Griselda Murray Brown

Wigtown Book Festival 2009: Highlights from the final weekend

29 Oct 2009

Wigtown Book Festival, hidden deep within rural Dumfries & Galloway, is one of the main events on the UK literary calenday. Griselda Murray Brown spent a weekend sampling the events on offer.

The Fall of Man

Paradise Lost in a bedsit

12 Aug 2009

An affair between middle-aged, middle-class Peter and his children’s Slavic nanny is told with contemporary dialogue and passages from Paradise Lost. Milton’s long lines feel rushed and therefore unlike real-life musings, but powerful body language…

Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard, Duke of York’s Theatre, London

27 Jul 2009

David Leveaux’s West End revival of Stoppard’s Arcadia is the first since its 1993 premiere, not because it’s not good (it’s excellent) but because it’s daunting. It is a play of big, basic questions; of eroticism and advanced mathematics; of…

The History Boys - Byre Theatre, St Andrews, Wed 22 Apr

24 Apr 2009

Incompetent Productions On The Rocks arts festival It's sometime in the ‘80s, somewhere in the North, in an underperforming all-boys secondary school. The unremarkable nature of this setting is there in the set’s drab schoolroom furniture, in the…

Theatre Odyssey - Aristophanes' The Frogs - Tue 21 Apr

22 Apr 2009

Aristophanes’ The Frogs Theatre Odyssey On The Rocks arts festival, St Andrews The first half of Theatre Odyssey’s take on Aristophanes’ The Frogs, an offering from the new On The Rocks arts festival in St Andrews, felt like the most painful kind…

The Grind Show

Carnival slapstick and profound questioning from the TBA Collaborative

19 Aug 2009

A mix of slick physical theatre and naturalistic dialogue, The Grind Show follows wide-eyed ‘Boy’ through a surreal circus. Underworld characters, including the double-bodied Miss Von Ambourg (whose act involves splitting apart to throw daggers at her…

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India - William Dalrymple

17 Dec 2009

(Bloomsbury) William Dalrymple’s publisher describes Nine Lives as his ‘first travel book in a decade’; this is rather misleading. Dalrymple’s own, contradictory phrase, ‘linked non-fiction stories’, is closer to the truth. This collection is, in…

Colm Tóibín - Brooklyn; Patrick McCabe - The Holy City

23 Sep 2009

Colm Tóibín’s and Patrick McCabe’s latest novels – both written during Ireland's 'Celtic Tiger' boom years and published this year – are two very different beasts.

Will Self - Liver And Other Stories

Moments of brilliance are too often lost

17 Sep 2009

'If you are offended by a certain four letter word beginning in 'c' and ending in 't',' Will Self addresses his salt-and-pepper Edinburgh Book Festival audience, 'I suggest you leave now. If you are of a nervous or emotional disposition, I suggest you…

Diana Athill, Paddy Doyle and Iain Banks set for Wigtown Book Festival

15 Sep 2009

Tucked away on the Galloway coast, pretty little Wigtown is home to one of Scotland's worst kept literary secrets. After a bumper year in 2008, the annual Wigtown Book Festival looks set for its busiest year on record, with more than 170 events over 10…

Actus tragicus

Bach in a dolls house

11 Sep 2009

'I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.' Virginia Woolf's sentiment is one the characters in Actus tragicus might well understand - though her black humour would probably be lost on them. Filling the stage is an impressive…

Margaret Atwood - The Year of the Flood

Author launches new work at Edinburgh Book Festival

2 Sep 2009

The Flood which Margaret Atwood brings to an already soggy Charlotte Square gardens is, in fact, a waterless one. It is not sent by a punitive, Old Testament God but rather by scientists of the near future playing Him. Two isolated women, Toby and…

Don Juan in Soho

An energetic young cast but no Rhys Ifans

26 Aug 2009

When the the Guardian calls a show a 'Top ticket', it tends to sell well. The picture accompanying their list of five such tickets features Rhys Ifans as Don Juan in the 2006 premiere of Patrick Marber's Don Juan in Soho (after Moliere); the caption…

