Theatre
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Love Letters to the Public Transport System
21 Aug 2012
Life-affirming monologue celebrates society’s unsung heroes
The premise of Molly Taylor’s monologue sounds, in summary, so precious you wouldn’t expect it to work as a piece of drama. In 2009, following a painful break-up and the loss of her permanent job, Taylor travelled by bus to London where a chance meeting…
Wuthering Heights
20 Aug 2012
Emily Brontë adaptation by young Cardiff players is a praiseworthy production
Rarely has fiction portrayed the negative as well as positive emotions of love than in Emily Brontë’s masterpiece. Heathcliff and Cathy's passionate, never harmonious yearning is, of course, at the heart of the story, yet the novel's complex narrative…
Michael Tremblay's The Guid Sisters returns to Scotland
20 Aug 2012
23 years after seminal staging, The Guid Sisters revived by by leading Québécois
In 1989, Michael Boyd (then director of the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, now director at the Royal Shakespeare Company) staged his acclaimed British premiere of The Guid Sisters (Les Belles-soeurs) by the great Québécois playwright Michel Tremblay. It has…
Monkey Bars
20 Aug 2012
Kids say the profoundest things
‘Sometimes adults don’t really listen to children,’ suggests the actor playing dialogue artist Karl James at the start of Chris Goode’s masterful new verbatim play. And that’s exactly what this astonishing piece seems to be telling us – that there’s so…
Bigmouth
20 Aug 2012
Enthralling roller-coaster through history and its (in)humanity by Valentijn Dhaenens
‘History not merely touches on language, but takes place in it.’ This quote from the German philosopher Adorno could summarise the underlying themes of SkaGeN’s Bigmouth. The show makes the (perhaps not obvious connection) between figures of great…
Mies Julie
20 Aug 2012
Essential adaptation of Strindberg’s classic
Truly great productions of classic texts can reveal the play within the play. Who knew that beneath the staid formality of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie lurked a play as explosive and heartwrenching as Yael Farber’s South African-set rewrite? Like…
Beats
20 Aug 2012
Tremendous recreation of rave culture
Tremendous recreation of rave culture In 1994 the UK Criminal Justice and Public Order Act outlawed gatherings of more than 100 people with a soundtrack of ‘amplified music characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’. In the…
Uninvited
20 Aug 2012
Ambitious production fails to spring to life
Our unnamed protagonist, obsessed by order and routine, returns home from work to discover a stranger in his house. So he makes him a cup of tea. But that’s the least of his worries: the talking wallpaper seems to have opinions on everything, and his…
And They Played Shang-a-Lang
20 Aug 2012
Bay City Rollers jukebox musical is boisterous good fun
If a semi-autobiographical jukebox musical about salad days in Scotland sounds grim -- and it should -- Derek Douglas’ nostalgia fest is surprisingly good fun. Local amateur company Craft Theatre’s 15-strong cast perform with such gusto and evident…
Gulliver's Travels
19 Aug 2012
Savage and funny adaptation of Swift’s satire
The Victorians considered Gulliver's Travels a kid's book, chortling at the notion of a big man in a tiny world and quietly omitting Gulliver's horrified realisation that the bestial Yahoos are in fact human. That uncomfortable final part of the book is…
Children's shows from Scotland at 2012 Edinburgh Festival Fringe
19 Aug 2012
Shows from Catherine Wheels, Frozen Charlotte, Le Petit Monde and more
It’s great to have so many visiting companies at the Fringe, but just for a moment, we’re going to celebrate the home-grown Scottish talent right on our doorstep The Ballad of Pondlife McGurk One of Scotland’s finest children’s theatre companies…
Angels
19 Aug 2012
Powerful monologue with a stunning central performance
Save for a single hanging strip-light, the studio space at the Traverse is so utterly bare that you begin to suspect the audience has been the victim of a cruel practical joke. But then actor Iain Robertson appears and strikes up the opening passages of…
An Appointment with the Wicker Man
