Coffee-Table Notes

Edinburgh International Festival Theatre Leith Academy Four stars   If it feels like we’re living in a real life disaster movie right now, Edinburgh’s site-specific auteurs Grid Iron are here to take the temperature of the times in epic fashion. As the culmination of Edinburgh International Festival’s four-year residency at Leith Academy, director and co-writer Ben Harrison working alongside playwrights Nicola McCartney, Uma Nada-Rajah and Tawona Sithole have contemplated a worst-case scenario for the end of the world as we know it and brought it to life.   Utilising the full expanse of the school, Muster Station: Leith reimagines the venue as part sanctuary, part concentration camp for those on the run from an environmental catastrophe close to home. It begins with a queue, as the audience are ‘processed’, as they might be in a post Brexit airport, detention centre or Covid vaccination centre. From here we’re promenaded from swimming pool to gym to library, where a cast of eight play

Wee Red Bar Four stars   Like Shakespeare and Greek tragedy, you know how plays about bands are likely to turn out. So it goes in Graham Eatough’s adaptation of David Keenan’s wild novel about an unknown 1980s beat combo straight outta Airdrie, who crash and burn like so many before them. As related by local fanzine writer and one-time band insider, Ross Raymond, Memorial Device were legend, and none more so than their mercurial psychik guru frontman Lucas Black.      Director Graham Eatough’s adaptation sets things up as a presentation by Raymond, who rewinds back to the heady days when bands formed, not with a career plan, but out of need. Embodying the fab four by way of artfully posed shop window mannequins, Raymond and others captured in filmed interviews present an impressionistic oral history of the band and the grim times they came out of by way of a series of possibly unreliable memories.   At the centre of this is Paul Higgins, who plays Raymond as a giddy wannabe turned John

Church Hill Theatre Four stars   Odile Gakire Katese is already sitting comfortably as the audience enter for the Congo born Rwandan writer and performer’s meditation on the aftermath of the 1994 genocide of her country, when up to as many as an estimated one million people were killed by state sanctioned militia during the Rwandan Civil War. Introducing herself as Kiki, Katese emanates a cosy charm a million miles away from the subject of her presentation.   If it weren’t for the eight women flanking her sat behind drums, she could be talking to you in your living room. The women’s’ intermittent displays of choral song make things even more welcoming. Only when Katese starts reading letters penned by those from all sides who survived the purging to those who maybe didn’t does the utter seriousness of her endeavour take hold.   These are letters she solicited from people, like a one woman reconciliation committee, or some questing folklorist intent to keep a set of very personal histor

The Hub Four stars Love and anger are at the heart of the National Theatre of Scotland’s stately and sensual revival of Liz Lochhead’s ferocious and sometimes surprisingly funny take on Euripides’ study of how hell really does have no fury like a woman scorned. There are moments in Michael Boyd’s thrilling production when it looks like Adura Onashile’s furious Medea and her hubby Jason’s new squeeze Glauke, played by Alana Jackson, might tear physical chunks out of each other as much as verbal ones.   The fact that all this is played out aloft designer Tom Piper’s catwalk set, with all involved suited and booted for Jason and Glauke’s wedding, gives things an even more combative air. As does the ten-strong all woman Chorus who initially come out of the audience to give Medea some sisterly back-up, and end up witnessing the depths of her rage.   When Medea talks about how no-one likes you if you’re foreign, it sums up the small town resistance to difference she’s been up against since s

Ross Stenhouse – Actor, Writer   Born November 18, 1961; died August 5, 2022   Ross Stenhouse, who has died aged sixty, was an actor and writer of tremendous heart, who lit up Scotland’s stages from his early years as a key member of the original Arches Theatre Company, as well as with Hopscotch Theatre, the children’s  company he co- founded in 1988 with Grant Smeaton. With Stenhouse writing original scripts and Smeaton the songs to go with them, the company toured schools in and around Glasgow, and is still going strong today. Regarded as the life and soul of the company, Stenhouse’s work on and off stage had an outrageous comic glee possessed with a depth that could see his tone switch to pathos in an instant.    Ross Stenhouse was born in Glasgow, the elder of two sons to Sheena (nee Clarke Campbell), a comptometrist, and Alexander Stenhouse, an accountant, and grew up in Cardonald and Crookston. He attended Cardonald  Primary School and Penilee Secondary School, where he played gu

Andrew Leigh – Theatre manager   Born February 17 1941; died July 28 2022     Andrew Leigh, who has died aged 81, was a theatre manager who helped make things happen in some of the UK’s key producing houses. From his early days at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, and the Traverse, Edinburgh, Leigh continued his association with Scotland by way of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and latterly with Fringe regulars Pleasance theatre, with whom he was a board member. Inbetween, he was instrumental in the founding of the Duke’s Playhouse, Lancaster, and the Paines Plough company. He also helped shape the relationship between subsidised and commercial theatre, and had a lengthy tenure at the Old Vic, London.   Throughout his sixty year career, Leigh navigated organisations through what were sometimes turbulent times with a level headed and good humoured approach while always remaining a champion of forward thinking ideas.   Andrew Leigh was born in Ottawa, Canada, where his mother Marion (nee Bl

Hannah Lavery didn’t choose the title of ‘Scotland, You’re No Mine’, the Edinburgh International Book Festival event the capital’s recently appointed Makar takes part in at the end of the month. The title comes from the name of one of the key poems in   Blood Salt Spring (2022), Lavery’s debut full-length collection, and is one of the oldest poems in the book.    ‘Scotland, You’re No Mine’’s evocation of Lavery’s love/hate relationship with the country she lives in had already appeared in slightly different forms, both in Lavery’s pamphlet,  Finding Seaglass: Poems from The Drift (2019), and in her poetic drama,  The Drift (2018) itself. The poem has also become one of her most popular works, being named in 2019 as one of Scotland’s favourite poems.   “It's a poem that people often request of me,” says Lavery, “so it’s obviously had a resonance, but I suppose it’s quite a big poem, in that it's talking about colonialism, Scotland's history and it’s place within that, but wi