Reviews, Mark Fisher

Heer Ranjha (Retold)

27 Nov 2008

NEW PLAY Two kids from opposite sides of the tracks. She’s a glamorous socialite, daughter of the owner of a successful chain of Scottish restaurants and a Sikh of Punjabi origin. He’s a suicidal job-seeker who’s never left the country and, although…

Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us

27 Nov 2008

NEW PLAY It’s hard to shake off the feeling that this final production in the National Theatre of Scotland’s series of Traverse Debuts is set in a bygone era. The story of a young man returning home from the seminary, disillusioned with Catholicism…

4.48 Psychosis

13 Nov 2008

MODERN CLASSIC It doesn’t seem right to say you have enjoyed Sarah Kane’s final play. Written not long before her suicide in 1999 and staged posthumously, it is a poetic evocation of the mind of someone in the depths of clinical depression. There are…

Cockroach

30 Oct 2008

It sneaks up on you unexpectedly, this full-length debut by Sam Holcroft. At first, she gives the impression of writing a lightweight comedy of high school life; all cat-fights, smashed windows and detentions. But something is afoot in the biology…

Marat/Sade

30 Oct 2008

Call it a testament to the human spirit or the will to triumph in the face of adversity, but for some reason, after the interval, the audience comes back. Perhaps, they are thinking, it is a mistake to imagine the acting is terrible. Maybe, they hope…

Peter Pretsell

16 Oct 2008

PRINTS AND PAINTINGS There’s a light-hearted sense of joy and goodwill in these two parallel exhibitions celebrating the four-decade output of the late Peter Pretsell, who was both student and lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art and, appropriately…

Sunset Song

2 Oct 2008

ADAPTATION It was some time in the early-60s when His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, last produced a play of its own, barring the annual pantomime. To return to the fray with a ten-strong company and a mainstage tour after so long was ambitious but…

Don Juan

2 Oct 2008

CLASSIC John D is a 21st century mover and shaker. He sets up meetings with celebrities, has his photograph on billboards and indulges in high-profile charity work. He is all ego and, as played by Mark Springer, both charismatic and…

Fleeto

2 Oct 2008

NEW PLAY No doubt it’s Fleeto’s origins as a piece of lunchtime theatre in A Play, a Pie and a Pint that mean this revival by Glasgow’s V.amp is stripped back and elemental. The set amounts to nothing more than a table and a couple of chairs – and…

Offshore

2 Oct 2008

NEW PLAY It’s easy to imagine that the countryside exists without money. With all that fresh air, isn’t cash just a distraction? Of course, just as the wilderness is actually the result of centuries of industrial exploitation, so the rural population…

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…

In a Thousand Pieces

21 Aug 2008

No one should rush to the Paper Birds company in search of an incisive analysis of human trafficking. Despite drawing on verbatim material, In a Thousand Pieces tells you nothing you didn't already know about Eastern European women being sold into…

4.48 Psychosis

Painful journey into despair

16 Aug 2008

Having seen Grzegorz Jarzyna's mesmerising production of this Sarah Kane play on the intimate stage of TR Warszawa in Poland, I was concerned the playwright's sad mediation on suicide would lose its intensity on the bigger stage of the King's. I needn't…

Jidariyya

Palestinian end game

15 Aug 2008

There's a sad irony that a play about mortality should open in Edinburgh only days after the death of its author. Mahmoud Darwish was a major Palestinian poet and his Jidariyya was a response to a life-threatening heart attack a decade ago. It was…

A Drunk Woman Looks at The Thistle

Scotland in a Mina key

7 Aug 2008

If Liz Lochhead had continued the opening speech of Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off for another hour, it could have sounded a lot like A Drunk Woman Looks at the Thistle. Written by crime novelist Denise Mina as a response to Hugh…

Global Warming is Gay

Heggie raises the temperature on saving the planet

7 Aug 2008

Lifestyle choice? Ethical dilemma? Or is going green just a bit gay? These are the questions posed by playwright Iain Heggie as he gently satirises our responses to the new eco-orthodoxy. For opportunistic Green MSP Graham Orbison, the drive to save…

Terminus

Mesmerising monologues create filmic theatricality

7 Aug 2008

There are those who think Mark O'Rowe's style of writing does not constitute theatre at all. Certainly, his preference for interlinking monologues over conversational exchanges has more in common with storytelling than drama. Yet, the more his passages…

