Coffee-Table Notes

Peter Arnott had never read The Cone Gatherers when he was asked by Aberdeen Performing Arts to adapt Robin Jenkins' 1955 novel for their new touring production which opens at the city's His Majesty's Theatre next week. For a playwright who has already dramatised Neil M Gunn's The Silver Darlings for the same company, has penned a version of Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, and whose original works such as The Breathing House are often steeped in Scotland's rich literary heritage, this is quite an admission. Such is Arnott's curiosity, however, that the prospect of diving in to Jenkins' World War Two set work about notions of good and bad on a Scottish country estate was one to relish. “I have to confess to my shame,” says Arnott with a mix of sheepishness and ebullience, “that not only did I not know The Cone Gatherers as a novel, but I didn't know Robin Jenkins as a writer either. Once I started reading his work, however, I

It’s early evening on a gloriously sunny Saturday, and the Teatro Spiegeltent is a sell-out. Onstage inside, Squeeze co-frontman Chris Difford has just been interrupted from a series of acoustic renditions of the band’s greatest hits by the appearance of comedian and former Edinburgh resident Norman Lovett. Lovett has just used a faux This Is Your Life routine as a contrivance to stumble onstage and into a series of shaggy-dog stories with no real punchline. Such an unlikely double-act appears to have been formed simply because both parties quite like each other, and once liked a drink or three. The combination of Cool For Cats, Up The Junction, et al, with Lovett’s deadpan non-sequiters and a series of amusing video projections to accompany each song is a random, slightly shambolic alliance that never fully gels, but which is all the funnier because of that. For the first half of the show, Difford and Lovett are forced to contend with loud ambient electronica booming in

Dundee is a long way from Cheltenham Ladies College, and not just in geographical terms either. Yet, without such an august institution commissioning playwright Sharman Macdonald to write a new work, it's unlikely that her play now known as She Town would be opening in a brand new production at Dundee Rep this week. “It was the suggestion of my very first literary agent that I write something for them,” the Glasgow-born actor turned writer says. “I said that I’ve only got one idea, and they’re not going to want to do that.” Given that that idea involved a cast of forty playing a community of vocal working-class women in 1930s Dundee, you can see her point. Especially as the play was set against a backdrop of social and political strife, with intimations of the Spanish Civil War en route. “I was reading an economics book, and there was this section in it about a society of women in Dundee during the depression, which I’d never heard of. There was a sentence in the boo

Inveresk Lodge Gardens, Musselburgh 4 stars The joy of gardening, by all accounts, comes with the sense of purposeful distraction it brings alongside the appeal of growing things in a way that remains both practical and creative. Much the same can be said for Dora and Maddy, the two sisters in Jules Horne’s deliciously brutal play, performed outdoors in Nutshell’s touring revival of the company’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe hit. As the audience are welcomed into one of East Lothian’s most charming nooks with tea and scones, there’s an initial village fete feel to Kate Nelson’s production. This is accentuated by actors Nicola Jo Cully and Gowan Calder’s chatty pre-show introduction that segues into the show itself. At first the siblings are, in Maddy’s words, “young and immortal,” burying their teddy-bears and launching dismembered Sindy dolls from aloft the shed roof as the garden becomes den, playground and safe haven from the grown-up world. The falls which go on to de

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars If Adam and Eve had scromphed down home-grown avocadoes instead of apples, things might have turned out a whole lot rosier in the garden. Or at least that’s the impression you get from the domestic Eden built by the biblically named Ade, Kane and Evelyn in Sylvia Dow’s new play, lovingly directed by Selma Dimitrijevic for the London-based Greyscale company in association with Stellar Quines. A couple, giddy on the possibilities of each other, fall together, set up home and play happy families, knee-deep in a forest of plants and acquired memories that gradually fill up their room. The latter is depicted via an extended wordless sequence that would put some furniture removal firms to shame, as the pair embark on a great adventure of magic moments and endless games of Scrabble. Things only darken with a seemingly estranged prodigal’s return and a death in the family that comes gift-wrapped. All this is implied rather than told in a very pa

As a writer, Sylvia Dow has just come of age. As she prepares for the Greyscale company's production of her first full stage play, A Beginning, A Middle and An End, which opens at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, this week, Dow is clearly on a roll. Dow has ducked out of rehearsals with Greyscale director Selma Dimitrijevic for the afternoon to attend the tea-time launch of the thirtieth edition of annual literary compendium, New Writing Scotland. Dow's short play, A Little Touch of Cliff in the Evening, gives the volume its title, and, like many of her works, uses a pop reference to make its point. While the sainted Cliff Richard is the signifier for her New Writing Scotland play, it's a Bee Gees song that gave Dow the title for It's Only Words, a radio play written especially for veteran actress Edith MacArthur. This play receives a rehearsed reading at the Traverse in Edinburgh to coincide with A Beginning, A Middle and An End's visit. Yet another play,

Royal Lyceum Theatre 4 stars On a movie screen, a terrified young woman is pleading for her life in what could be a scene from a lo-fi horror flick. The next time we see the woman we find out is called Alice, she’s in front of a camera again, just as scared as she auditions for a hard-core porn film. Is Alice for real here, or is she faking it, to death if necessary? These are some of the questions being asked by director Matthew Lenton in Vanishing Point’s look at the dark side of pornography, co-produced with two Italian companies and Trmway, Glasgow. Here, as Alice’s tale is paralleled by an internet porn addict’s own descent, performers, directors and consumers become complicit in some psycho-sexual rabbit hole where love, erotica and even cheap thrills are forsaken in favour of what looks like extreme forms of mutual abuse. The third in Vanishing Point’s loose-knit trilogy of impressionistic works seen largely behind glass, where Interiors and Saturday Night loo