Mark Fisher

The Caretaker

CLASSIC Directing a classic Harold Pinter play is, says Philip Breen, like staging an opera, so exactly is it written. ‘Every pause is written for a reason and he’s always right,’ says the director, returning to the Citz after his successes with…

Peter Pretsell

PRINTS AND PAINTINGS There’s a light-hearted sense of joy and goodwill in these two parallel exhibitions celebrating the four-decade output of the late Peter Pretsell, who was both student and lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art and, appropriately…

Moonwalking

NEW PLAY Her play clocks in at less than an hour and will be performed in front of an audience eating their lunch, but you can’t fault Nicola Wilson for ambition. Moonwalking, part of Oran Mor’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint season, considers nothing less…

Gerry Mulgrew - The Lesson

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

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…

Don Juan

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…

Cryptic Productions

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…

Offshore

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…

Fleeto

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…

Cherry Blossom

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…

Six Acts of Love

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…

Mother Courage And Her Children

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…

Macbeth

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…

Don Juan

Juan for the ladies

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

4.48 Psychosis

Painful journey into despair

Having seen Grzegorz Jarzyna's mesmerising production of this Sarah Kane play on the intimate stage of TR Warszawa in Poland, I was concerned the playwright's sad mediation on suicide would lose its intensity on the bigger stage of the King's. I needn't…

Jidariyya

Palestinian end game

There's a sad irony that a play about mortality should open in Edinburgh only days after the death of its author. Mahmoud Darwish was a major Palestinian poet and his Jidariyya was a response to a life-threatening heart attack a decade ago. It was…

Bite the Dust

Polish satire lost in translation

First there is the show that should have been. Originally staged in the late-70s, Bite the Dust is a satirical sideswipe at the military mindset. It proved so controversial in Poland that playwright Tadeusz Rólewicz withdrew the performance rights.

Class Enemy

A different class

When Nigel Williams’ Class Enemy made its debut at London’s Royal Court in 1978, hip hop was still a phenomenon of the American underground. It would never have occurred to a director to incorporate it into this portrayal of a bunch of teenagers in a…

Surviving Spike

The taming of the Goon

He was a maverick, a one-off, a free-associating comedy anarchist. So what’s the point in paying tribute to Spike Milligan with a bio-play that is safe, conventional and cosy? The tone of Surviving Spike by Richard Harris has far more in common with the…

Dybbuk

Jewish ghost story fails to haunt

The idea to combine two different treatments of the Jewish myth of the dybbuk is inspired. In sandwiching together the play by Szymon Anski, a traditional drama about a woman possessed by the spirit of her dead lover, and a modern story by Hanna Krall…

A Drunk Woman Looks at The Thistle

Scotland in a Mina key

If Liz Lochhead had continued the opening speech of Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off for another hour, it could have sounded a lot like A Drunk Woman Looks at the Thistle. Written by crime novelist Denise Mina as a response to Hugh…

The Tailor of Inverness

Stitching up the 20th century

Matthew Zajac's father used to tell a story about how to catch a fox. The method is to get the creature in the open then circle it. As long as you complete the circle, the fox will stay grounded. Then you spiral inwards and take your prey. Zajac does…

Global Warming is Gay

Heggie raises the temperature on saving the planet

Lifestyle choice? Ethical dilemma? Or is going green just a bit gay? These are the questions posed by playwright Iain Heggie as he gently satirises our responses to the new eco-orthodoxy. For opportunistic Green MSP Graham Orbison, the drive to save…