Theatre, Reviews

Kin

Heartfelt exploration of motherhood starring Donna Rutherford

This sensitive exploration of our relationships with our mothers as we both grow older carefully uses a mixture of live performance and pre-recorded interviews to create a heartfelt and moving show. Sitting at tea-lain tables with televisions displaying…

A Clockwork Orange

Stylish, shocking, all-male adaptation of Anthony Burgess' classic novel

Theatre company Action to the Word’s high-energy, all-male adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s classic novel relocates the fable to a futuristic northern England, full of rippling muscles, bronzed flesh and lashings of casual sex and…

Monstrous Acts

Bluebeard inspires 15th century prison romance

The first ten minutes of this production from Australia’s Out Cast Theatre are wordless. When the dialogue finally kicks in, it rather punctures the wonderfully charged atmosphere of the opening scenes, which establish the power dynamic between a pair…

Wrong Place, Right Time

Generation X drama that’s heavy on the clichés

Ah, the quarterlife crisis; a life-slump suffered by 20-something Generation Y-ers with big dreams, little direction and zero financial security. With the big three-oh looming, Sophie Willan, Léonie Higgins and Lowri Evans explore its grip in three…

Miss Havisham’s Expectations

Linda Marlowe deconstructs Dickens’ jilted bride

Without doubt one of Charles Dickens’ most infamous creations, Miss Havisham casts an eerie shadow over Great Expectations, the black heart of the story, a woman ruled by spite but also suffering deeply from her own heartache at being jilted. Linda…

Breathing Corpses

Promising exploration of death from Exeter University Theatre Company

In La Ronde, Arthur Schnitzler sets up a Newton’s cradle of sexual relationships: one person sleeps with another, who sleeps with another and so on. Laura Wade’s 2005 play, first seen at the Royal Court, charts a similar chain reaction, only of death…

Nothing is Really Difficult

None-more-Fringe physical theatre performance

Inside a purpose-built plywood cube on George Square, three grown men run around, striking poses and indulging in slapstick behaviour, with the odd flash of profundity and occasionally sinister undertones. None of them utters a word, and at one point…

Kemble’s Riot

Political intrigue with superbly engaging performance from Richard Hansell

Kemble's Riot recreates 66 nights of rioting in 1809 when the Covent Garden Theatre increased its ticket prices. With the audience drafted in as the rioters, split pro- or anti- theatre manager John Kemble, sitting on the fence is not an…

Stones in His Pockets

Tron production pits rural life against Hollywood megabucks

The stars of last year’s Tron panto couldn’t have found a better vehicle for their versatile talents than Marie Jones’ comedy about the arrival of a Hollywood film crew in a rural Irish town. In the lead roles of itinerant former video shop proprietor…

As You Like It

Outdoor productio of Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy by Bard in the Botanics

‘All the world’s a stage’ could be the perfect tag line for a theatre company that, year after year, plies its trade in every corner of Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens and whose actors make their entrances from behind trees and exit across stretches of lawn.

Passing Through

Scottish rom-com has a sense of fun that never fully translates into drama

If any more proof were needed that the Scottish rom-com has become a fully-fledged theatrical genre, Passing Through is it. Alistair Rutherford’s play weaves through Glasgow much as the production has travelled across Scotland over the last year…

Whatever Gets You Through the Night

Powerful piece exploring the many Scotlands that exist in the wee hours

Not even the most hardened cynic could sniff at the ambition of this Vital Spark project headed up by Cora Bissett, who has invited writers and musicians from across the land to create work exploring the many Scotlands that exist between the hours of…

Alan Cumming, John Tiffany and Andrew Goldberg production of Macbeth

Stunning performance by Alan Cumming as Shakespeare's tyrant king

Alan Cumming’s celebrity status and many sidelines, including as a novelist and campaigner, sometimes threaten to eclipse the fact that he’s an incredibly versatile actor. There aren’t many other stars with the courage, energy and charisma to pull off…

One Elliot Park

Imaginative psychological thriller from Edinburgh-based Siege Perilous

Part psychological thriller, part cop drama, Lindsay Miller's One Elliot Park asks just how much our neighbours affect our lives. The inhabitants of three flats in an ordinary Edinburgh tenement return to find their front doors wide open – but nothing…

Hadda and Hassan Lekliches!

