Monday, May 14, 2012
Various venues, EdinburghThere is an extraordinary moment towards the start of Kindur, one of the highlights of this year's Imaginate children's theatre festival. We have been enjoying some …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:35PMFriday, April 27, 2012
Citizens, GlasgowThere's a sense of impermanence about Dominic Hill's austere King Lear. The tables and chairs are forever being overturned and whisked away, as if in response to Lear's unst…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 10:34AMWednesday, March 14, 2012
This year's EIF offers plenty to look forward to, from a glow-in-the-dark race up Arthur's Seat to a Polish Macbeth and the Mariinsky Ballet. What will you be booking for?You've got to admir…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:59AMMonday, March 12, 2012
Citizens, GlasgowThe greatest challenge in staging Betrayal – written by Harold Pinter in response to his seven-year affair with Joan Bakewell – is to make it seem more than a study of n…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:12PMSunday, March 11, 2012
Traverse, EdinburghBinary thinking is at the heart of this fascinating, if ultimately frustrating new play. It is the result of a two-way collaboration between Scotland's Stellar Quines and …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:15PMMonday, March 5, 2012
Tron, GlasgowThe birds and the bees in JC Marshall's timely play signify not sex but death. In a poetic flourish, she pictures the victims of a mid-air terrorist atrocity being accompanied b…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:26PMThursday, February 23, 2012
His Majesty's, AberdeenMention The Wicker Man and people tend to snigger. Something in the movie's anachronistic juxtaposition of Scottish island setting, English folklore and early 70s peri…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:15PMSunday, February 19, 2012
Tron, GlasgowThe scene is a house in Harare where preparations are nearing completion for a wedding. The excitement is all the more intense because of the return of Mwana, the groom's brothe…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:02PMWednesday, January 25, 2012
Royal Lyceum, EdinburghIn the theatre is a stage. On the stage is a panelled room. In the panelled room is a wardrobe. In the wardrobe is a music box. Like Russian dolls, these boxes within …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:30PMSunday, November 13, 2011
Traverse, EdinburghYou see a pinprick of light. It could be the beam of an optician testing your peripheral vision. Or it could be the twinkle of Andromeda, a mere 2.5m light years away and …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:35PMFriday, November 4, 2011
Penilee Community Centre, GlasgowIn only one of the sketch-like scenes in John Retallack's community show for the National Theatre of Scotland and Company of Angels does anything that could …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:50PMWednesday, November 2, 2011
The National Theatre of Scotland is under fire for neglecting homegrown drama. But what is Scottishness, anyway?Can a play be Scottish? And if so, how? These were the questions put forward a…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:11PMThursday, October 27, 2011
Royal Lyceum, EdinburghMaureen Beattie enters with her hair dripping wet. It's not a conventional way for an actor to come on, still less so when playing a would-be mother superior. As she s…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:09PMMonday, October 24, 2011
Citizens, GlasgowIn 1967, an unknown playwright called Peter Nichols sent a script on spec to the Citizens theatre. Remarkable not only for its subject matter but also for its tone, A Day in…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:36PMTuesday, October 18, 2011
Oran Mor, GlasgowIf ever there was a character ready to leap into a sitcom it is Leo Butler's Nina. Played by Denise Hoey, she is the epitome of tactlessness, the old university friend who h…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:20AMMonday, October 17, 2011
Traverse, EdinburghIs it a fancy-dress party? An elaborate cabaret? A rerun of The Good Old Days? An esoteric piece of durational art? It's impossible to compartmentalise Stewart Laing's thr…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:46PMA spate of plays dealing with religious oppression in the country is a reminder that we can take years to process collective traumaTowards the end of Irish Theatre Magazine's annual internat…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:58AMThursday, October 13, 2011
Tramway, GlasgowFor a mesmerising 90 minutes, we don't hear a single word from the six actors in Saturday Night, a new work from the company Vanishing Point. They appear to hear each other, …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:17PMTuesday, October 11, 2011
Chekhov's life has provided rich dramatic material for other playwrights, as has Joe Orton's – who else might suit the treatment?Is it wise to write a play about a playwright? We accept it…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:07PMThursday, October 6, 2011
Tron, GlasgowIt's the end of the world as we know it and Catherine Gillard and Nancy Walsh feel fine. The two actors are washed up on a tiny cabaret stage for one last vaudeville turn before…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 11:12AMTuesday, October 4, 2011
Cumbernauld theatreIt's a road that really exists. Nearly two miles long, it goes from South Arnish to Brochel Castle on the Inner Hebridean island of Raasay. Built in the 1960s, it is the s…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 09:40AMMonday, September 26, 2011
Eden Court, InvernessImagine Last of the Summer Wine set on a Clyde puffer and you'll be close to the mild-mannered territory of Neil Munro's Para Handy stories. Written initially as a newsp…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:12PMThursday, September 22, 2011
Royal Lyceum, EdinburghWhat sets Liz Lochhead's 1987 play apart is the way past and present rub up against each other, setting off sparks of recognition as text-book history clashes with mod…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:08AMWednesday, September 21, 2011
Citizens, GlasgowThe tenement flat is claustrophobic, cramped and colourless. There is no room for manoeuvre between sink, table and bed, yet new people constantly arrive and are somehow abs…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:40PMWednesday, September 14, 2011
Tron, GlasgowBorderline theatre company is brandishing a lethal comedic weapon with DC Jackson's workplace rom-com. The first gag comes after less than 10 sentences and, from then on in, the…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:30PMMonday, July 18, 2011
Once the sultan of sleazy synth pop, Marc Almond's new Edinburgh show Ten Plagues examines the Black Death. Gloomy? 'We're all dropping off the end of a conveyor belt,' he saysThirty years a…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 04:31PMThursday, June 23, 2011
Pitlochry Festival TheatreIntroducing the Pitlochry festival theatre's 60th anniversary gala night, Joss Ackland began by telling the audience about his time as an actor in the first company…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:04PMSunday, June 19, 2011
Dundee RepWe're in the kind of room where Jack Bauer tortures enemy agents. Concrete walls. Featureless surfaces. No windows. Stark shadows. Bleak directional light. Fearsome rumbling soundt…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 09:43AMWednesday, June 8, 2011
Traverse, EdinburghThere was I thinking Knives in Hens was one of those plays that didn't change much from production to production. David Harrower's astonishing 1995 debut is set in an unsp…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:44PMTuesday, May 31, 2011
Tron, GlasgowThere used to be an argument that a play couldn't be called feminist – even one with an all-female cast – if its characters' lives were defined by men. Gary Owen's three-han…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 10:34AMSunday, May 29, 2011
Dundee RepWhen Anna Karenina takes up with her lover Vronsky, someone says she has "gained a shadow". She is not the only one. The characters in Jemima Levick's production are forever being …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:45PM 
