Perth Theatre, 8 February 2013
IN THE BAR after the show, two of the staff are playing cards.

IT looks like a game of snap rather than the poker that has dominated the second half of Conor McPherson’s play, […]

Pitlochry Festival Theatre, 5 December 2012
ON the first preview performance, the audience entered on an ordinary winter’s evening and left, so I’m told, to see the first snowfall of the season. We knew the […]

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 13 September 2012, and touring
WHEN babies are born, they assume they are at the centre of the universe. It’s only as we mature that we realise ours may not be the only […]

Pitlochry Festival Theatre, 7 September 2012
FEW playwrights have ever worried at a theme as consistently as JM Barrie.

IT isn’t only in Peter Pan that the Kirriemuir-born writer lamented the swift passage of […]

Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, 19 August 2012, and touring
TO DESCRIBE  a production based on the songs and poetry of Robert Burns as being especially Scottish may seem redundant.

AFTER all, that is only what you […]

The Long Way Home
MARK FISHER looks at the Highlands and Islands component of HOME, the National Theatre of Scotland’s ambitious launch project taking place in ten locations across Scotland
PEOPLE HAVE been […]

Traverse, Edinburgh, 11 May 2012, and touring
HOWEVER old we are, it never stops being difficult to get our problems in perspective.

WHEN we’re faced with a dilemma that affects us deeply, it seems like the […]

Dundee Rep, 28 March 2012, and touring
EVERYONE in Garry Robson’s wordy drama, based on real events in 1936, is living the life of someone they are not.

THERE is John Gielgud, making a name for himself as a […]

Adam Smith Theatre, Kirkcaldy, 20 February 2012, and touring I HAVE a vivid childhood memory of an episode of Bill and Ben in which the two flowerpot men left their usual patch of land and ventured through a door in the garden wall. SOMETHING about it stayed with me. It was partly the breaking of a tiresome routine, […]

Tron Theatre, Glasgow, 17 February 2012, and touring JOHNNY McKnight is a fly one. As a playwright, he makes like everything is a big laugh. THE two one-hour plays brought together here by Random Accomplice are all gossipy and effervescent, quick-witted jokes and gallus patter with an air of camp. Like the candyfloss shared by Jenny and […]

Perth Theatre, 11 February 2012 PLAYWRIGHTS like to show us characters under pressure. THEY have to be careful, however, not to impose so much pressure their characters simply walk off stage. Whatever the dramatic scenario, the characters have to have a reason for putting up with the discomfort and not doing a runner. In Someone Who’ll Watch Over […]

Barony Bar, Edinburgh, 8 February 2012, and touring YOU’RE sitting in your local and everything looks familiar: special offers chalked on the blackboard, neon advertising signs above the till, the various beer logos on the pumps. BUT look closely and all is not what it seems. Those are not the usual brands of ale on sale, but […]

Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh, 27 January 2012 YOU probably heard the fuss kicked up by fans of the Smiths in the run-up to Christmas. THEY were outraged with department store John Lewis for using one of the indie band’s finest songs, ‘Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want’, as the soundtrack to an advert. What greater insult […]

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 12 November 2011, and touring SAY WHAT you like about the church – and I’m sure you do – but one thing organised religion is notably good at is dealing with births, marriages and deaths. WHEN we want to mark those occasions, even in a secular age, we still tend to look to the […]

Pitlochry Festival Theatre, 31 October 2011 IT’S STRANGE enough that one of Scotland’s most highly attended theatres is in one of the country’s smallest towns. What’s even stranger is that Pitlochry Festival Theatre now appears to be repeating its summer success in the autumn. For the first time, the theatre in the hills has staged a production […]

Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline, 29 October 2011, and touring WE ALL like to imagine books are full of knowledge, but it is with a degree of scepticism that we regard Dr Patricia Baker when she tells us her job is to work out the stories hidden inside ancient scrapbooks. Surely this self-styled ‘scrapologist’ in her forensic lab coat […]

Tramway, Glasgow, 8 October 2011, and touring SILENT MOVIES survived for decades before audiences got to hear what the actors were saying, so perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised by Vanishing Point’s Saturday Night . Like its companion piece Interiors, from 2009, this international co-production is entirely wordless. It’s like theatre for the…[Read more]

Scottish Youth Theatre, Glasgow, 8 October 2011, and touring DESPITE the enormous changes brought about by the industrial and technological revolutions, we have never stopped being spellbound by the fairy story. The world of woodcutters, wolves and forests should mean nothing to the modern child, yet the archetypal narratives of Little Red Riding…[Read more]

Tron Theatre, Glasgow, 5 October 2011, and touring CABARET is the artform we associate with decadence and a kind of end-of-the-world desperation. Perhaps the Emperor Nero was its first practitioner as he fiddled while Rome burned. Most commonly, it is the form we attribute to the nightclubs of 1930s Berlin when the Nazis were on the rise, […]