Theatre, Issue 649

Backbeat - Stuart Sutcliffe story comes to Citizen's Theatre, Glasgow

And the beat goes on

This season’s major show at the Citizens Theatre is more than just a Beatles biopic. Writer/director Iain Softley explains why to Jonny Ensall

First Word: Catherine Czerkawska

Playwright and novelist Catherine Czerkawska’s career has gone from strength to strength since she stopped ‘watering her Dylan Thomas adjectives’. Just don’t ask her if she’s ‘still writing’. Here she reveals her love of Lennon, linen and lace…

NTS history and Gutter magazine latest National Library of Scotland events

Eagle-eyed readers of the Around Town listings may have already noticed that change is afoot at the National Library of Scotland. Over the last few months, there have been an increasing number of interesting, well thought-out, exciting and downright…

Clutter Keeps Company

Davy Anderson’s oeuvre, which has been fairly prolific since the mid 2000s has shown a consistent impulse toward the social diagnostic. From his examination of alienation within a council flat, incorporating a commentary on our culture’s propensity to…

The Government Inspector

Back in the 1980s, Scottish theatre audiences could count on the likes of Communicado, Wildcat and 7:84 to maintain a live, lively commentary on contemporary events, often by drawing analogies sourced from Scottish history. It’s perhaps a force that’s…

The Sound of Music

There is a moment, quite near the end of this mostly jolly musical, when Nazi Germany comes to Edinburgh. The hairs stand up on the back of your neck, and it’s almost possible to imagine what life under the swastika was really like. Other than that…

The Zeros Keep Going

The numbers speak for themselves: worldwide, pornography is estimated to earn $3075.65 per second. The sexualisation of culture and the media is a burning issue, and one that has inspired the latest production by Glasgow-based theatre company…

Spymonkey’s Moby Dick

Being a member of Spymonkey sounds like a lot of fun. When the four-piece ensemble aren’t running around naked in front of thousands of people, parodying Christian pop bands, or generally playing silly whatsits for a living, they’re adapting great dense…

Neil LaBute Triple Bill

‘Like a long distance runner who is asked to fill in for a sprinter at the last minute, you find yourself using a whole different set of muscles that you didn’t know you had.’ Neil LaBute regards short play writing, it seems, as a sort of artistic…

The Ching Room and The Moira Monologues

A double bill of short plays by the acclaimed author of Boyracers and Death of a Ladies’ Man. The Ching Room, originally commissioned for the Traverse Theatre and Oran Mor’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint season is a darkly comic two-hander depicting a…