Tron, GlasgowYou couldn't accuse Sylvia Dow of being over-hasty. After a lifetime in arts administration, she has waited until her 70s to make her playwriting debut. There is nothing antiqua…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:38PMRoyal LyceumThe play by Arthur Miller that became Death of a Salesman was originally called The Inside of His Head, but the title could apply equally to Vanishing Point's nightmarish contrib…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:14PMFringe veterans have various strategies for surviving Edinburgh – from stirring up debate to remembering your motivation – but all agree on the benefits of limiting beer intakeOf all the…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:04AMPitlochry festival theatreSince director Richard Baron staged The 39 Steps at Perth Theatre in 1998, the adaptation has been on a journey as long and involved as that of Richard Hannay when …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:26PMTron, GlasgowAs titles for riotous comedies go, this one had to be the grimmest. The stones in Sean Harkin's pockets are there to weigh him down as he drowns. His suicide, as playwright Mari…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:53PMArches, GlasgowThe earliest hours of the morning are also the most solitary: a drunk staggering home; a security guard watching CCTV; a forlorn Facebook user hoping someone will message back…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 11:15AMPitlochry festival theatreThe murder-mystery always lets you down. It's a genre that compels you to piece together the clues, then leaves you with a sense of emptiness the moment the detecti…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:56AMTramway, GlasgowAlan Cumming plays every part in Shakespeare's tragedy set inside a mental asylum, writes Mark FisherIn his one-man Elsinore, Robert Lepage had to have a sword fight with him…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 10:53AMDundee RepAt the hands of director Jemima Levick, Shakespeare's isle is not only full of noise but women, too. As seagulls scream over a very 21st-century set of washed-up bin bags, computer…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:28PMPitlochry festival theatreSeymour the florist has a lot in common with Macbeth. Like Shakespeare's antihero, the misfit at the centre of Little Shop of Horrors gets his first break through h…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:15PMCitizens, GlasgowSince the rise of the black-box studio in the 1960s and 70s, the place for Beckett's shorter plays has generally been in small rooms before select audiences. It's fascinatin…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:35PMTheatremakers don't become game-changers overnight. And a rare revival of John McGrath's 1966 play Events While Guarding the Bofors Gun is a reminder of a playwright who would go on to shape…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:18AMVarious venues, EdinburghThere is an extraordinary moment towards the start of Kindur, one of the highlights of this year's Imaginate children's theatre festival. We have been enjoying some …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:35PMCitizens, GlasgowThere's a sense of impermanence about Dominic Hill's austere King Lear. The tables and chairs are forever being overturned and whisked away, as if in response to Lear's unst…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 10:34AMThis year's EIF offers plenty to look forward to, from a glow-in-the-dark race up Arthur's Seat to a Polish Macbeth and the Mariinsky Ballet. What will you be booking for?You've got to admir…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:59AMCitizens, GlasgowThe greatest challenge in staging Betrayal – written by Harold Pinter in response to his seven-year affair with Joan Bakewell – is to make it seem more than a study of n…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:12PMTraverse, EdinburghBinary thinking is at the heart of this fascinating, if ultimately frustrating new play. It is the result of a two-way collaboration between Scotland's Stellar Quines and …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:15PMTron, GlasgowThe birds and the bees in JC Marshall's timely play signify not sex but death. In a poetic flourish, she pictures the victims of a mid-air terrorist atrocity being accompanied b…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:26PMHis Majesty's, AberdeenMention The Wicker Man and people tend to snigger. Something in the movie's anachronistic juxtaposition of Scottish island setting, English folklore and early 70s peri…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:15PMTron, GlasgowThe scene is a house in Harare where preparations are nearing completion for a wedding. The excitement is all the more intense because of the return of Mwana, the groom's brothe…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:02PMRoyal Lyceum, EdinburghIn the theatre is a stage. On the stage is a panelled room. In the panelled room is a wardrobe. In the wardrobe is a music box. Like Russian dolls, these boxes within …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:30PMTraverse, EdinburghYou see a pinprick of light. It could be the beam of an optician testing your peripheral vision. Or it could be the twinkle of Andromeda, a mere 2.5m light years away and …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:35PMPenilee Community Centre, GlasgowIn only one of the sketch-like scenes in John Retallack's community show for the National Theatre of Scotland and Company of Angels does anything that could …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:50PMThe National Theatre of Scotland is under fire for neglecting homegrown drama. But what is Scottishness, anyway?Can a play be Scottish? And if so, how? These were the questions put forward a…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:11PMRoyal Lyceum, EdinburghMaureen Beattie enters with her hair dripping wet. It's not a conventional way for an actor to come on, still less so when playing a would-be mother superior. As she s…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:09PMCitizens, GlasgowIn 1967, an unknown playwright called Peter Nichols sent a script on spec to the Citizens theatre. Remarkable not only for its subject matter but also for its tone, A Day in…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:36PMOran Mor, GlasgowIf ever there was a character ready to leap into a sitcom it is Leo Butler's Nina. Played by Denise Hoey, she is the epitome of tactlessness, the old university friend who h…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:20AMTraverse, EdinburghIs it a fancy-dress party? An elaborate cabaret? A rerun of The Good Old Days? An esoteric piece of durational art? It's impossible to compartmentalise Stewart Laing's thr…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:46PMA spate of plays dealing with religious oppression in the country is a reminder that we can take years to process collective traumaTowards the end of Irish Theatre Magazine's annual internat…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:58AMTramway, GlasgowFor a mesmerising 90 minutes, we don't hear a single word from the six actors in Saturday Night, a new work from the company Vanishing Point. They appear to hear each other, …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:17PMChekhov's life has provided rich dramatic material for other playwrights, as has Joe Orton's – who else might suit the treatment?Is it wise to write a play about a playwright? We accept it…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:07PM
