Coffee-Table Notes

Eastgate Theatre, Peebles Four stars It’s very much a case of better the devil you know in the Vanishing Point company’s stripped-down touring version of their hit piece of theatrical gothic. While there might just be storytelling MC Robert Jack and crooning composer Biff Smith onstage compared to the coffin-load of sixteen actor/musicians who graced the original, the beyond the grave stories and songs remain the same. As the audience enter the twilight zone for the restless dead as if on a guided tour of what lies beneath the earth, Jack and Smith lead us through a series of chronicles of deaths foretold. Each are laid bare in Nikki Kalkman and Matthew Lenton’s infinitely portable production with the knowing foreboding of master storytellers. Think Edgar Allan Poe hosting Jackanory. Each yarn is illustrated with a series of sepia-tinted photographs that sit astride the coffin of Kenneth MacLeod’s funeral parlour set as they might do in similar memoriam on a living room mant

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