Mark Brown

Beckett double bill to be staged at The Citz

Director Dominic Hill discusses his productions of Krapp's Last Tape and Footfalls

15 May 2012

Following on from the success of his productions of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal and Shakespeare’s King Lear, Dominic Hill concludes his inaugural season at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre with a double bill of short plays by the great, Irish dramatist Samuel…

Political theatre festival Mayfesto to look at the August 2011 riots and Arab Spring

Programme features Chalk Farm, Springtime and No Time for Art

17 Apr 2012

All the world’s a stage The annual Tron festival Mayfesto engages with political struggle from the Egyptian revolution to the riots in England, as Mark Brown discovers Two years ago the then recently appointed director of the Tron Theatre in Glasgow…

Waterproof / From Paisley to Paolo

Comic double-bill features some laughs but lacks freshness and subtlety

14 Mar 2012

These short comic plays, being toured by Mull Theatre, began their lives at A Play, a Pie and a Pint (Òran Mór, Glasgow’s famous lunchtime theatre). Both contemplate the life disappointments of young, Scottish, working-class men (most often with a…

The Overcoat

All-Scottish cast lead excellent classic satire

23 Aug 2011

An up-to-the minute, fast-paced version of Gogol’s great satire, Catherine Grosvenor’s sharp and hilarious translation (for Finnish companies Rhymäteatteri and Ace Productions) finds us in the world of Edinburgh banking. A fine, all-Scottish cast is led…

The Missing

John Tiffany's National Theatre of Scotland production of Andrew O’Hagan book

23 Aug 2011

‘The passage of time has been really necessary. I needed to get some distance,’ says Andrew O’Hagan. He is referring to the 14 years which have passed since John Tiffany (then literary manager at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, now associate director…

Hedda Gabler

Stark and surprising modern adaptation

23 Aug 2011

A boldly minimal, variably acted and oddly updated adaptation of Ibsen’s great drama from the young actors of Palindrome Theatre Company of Austin, Texas. One of the Norwegian Bard’s characters will, we are told, ‘piss his pants’, another is ‘a piece of…

Dust

Mining a rich seam of anger among Thatcher and coal industry

17 Aug 2011

It’s 2011 and (you might need party hats and a few crates of beer at the ready) Margaret Thatcher has died. Such is the lovely dream (er, I mean ‘fictional scenario’, of course) at the heart of Ade Morris’s Dust, a play set largely in Arthur Scargill’s…

Paper Tom

Effective piece of issue-based theatre dealing with UK treatment of soldiers

16 Aug 2011

From the trenches of the First World War to the conflict in Afghanistan, Paper Tom (which moves back-and-forth between the two) asks how far British society has come in its treatment of soldiers when they return home scarred psychologically by battle.

Tonight Sandy Grierson Will Lecture, Dance and Box

Cultural and political history piece leaves deep impression

16 Aug 2011

Genealogy combines with a cultural and political history of the modern world and some benign audience participation in this charmingly imperfect play. From a drum and bass club in Lisbon in 2010, it traces the

King of Scotland

Strong presentation of Iain Heggie’s second best monologue

12 Aug 2011

It’s 11 years since the premiere of Iain Heggie’s free adaptation of Gogol’s satire Diary of a Madman. Jonathan Watson, star of TV football sketch show Only an Excuse?, follows Brian Pettifer and the late Gerard Kelly in tackling the role of Tommy…

Interview: Stephen Earnhart - Director of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Haruki Murakami adaptation centrepiece of Edinburgh International Festival

11 Aug 2011

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Stephen Earnhart’s stage adaptation of a novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, epitomises the International Festival’s desire to explore connections between East and West, writes Mark Brown

Turandot

A radical completion of Puccini's unfinished opera

11 Aug 2011

The familiar tune of Nessun Dorma, from Puccini’s unfinished opera Turandot, is played at volume on a Hammond organ, as two men (one representing a hybrid of Puccini and his fictional prince, Kalaf, the other, an androgynous figure, who is, at times…

Leo

Tobias Wegner's vitruoso performance is engaging and imaginative

11 Aug 2011

Leo (played by multi-talented German performer Tobias Wegner) finds himself trapped in a box room. With a charming innocence, he uses his imagination, his hat, his suitcase and a piece of chalk to ease the anxiety and the tedium. As he does so we see…

Shylock

Gareth Armstrong and Guy Masterson take us behind the mask of Shakespeare’s Jew

9 Aug 2011

In a festival overflowing with one-actor shows, Gareth Armstrong’s Shylock, performed by Guy Masterson – a much-loved master of the Fringe monodrama – stands out as a work of real quality. The script, which is offered to us by the character of Tubal…

I, the Dictator - Teatr Wiczy brings show to Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2011

One-man Edinburgh Festival 2011 show reimagines Charlie Chaplin

26 Jul 2011

Teatro Replika – a small fringe theatre in Madrid – is not the most obvious place to catch up with Polish company Teatr Wiczy, whose one-man show about Charlie Chaplin, I, the Dictator, plays Edinburgh throughout the Fringe. It makes more sense…

Leo - Circle of Eleven’s new physical theatre show

Show juxtaposes projected film and live performance to comic effect

26 Jul 2011

Leo, the latest piece from Berlin theatre group Circle of Eleven, is a must for fans of visual and physical theatre. Indeed, fans of Aurora Nova – the late, lamented mini-festival of visual theatre, which ran on the Edinburgh Fringe from 2001–2007…

Nightshade

3 Jul 2007

STRIPTEASE ART In these days of ubiquitous sexploitation advertising and cinematic ‘torture porn’, striptease can seem like an almost quaint activity. Such, indeed, is the thesis of one of the striptease artists in Nightshade, the latest show to be…

The Patriot

8 May 2007

NEW WORK In selecting Grae Cleugh’s The Patriot as the first production of his reign, the Tron Theatre’s new director Gregory Thompson clearly had the zeitgeist in his sights. Unfortunately, the only thing he has shot is his own foot. Cleugh has…