Theatre

Gerry Mulgrew - The Lesson

2 Oct 2008

Gerry Mulgrew is a smart director, but when he’s in the rehearsal room he prefers to work from instinct. ‘I respond to Peter Stein when he says a director should have unlimited enthusiasm and absolutely no idea of what he’s going to do,’ says the man…

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…

Cherry Blossom

2 Oct 2008

MULTI-MEDIA PLAY Catherine Grosvenor’s Cherry Blossom is an impassioned attempt to represent the experience of Poles migrating to the West, while Lorne Campbell’s direction ensures that the play – performed in English and Polish – is understandable…

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…

Something Wicked This Way Comes

2 Oct 2008

STAGE ADAPTATION With no budget to keep to, the human imagination can run wild in the best possible way. Which is why director Gill Robertson shied away from staging Something Wicked This Way Comes for so long. Ray Bradbury’s 1962 novel is filled…

The Porcelain Project

2 Oct 2008

DANCE/VISUAL ART In the normal run of things, dancers rehearse, set-makers build and eventually the two elements come together. Not so with The Porcelain Project. The latest offering from Belgium’s Needcompany started life as an artwork by…

The Tiger Who Came to Tea

2 Oct 2008

STAGE ADAPTATION Uninvited dinner guests can be a pain, especially when they arrive armed with a big appetite. But it’s unlikely any of the readers of The Tiger Who Came to Tea haven’t fantasised about just such an occurrence taking place in their…

Can’t Smile Without You

2 Oct 2008

OK, we’ve had the ABBA musical, the Queen musical, the Pet Shop Boys musical, the Rod Stewart musical and the Madness musical. So, what the theatre world really needs now is a stage extravaganza inspired by the life and work of that…

Cryptic Productions

2 Oct 2008

Cathie Boyd takes her research seriously. She wasn’t comfortable directing a modern opera set in the Caribbean without getting a proper sense of the place. So, at the start of this year, she took a trip to Haiti. ‘I wanted to know what Haiti looks 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…

Mary Poppins

2 Oct 2008

At least one commentator has compared Sarah Palin, the American vice-presidential hopeful, to everyone’s favourite nanny. ‘This election isn’t about the issues any more,’ wrote Steven Wells in The Guardian recently. ‘It’s about America’s strange desire…

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…

Glasgay! - Tennessee Williams

18 Sep 2008

Some years ago, I attended a conference where a debate about the work of Tennessee Williams came very nearly to blows. The bone of contention involved Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which the character Brick confesses an attraction to a friend that surpasses…

Cherry Blossom

18 Sep 2008

What does the word ‘collaboration’ make you think of? Director Lorne Campbell thought he knew until he tried it for himself. ‘You think of something cosy and cuddly,’ he says. ‘But this has been really hard. We’re still friends, still happy and excited…

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…

Noises Off

18 Sep 2008

REVIVAL Bringing farce to the fore, Michael Frayn’s 80s parody is touring once again, revealing the merry antics of a second-rate theatre company both on and off stage as it struggles with its ludicrous sex comedy, Nothing On. Nestling at the core…

Offshore

18 Sep 2008

Alan Wilkins triumphed in this year’s Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland as the author of Carthage Must Be Destroyed, a knotty drama about the political mindset. Now he’s teamed up with Glasgow’s Birds of Paradise, a company dedicated to putting…

Six Acts of Love

18 Sep 2008

NEW PLAY The Scottish Government’s Homecoming programme is not until next year, but Ioanna Anderson is getting in early. At the age of 38, she’s planning to move back to her native Edinburgh after spending the best part of 20 years in Ireland, where…

Mary Poppins

18 Sep 2008

MUSICAL In 1964, when Mary Poppins opened at the cinema, it immediately amassed an army of fans. One woman, however, was distinctly unimpressed by the all-singing, all-dancing Disney adaptation – the novel’s author, PL Travers. Thirty years later…

Arches LIVE!

18 Sep 2008

Although billed as a theatre festival, the Arches’ annual celebration of performers who are ‘determined to subvert and surprise’ is just as likely to delight art-lovers, many of the events crossing the boundary between performance and installation. One…

Follow Me

18 Sep 2008

NEW PLAY Drawing a dazzling trail of four and five-star reviews since its world premiere at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year, Follow Me is a sparsely staged emotive tale about Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in Britain, which has arrived on…

Humble Boy

18 Sep 2008

REVIVAL Following its 32-week sell-out nationwide tour of Abigail’s Party, London Classic Theatre returns to Musselburgh with Charlotte Jones’ award-winning Humble Boy. Artistic director Michael Cabot has mixed memories of his last visit to Scotland…

Macbeth

18 Sep 2008

CLASSIC On the surface, Lucy Pitman-Wallace’s Macbeth is set up brilliantly. Set in medieval Scotland – as opposed to modern gun-slinging versions – we see a wild, desolate land; large wooden beams rising into the air, creating a fortress around…

Sunset Song

18 Sep 2008

Voted Scotland’s favourite novel after the publication of The List’s 100 Best Scottish Books of all Time in 2005, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song is a work that soars above its set-text status. In the first in-house production by Aberdeen’s His…

All the world’s a stage

15 Sep 2008

Merchant City Festival (25-28 Sep) www.merchantcityfestival.com Located in the heart of old Glasgow, this event locates a programme of film, theatre, comedy, visual arts, street theatre, live music, food and fashion within an area of real…

Raising the curtain

15 Sep 2008

The List steps out from the wings and showcases the very best performance spaces and cherry picks the shows you cannot afford to miss.

Only the brave

Arches Live!

