Coffee-Table Notes

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Five stars The ragtime parade of street-smart buskers who burst through the doors and freestyle into the auditorium set the tone of things to come in Isobel McArthur’s new adaption of Charles Dickens’ much reinvented Christmas classic. While the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh’s production moves the action to its own doorstep, McArthur and director Ben Occhipinti have opted for something infinitely more modern, even as they retain the story’s period setting. This sees the action framed by the storytelling band, who step in and out of assorted characters inbetween giving Christmas carols a jazzy reboot. Colin McCredie’s Scrooge is younger than how he is traditionally seen, played here by McCredie as a dodgy money-lender who has no truck with charity chuggers, and certainly not with his puppy-dog keen nephew, Fred, played by Samuel Pashby in reindeer ears and a Christmas jumper. Once the shop doors are shut, Scrooge cuts a lonely figure, with the fli

Dundee Rep Four stars Icons don’t come much bigger in this country than Oor Wullie. The spiky-topped tearaway and his bucket-wielding antics in small-town Auchenshoogle have made generations of comic strip readers part of Wullie’s gang ever since he was first created by Dudley D. Watkins in 1936. That sense of inclusion pervades this bold stage adaptation by writer and lyricist Scott Gilmour and composer Claire McKenzie, the internationally successful musical theatre duo behind the Noisemaker company, who have joined forces with Dundee Rep and Selladoor Productions to allow Wullie to make the leap from page to stage. Andrew Panton’s production enables this by way of a set-up where Eklovey Kashyap’s disaffected real world schoolboy Wahid, on the run from everyday racism in the classroom, is loaned an Oor Wullie annual by a mysterious librarian called Dudley. Through this portal comes Wullie himself, played by Martin Quinn as a gallus Peter Pan-like sprite in search of his sto

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Ebeneezer Scrooge is the perfect embodiment of Edinburgh at its worst. This is something Tony Cownie’s new adaptation of Charles Dickens’ perennial festive yarn ramps up to the max, with an Old Town-dwelling Scrooge revealed as mean-spirited, fun-hating, exploitative and loveless. With the shadow of Edinburgh Castle above him on Neil Murray’s expansive gothic set, Cownie’s Scrooge is a living hybrid of auld Reekie NIMBY and money-grabbing shark trading on people’s misery, with the contradictions of both tearing him apart. As Crawford Logan’s Victorian miser is forced to confront his own demons, he is emotionally bunged up with enough guilt-laden neuroses to give him nightmares, if he can sleep at all. Christmas is a funny thing, however, and even as Grant O’Rourke’s comedy copper makes sure the carol singing street choir are forced to hold their wheesht in a way any inner city busker will recognise, the forces of good conspire for S