Coffee-Table Notes

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars Mike Bartlett’s contemporary version of one of the most unforgiving tragedies of all time is a curious beast. On the one hand, this suburban English redux taps into tragically familiar stories of modern-day infanticide. On the other, there’s a glib gallows humour at play which becomes a form of self-protection, as Rachael Stirling strides through her red-brick des-res with the mono-maniacal fury of the original woman scorned. Stirling’s Medea is a flame-haired posh girl on a new build estate who saved upwardly mobile rough diamond Jason from drowning. Unable to deal with Medea’s bolshie ways any longer, Jason has left her for a younger and, as Jason admits, “nicer” model, while Medea is left with only her traumatised little boy and impending homelessness to deal with. While no-one would blame Medea for what she does after being treated so shabbily, her pair of busy-body gal pals and a a tongue-tied brickie looking on imploringly are o

Kings Theatre, Edinburgh 3 stars Death clearly becomes Penelope Keith. Onstage, at least, that is. The last time everyone's favourite cut-glass matriarch appeared on the Kings Theatre stage she played a vicar's widow in Richard Everett's play, Entertaining Angels. This time out, Keith plays the widow of Sam, a tabloid newspaper editor in Keith Waterhouse's stage version of his comic novel. Keith first played June in 1998, when Good Grief played the West End a year after the novel was published. Fourteen years on, and three years after his own passing, Waterhouse's play now looks at times like he was penning an elegy for himself. Keith is cast wonderfully against type as June Pepper, a hard-drinking northern lass who we first meet at home following Sam's funeral. Having promised him that she'd keep a diary of her thoughts following his demise, June's scribblings here become upstage asides. These become a form of therapy for June as she navig

When Louise Quinn found herself in a meeting with twenty people to  discuss what sort of training shoes she should be wearing, she recognised something was amiss. That was when Quinn was fronting the band, Hardbody, the 1990s near misses whose major label masters instigated such a meeting. Such an absurd con-flab may have fed into the narrative for the video that accompanied The Glimmer Song, a single by Quinn’s current combo, the eponymously inclined A Band Called Quinn. In the video, Quinn and the band are brought to life by some evil puppet-master who puts them in a toy theatre where they’re forced to perform as he sees fit. This in turn may have informed BiDiNG TiMe (Remix), Quinn’s version of a play written by Australian auteur Pippa Bailey, which Quinn performs at The Arches in Glasgow this weekend for one night only. BiDiNG TiME charts the rise and fall of Thyme, a young woman chasing love and fame in a man's world. Where Bailey's original version, first p

When Dermot Bolger was first approached to write a stage adaptation of  Ulysses, James Joyce's epic free-form novel set on the streets of Dublin, the playwright and novelist's immediate reaction was one of “sheer palpable terror,” as he remembers it some eighteen years later. “The novel is 265,000 words long, so to adapt something like that for the stage is a huge thing to do. But I remember that I was initially terrified of writing plays and poems at all, so I try and do the things I'm terrified of.” Bolger has had to wait until Andy Arnold's forthcoming production at the Tron to see a full staging of his terror-induced take on Joyce's modernist classic, which charts a life in the day of Leopold Bloom via an experimental stream of consciousness technique that both scandalised and revolutionised contemporary literature. Bolger's original commission from the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, where Joyce's original manuscript is stored, came at a

HMV Picture House, Edinburgh 4 stars The two cuddly toys perched side by side on a stool at the front of the stage don't really fit in with the mirror ball and after-hours pink lighting that sets the mood with the sort of contradictions which has defined Marc Almond's career, from the kitchen-sink sleaze of Soft Cell to torch singing drama queen and beyond. Last year he performed at the Traverse Theatre in Ten Plagues, a darkly dissonant song cycle by playwright Mark Ravenhill and composer Conor Mitchell. For this current Pop Troubadour, Hits and More Tour, Almond has lightened up considerably to revisit a back catalogue that stretches out over more than thirty years. He opens with the call to arms of The Stars We Are, a sweepingly rich scene-setter that already sounds triumphant. Sporting a shimmery black shirt that billows as he strikes poses, Almond is backed by a piano-led band augmented by accordionist and larger than life support act Baby Dee, last seen i

Perth Theatre 3 stars The Trivial Pursuits being played during the girls night say it all about Neil Simon’s mid 1980s female-led reboot of his 1965 New York flat-sharing comedy. Because, rather than the laddishly perennial poker school of the original, it’s that more voguishly faddish game which makes it look more of a period piece than it should do. That’s not necessarily to the detriment of Rachel O’Riordan’s bright and at times extremely funny new production. Just don’t mistake the primary colours and zingy period soundtrack, led by Cyndi Laupa’s gloriously inevitable Girls Just Want To Have Fun, as some cheap date hen-night extravaganza is all. Simon, and indeed O’Riordan, are smarter than that. Here, then, Olive is the slobby singleton holding court to a diverse mix of gal pals on the run from various states of marital harmony. When neurotic drama queen Florence turns up having been unceremoniously dumped after fourteen years, the unholy alliance the pair forge wh

Platform, Easterhouse 4 stars A sense of balance is what’s yearned after by the four women in Linda Mclean’s remarkable new work for Magnetic North. If such a yearning is evident in the cascade of chairs suspended in infinite mid-air above what could be dance-floor, chess-board or op-art installation in Claire Halleran’s design, it pours through the torrent of words that present four very different but umbilically connected portraits of a woman’s world at different points in the twentieth century. All in different ways are struggling, be it for simple pleasure, escape from their lot or else out and out transcendence. As each tries to better themselves, through the liberty of earning their own living, the promise of domestic bliss or an education and the exotic allure of other cultures, their ambitions are thwarted, sometimes brutally. Rather than fake an attempt at Sunday serial naturalism the above might suggest, McLean’s writing itself steps beyond its immediate mili