4 Sep 2008

As Arches Live! returns to Glasgow for its sixth year, David Pollock talks to new artistic director Jackie Wylie about her vision for the annual celebration of experimental theatre and performance art

Macbeth

4 Sep 2008

The last time Liam Brennan starred as Macbeth it was in a modern-day interpretation in Musselburgh in which the soldiers wore khaki, news was conveyed by TV screen, and when the thane of Cawdor heard bells it was the sound of his mobile. Ten years…

Sunset Song

4 Sep 2008

Director Kenny Ireland is looking to instil some pride in the nation's literary heritage by bringing Lewis Grassic Gibbon's classic tale of community, national identity and sexual awakening back to the stage. Set in an early 20th century farming…

Mother Courage and Her Children

4 Sep 2008

One of the neglected aspects of Mother Courage and Her Children, Brecht's great condemnation of capitalism as it is manifested in war, is its humour. There's a certain dark perversity to Brecht's story, which depicts a mother inadvertently sacrificing…

List picks: Theatre

4 Sep 2008

Scottish Ballet, Sunset Song, Mother Courage and her Children, Fleeto, Macbeth, Arches Live!, Don Juan

Absurd Person Singular

4 Sep 2008

Alan Ayckbourn's decades-long journey through English suburban angst was seldom better exemplified than in Absurd Person Singular. Central to the story is the compulsion of people to consume and accumulate wealth to the detriment of their emotional…

Amada

4 Sep 2008

Stories about prostitutes in the theatre are generally tales of suffering and abuse, yet this piece, adapted by Cora Bisset from a short story by Isabel Allende, takes an unorthodox approach to familiar subject matter. There's a transformative beauty to…

Don Juan

Juan for the ladies

4 Sep 2008

Misogynist, sex god or libertine? Don Juan is all this and more, as theatre director Jeremy Raison tells Mark Fisher

Flashdance

4 Sep 2008

It's time to pull on those off-the-shoulder crop tops and leg-warmers and return to the 80s as this West End version of the popular film about welder Alex, who dreams of enrolling at the Shipley Dance Academy, arrives north of the border. The production…

Fleeto

4 Sep 2008

The perceived increase in knife crimes on the streets of Scotland is steadily raising awareness of a deadly culture creeping through the nation's young population. Knives continue to be used only in around eight percent of violent crimes, but it's the…

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

4 Sep 2008

It's been 54 years since Seven Brides for Seven Brothers set a new bar for Hollywood big screen productions, but, as a new national tour of the musical suggests, it's still undergoing numerous theatrical reincarnations. What exactly is it about this…

Sex and Chocolate

4 Sep 2008

A 50th birthday. Alone. In your office while your colleagues are out on the razz. This tripartite hell sounds like the stuff of a depressing dramatic monologue rather than a fantasy romp, but life-affirming comedy is precisely the aim of writer Rona…

Slick

4 Sep 2008

Another chance to see Vox Motus' daft satire on cruelty, greed and casual violence, in which a Glasgow family discovers oil spurting from their toilet, fresh from its premiere at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Expect some funny gags and a novel…

The Arches' Brick Award winner announced

4 Sep 2008

The Arches have announced the winner of their Brick Award, offering £1k to an emergent performance company or artist to re-stage their piece at the theatre next year. Crocosmia by The Little Bulb Theatre and The Night Flyer by The Paper Cinema and Kora…

Jihad: Inner Struggle

edfest.tv - video

1 Sep 2008

Jihad: Inner Struggle tells the story of the similarities, differences and prejudices that exist, as two people from completely different cultural perspectives get to know each other

I Went To The House But Did Not Enter

edfest.tv - video

1 Sep 2008

Three iconic 20th century texts, the theatrical genius of Heiner Goebbels and the virtuosic vocal talents of the Hilliard Ensemble, specialists in both medieval and contemporary music

Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray

Effective storytelling makes for an adaptation with impact

29 Aug 2008

In the closing moments of Dorian Gray, a bright light shines out into the audience, temporarily blinding us. Something most people aren't used to, but those who spend their life in the spotlight are all too familiar with. It's this -- the trappings of…

I Went To The House But I Did Not Enter

Musical reflection of literary masters

29 Aug 2008

There has been no shortage of theatre that examines the disaffection and atomisation of modern life over the last century, but it’s less common to find a piece that selects four noted 20th century authors to explore the theme, then translates their work…

One Small Step

edfest.tv - video

28 Aug 2008

Check your oxygen, adjust your spacesuit and buckle up for the biggest mission of your life…. to the moon.

Guy Masterson

edfest.tv - video

28 Aug 2008

Guy Masterson provides an insight into the exiting world of theatre.

Ruhe

edfest.tv - video

27 Aug 2008

A recital of beautiful Schubert song is brutally interrupted by people who want to talk about their voluntary enlistment in the SS.

Kiddy-Fiddler on the Roof

edfest.tv - video

27 Aug 2008

At Townsville Comprehensive, teacher Arnold Finkler is falsely accused of molestation and chased by an enraged mob of parents.

Eye to the future at the end of the line for Edinburgh Festival 2008

Alan Bissett's festival blog

27 Aug 2008

Ah, the end of the Fringe. Goodbye rain. Goodbye bright-eyed young hopefuls thrusting flyers. Goodbye posh accents. How was it for you? Depending on who you talk to, plays this year have been too bleak/political/teenage. Given the gloomy political…

Weights

edfest.tv - video

26 Aug 2008

1978: a gunshot in a gritty LA bar. A life changed forever. Lynn Manning's poetic, musical, mesmerising, pulverising 2007 hit returns.