falling in love and being able to go wherever they want,” says Newman. “It’s a story about how wonderful it is to be connected. With everything that’s going on in the world just now, all of that is becoming harder, and this show is celebrating how joyful it is to be able to be that carefree.” Newman and her team currently have four of PFT’s summer season of six shows in rehearsal, utilising an ensemble of seventeen actors. The plays include No

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It's a long way from Zambia to Newcastle for Kema Sikazwe, aka Kema Kay, the UK raised rapper turned actor, whose profile has been very much on the upturn since his appearance in Ken Loach's era defining film, I, Daniel Blake. As he tells it over an hour of autobiographical storytelling peppered with his own songs, Sikazwe arrives in the rough and tumble of one of Tyneside's less salubrious areas aged three. From here he is thrown into the deep end of playground bullying and everyday racism until he discovers a music to call his own as a survival mechanism to weather the storm. Despite the show's title, taken from the Zambian meaning of Sikazwe's name, there is light and shade aplenty in his story, told in a dynamic but engagingly gentle manner in Graeme Thompson's production for Live Theatre Newcastle. Using a pair of microphones set against patterns of ever-pulsating neon strip lights on Emma Bailey's set,