Under Milk Wood

Visually appealing production of Dylan Thomas's 'Play for Voices'

26 Aug 2009

A group of girls from Youth Arts Leicestershire, all in their late teens, all dressed as wood nymphs, rock slowly back and forth as we file into the theatre. Their synchronized movements suggest the ebb and flow of the tide. 'To begin at the…

A One Way Street

Eco-friendly yummy mummies in sketch form

25 Aug 2009

The preoccupations of suburban housewives are presented in four, well-observed sketches. Sarah and Lois, trapped in a larder during a kids’ party, argue the merits of ‘genuinely sustainable’ party bags. Paula and Cathy, rehearsing their pitch for a…

Tomb to Womb

A woman's life told in reverse

23 Aug 2009

This play – which tells Margaret’s life story backwards – gets worse as it progresses. While Margaret’s nursing-home frustration and childless marriage are movingly portrayed, her toddler angst is less convincing. Actors never leave the stage and slick…

Heroin(e) For Breakfast

Glamorous, gritty drug drama

21 Aug 2009

It’s 11.40 am real time, perhaps slightly later dramatic time, and before even the stage lights go up we are treated to explicit, morning-gloom sex. But this is not ‘shock tactic’ Fringe theatre. This sex is cartoonish, speeded-up and half-ironic. So…

Killing Me Softly

Rhyming couplets that feel remarkably natural

19 Aug 2009

In this one-man verse play, we are guests at a ‘welcome-home party’ for Sylvia, complete with 80s pop and cheap decorations. Slowly - in rhyming couplets that feel remarkably natural - we learn why we're invited. Our host is chatty, evasive, and…

Almost 10

An absorbing portrait of childhood for adults

18 Aug 2009

Unselfconscious and excitable, nine-year-old Rachel is full of unaired grievances and incisive observations. Targets include her exasperating Bulgarian nanny, ‘best friend’ Hortense and young, blonde schoolteacher Miss Danielle (who the other girls only…

Love’s Labour’s Lost

Unadventurous production of Shakespeare’s wordy comedy

18 Aug 2009

Sex has a tricky habit of getting in the way. So discover the Lords of Navarre when, soon after they swear an oath of celibacy, the alluring Ladies of France arrive on the scene. Despite this young cast’s fashionably modern attire, their production…

Wrecked (A Guardian Reader’s Quest to Save Africa)

Memories and musings at sea

18 Aug 2009

Shipwrecked between continents, a lone woman bobs along in her suitcase considering her childhood abroad and the liberal views she inherited from her mother. This energetic one-woman play would work better as a series of sketches: the characters are…

Iago

A one-man abridgement of Othello

12 Aug 2009

Iago re-performs his soliloquies and conversations in a one-man abridgement of Othello. The other characters, filtered through Iago’s perspective, become caricatures, and his own pathology is thrown into relief. This production resists the urge to…

Baba Yaga Bony Legs

Disappointing multi-sensory adaptation of Russian folktale

10 Aug 2009

Greeted outside the theatre with bread and gooseberry jam, those ‘scared of the dark’ are advised to leave. Those willing to take the risk are led into a darkened room, where the actors’ unmoving shapes are semi-visible. The dark is full of our…

An Evening with Psychosis

Maddeningly unfunny verbatim play

10 Aug 2009

An Evening with Psychosis is a tiresome and ill-conceived multi-media play about losing touch with reality. Dramatised extracts from verbatim interviews conducted with people whose lives have been affected by psychosis (the mother of a psychotic teenage…

Much Ado About Nothing - 25 & 26 April, St Mary’s Quad, St Andrews

27 Apr 2009

Directors Sam Fowles and Alice Jones promised an ‘original’ Much Ado. ‘While we would never dare to look outside such a wonderful script for inspiration,’ they explained, ‘we basically took this as something of a carte blanche to experiment.’ The…