19 Aug 2012
A populist comedy success from Greg Hemphill, Donald McLeary and Vicky Featherstone
Of course the idea of a musical version of acclaimed horror movie The Wicker Man is absurd. That’s pretty much the point of the National Theatre of Scotland’s play-within-a-play from writers Greg Hemphill and Donald Mcleary and director Vicky…
How to Start a Riot
19 Aug 2012
Nifty political piece that fizzes with questions and ideas
Mark Duggan’s death at the hands of the police sparked last summer’s riots: four days of violent disorder and looting all over the country. But, as Worklight Theatre point out, sparks don’t catch without fuel and flames don’t spread without…
Wonderland from Vanishing Point theatre deals in pornography and voyeurism
17 Aug 2012
A new show from Glasgow theatre company set for UK run
Mark Fisher flies to Italy to find Glasgow’s Vanishing Point raising the Neapolitan temperature with Wonderland
Songs of Lear
17 Aug 2012
A sublime version of the Bard’s tragedy, in its purest form
Imagine King Lear in pill form, the Shakespearean equivalent of Willy Wonka’s Three-Course Dinner Chewing Gum. Or contained in a single firework. What about Lear: the new fragrance from Christian Dior? Baffling as this all sounds, it’s pretty much what…
(remor)
17 Aug 2012
Potent micro-theatre probes a couple’s break up
The most potent things always come in the smallest doses: shots of espresso, measures of vodka, and in this case an 11-minute piece of dance that cuts to the core of a couple’s broken relationship. Even the wooden box that performers Marta Barceló and…
Othello – The Remix
17 Aug 2012
Energetic reimagining of the Moor of Venice
The third of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s highly successful adaptations of the bard – following The Bomb-itty of Errors and Funk It Up About Nothing in recent years – Othello: the Remix reimagines the Moor of Venice as an American rap god, recently…
As Ye Sow
17 Aug 2012
Strong performances and mounting tension in well-conceived ghost story
Without the use of special effects horror can be quite tricky to bring to the stage with the result that ghost stories are usually the sub-genre of choice for the theatre. The audience can fill in the gaps that clever editing or CGI would usually…
Waiting for Stanley
17 Aug 2012
Keep calm and carry on clowning
A woman with a red clown nose waits on a luggage-filled railway platform for her wartime sweetie to return. As her wait grows, she raids the suitcases around her, each contributing props to a captivating series of tales drawn from the experiences of…
Oh, the Humanity and Other Good Intentions
17 Aug 2012
Marvellous quintet of short plays with excellent performances
Marvellous quintet of short plays with excellent performances Isn’t self-consciousness a ball-ache? It ups the ante, rather, as if all eyes are on you and you’re barely making sense, let alone delivering the goods, and you still haven’t found what…
Good Grief
17 Aug 2012
Meandering musical hour of delightful schadenfreude
Gone Rogue’s likeable, funeral-set musical might start off in a subdued atmosphere of deep sorrow, but by the end of the show most of the mourners have ended up half naked, high on hash cookies or reeling from shocking family revelations. Using a family…
The Shit / La Merda
17 Aug 2012
Howl of human emotion makes for unforgettable theatre
Raw, touching, intelligent and mesmerising, Cristian Ceresoli’s The Shit is an unforgettable piece of theatre that reveals our universal inner thoughts, fears, desires and memory with almost frightening accuracy. Comprised of a powerful and…
Rubies in the Attic
17 Aug 2012
Inspired and uplifting cabaret-style show
Ancestry, lineage and belonging form the basis of The Ruby Dolls’ Rubies in the Attic, an invigorating and fun piece of theatre. Comprised of music, close harmony singing, puppetry and physical theatre, this show uses each Doll’s family history to chart…
The Council of the Ordinary
17 Aug 2012
B-Boying takes a turn towards the dark side
It’s beat battles and break moves but not as you know them, in this triple bill from breakdancing troupe Bad Taste Cru. As well as flipping themselves into spins, the Cru, originally from Northern Ireland, also demonstrate the dance’s potential to…