The Tailor of Inverness

Stitching up the 20th century

7 Aug 2008

Matthew Zajac's father used to tell a story about how to catch a fox. The method is to get the creature in the open then circle it. As long as you complete the circle, the fox will stay grounded. Then you spiral inwards and take your prey. Zajac does…

Swindle and Death

19 Jun 2008

NEW PLAY Byre Theatre, St Andrews, Thu 19 & Fri 20 Jun, then touring until Sat 28 Jun Great drama usually boils down to a battle between the rational and the irrational. It is the buttoned-up Pentheus fighting with the anarchic Dionysus. It is the…

Louise Bourgeois: Nature Study

5 Jun 2008

PAINTING, SCULPTURE Inverleith House, Edinburgh, until Sun 6 Jul It’s a weekday lunchtime in spring and the Royal Botanic Garden is teeming with new life. Mothers push buggies, primary school children dig into the earth and the plants are a riot of…

Educating Agnes

8 May 2008

NEW TRANSLATION Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, run ended; Perth Theatre until Fri 9 May When Molière’s L’école des femmes was translated as Let Wives Tak Tent by Robert Kemp in 1948, it set in motion a half-century tradition of Scottish reworkings of…

Sleeping Beauty (King's Theatre, Glasgow)

13 Dec 2007

The pitch It’s time for Princess Beauty to put away childish things, say goodbye to her childhood friend Chester the Jester (aaawwww!) and get ready for some right royal action. Carrion the witch and Norval her son (or is he?) have other ideas, however…

Peter Pan

13 Dec 2007

The Pitch It’s not only posh kids from Bloomsbury who get to go flying with the boy who never grows old, now it’s regular kids from Glasgow who hear the tap on their fifth floor window and set off for an awfully big adventure. While the parents go to an…

They Make These Noises

15 Nov 2007

NEW PLAY Arches, Glasgow, until Fri 16 Nov The noises in question emanate from the rumbling stomachs of the old boys living in a godforsaken hostel where the theft of a splash of milk can lead to a bloody stabbing. This is where Brian Ferguson’s…

The Algebra of Freedom

20 Sep 2007

It’s not often we’re called upon to be sympathetic to the police officers who mistakenly killed Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Underground in July 2005. Nor are we expected to find time for those fundamentalists who prefer the bomb to the ballot…

Aalst

Tramway, Glasgow and on tour

27 Mar 2007

NEW TRANSLATION If you like your theatre cosy, comfortable and reassuring, don’t go within a mile of Aalst. A collaboration between Pol Heyvaert’s Belgian Victoria company and the National Theatre of Scotland, Aalst is the harrowing true-life tale of…

Risk

Tron Theatre, Glasgow. Now touring

12 Feb 2007

NEW PLAY Whether we’re crossing on red or skydiving for kicks, we live in a world of calculated risk. If we stopped to think about it, we’d rarely leave the house for fear of the consequences. Actually, to stay in the house would only expose us to…

Aladdin

King’s Theatre, Glasgow

13 Dec 2006

The pitch Rather more the story of Wishee Washee, a redundant shepherd trying to break into his mother’s laundry business, than of his brother Aladdin who falls foul of the wicked Abanazar after failing to get a magical lamp out of a cave. Amid flying…

Wullie Whittington

Tron Theatre, Glasgow

13 Dec 2006

The pitch Young Wullie Whittington is ready to take the leap from being last year’s understudy to this year’s romantic lead in the self-referential world of the Pantosphere. His chief obstacle is that his singing’s as flat as a pancake and it looks as…

Shadow of a Gunman, The

The Shadow of a Gunman

13 Nov 2006

CLASSIC The temptation with Sean O’Casey’s celebrated Dublin trilogy, which began with The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) and continued with Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926), is to present them as knock-about Oirish comedies…

Sweet Bird of Youth

Dundee Rep, until Sat 11 Nov

26 Oct 2006

CLASSIC Ladies, step this way. If you’re up for a sexual thrill, just check out the opening act of Tennessee Williams’ magnificent Sweet Bird of Youth and see Alan Turkington preening around in his pyjama bottoms, flexing his clean shaven chest and…

Drenched

Touring

2 Oct 2006

NEW PLAY There’s something that doesn’t ring true about playwright Gary Young’s portrayal of a disturbed young woman in Drenched. Played by Melanie Wilson in this 60-minute solo, Cassandra sees herself as a victim of an egotistical mother and a…