Ann Louise Ross

Steel Magnolias

Play made famous by big-screen adaptation is slight and horribly sentimental

27 Feb 2012

You should maybe seek a second opinion on this one. Judging by the full house and the warm reception, the Rep’s decision to stage Robert Harling’s play – best known for the big-screen adaptation with Julia Roberts and Dolly Parton – demonstrates a…

Hot 100 2011 - No. 49 to 1

The definitive list of Scottish creative talent

16 Dec 2011

The Hot 100 is the definitive list of Scottish creative talent. From fashion designers to performance artists, everyone who has made a sizeable splash in 2011 has a place in this countdown. It’s for people who’ve created a buzz, but it’s also about…

Cinderella (Dundee Rep)

Witty script, excellent performances and bold lack of concern for tradition

12 Dec 2011

Writer Phil Porter has taken perhaps the best-loved of all festive tales, pulled it apart and reassembled it with a bold lack of concern for tradition. Yes, folks, this is Cinderella but not as we know it. For starters, this version is set on a…

Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off

Timely revival of Liz Lochhead's seminal allegorical play

21 Sep 2011

Liz Lochhead’s powerful, playful dissection of a key chapter in Scotland’s history may have debuted at the height of the Thatcherite 80s, but the play’s central themes – the pernicious effects of sectarianism, the Scots’ complex relationship with our…

Anna Karenina

Dundee Rep ensemble pull off moving and powerful version of Tolstoy's classic love story

6 Jun 2011

Despite the occasional casting oddities that arise from matching a permanent ensemble to the requirements of a text, Dundee Rep pull off a moving and powerful version of one of the pinnacles in Russian literature. Jo Clifford’s lovely 2005 adaptation of…

Stellar Quines' Age of Arousal explores early days of suffragette movement

Nimble performances and funny set pieces, but often wordy script

24 Feb 2011

A play, ‘wildly inspired’ by George Gissing’s The Odd Women – a novel which even sympathetic critics have dismissed as ‘turgid’ – may not sound like the most promising basis for a night at the theatre. Yet, Stellar Quines’ Age of Arousal proves highly…

Dundee Rep bring Stephen Sondheim Sweeney Todd's musical to the stage

4 May 2010

There’s little heroism to be found in a tale of murder and cannibalism, but Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street at least attempts to find some rationale for the actions of the titular killer in tragedy and…

Mother Courage And Her Children

18 Sep 2008

CLASSIC It’s an austere landscape through which Ann Louise Ross drags her cart, scratching a living in the title role of Bertolt Brecht’s epic. Naomi Wilkinson’s set is a wall of grim metal panels, the stage a carpet of grey. Even the iconic cart is…

Les Parents Terribles

19 Jun 2008

REVIVAL Dundee Rep, until Sat 21 Jun The repression of our natural sexual urges was, in Freud’s view, a necessary step in the production of a civilised society. Mention this along with his theories on the Oedipus complex, and you can expect…

Ann Louise Ross - Les Parents Terribles

5 Jun 2008

In the early 20th century Paris, Jean Cocteau was considered avant-garde. He was the kind of artistic butterfly who, when he wasn’t publishing volumes of poetry, giving encouragement to young (and sexually attractive) artists and hanging out with the…

Peer Gynt

4 Oct 2007

For as long as people question their identity, pondering who they are and what role they play in the world, Peer Gynt will occupy a prominent place in the culture. It would, indeed become still more notable were all productions of Ibsen’s classic of…

Sunshine On Leith

8 May 2007

MUSICAL The joyful, if slightly fanciful tone of the Evening News banner ‘Beckham Signs for Hibees’ combined with the more sobering ‘Posh Spice seen in Jenners’ that appear early on in Dundee Rep’s stunning Proclaimers musical by Stephen Greenhorn…