One Day in Spring goes out on a high with a rich trip through Morocco's troubled recent history

The National Theatre of Scotland and Oran Mor’s One Day in Spring season goes out on a high at the Traverse this week, with a second outing for Jaouad Essounani's energetic two-hander, which takes a trip through Morocco’s troubled recent history with a…

Krapp’s Last Tape/Footfalls

Meticulously choreographed and compellingly performed Beckett double bill

Dominic Hill’s pairing of two short Beckett plays, rounding off his first season in charge at the Citz, produces a fascinating and powerful portrait of old age, regret and the unreliability of memory. Gerard Murphy gives a nicely understated performance…

Oliver!

Impressively staged if sometimes trivial production of Lionel Bart's musical

Lionel Bart’s phenomenally successful musical was always a kind of Dickens-lite, the composer jettisoning much of the source novel’s gritty social commentary and satire in favour of glossy set pieces and a slightly cloying ‘lor’ love us’ attitude.

Sleeping Beauty Insomnia

Israeli War-set play with absorbing characterisation and comedy

Lebanese playwright Abdelrahim Alawji bounds to the front of the stage. ‘This play is set in a theatre, during the Israeli war, where people used to hide during the...’ Then boom, acrid smoke and the lights go up on two figures clinging on to each…

Anne Boleyn

Howard Brenton's iconoclastic historical drama is a hands-down crowd-pleaser

You can see why the original Globe theatre production of Anne Boleyn sold out, and why Howard Brenton’s iconoclastic re-imagining of Henry VIII’s second wife was subsequently sent on a tour of the UK: the show is a hands down, no-arguments…

Roman Bridge

An unflinchingly claustrophobic production with bold performances and muscular dialogue

There’s a knowing nod to Samuel Beckett in Martin Travers’ Roman Bridge, the first full production in the National Theatre of Scotland’s Reveal 2012 season. The main protagonists are a pair of ragged-trousered hobos, who cling to each other, eat, sleep…

Enquirer

Whether by luck or incredible foresight, the National Theatre of Scotland’s exploration of the demise of the newspaper industry couldn’t be playing at a more auspicious time. Entering the top floor of the Hub at Pacific Quay, the first thing that draws…

Further Than the Furthest Thing

Haunting, beautifully-designed production of Zinnie Harris' play

From ripping out the seating for a powerful in-the-round production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus to the Mad Men-style two-storey 1950s maisonette of A Doll’s House, Dundee Rep has often impressed with its bold, imaginative use of design. The company’s…

King Lear

David Hayman heads an impressive ensemble cast in a gripping production of Shakespeare's play

Incredibly, it’s 33 years since David Hayman appeared in a Shakespeare play at the Citz, and his casting here, as the Bard’s aged monarch, raging against the dying of the light, provides a link to that spell in the 1970s-1990s when the Glasgow…

The Lieutenant of Inishmore

Comedy about republicanism, terrorists and dead cats follows predictable arc

A comedy about republicanism, terrorists, and dead cats that’s more fun than it sounds, The Lieutenant of Inishmore displays Martin McDonagh’s talent for harnessing the comic potential in those peculiarly Irish turns of phrase. Many of the play’s best…

Could You Please Look into the Camera

Clunky, unengaging and under-rehearsed piece on Syria

Great theatre will, at some point, emerge from the Arab Spring. This is not it. As rough and raw as a piece about Syria would have to be in the face of unfolding events, Mohammed Al Attar’s patchwork of real people’s experiences of detention is also…