Coffee-Table Notes

Summerhall, Edinburgh, December 7th-January 24 th 2014 When Keith Waterhouse's fictional fantasist Billy Liar wanted to escape from the horrors of the real world, he would retreat to a place inside his head called Ambrosia. The Situationists, meanwhile, charted psychogeographic maps of European cities, navigating places by mood rather than geography. There is much of the spirit of both in Jerry Gretzinger's ever-expanding map of an imaginary world, which the American artist has been painting for more than fifty years, and which currently numbers some 3011 sheets of A4 paper. “It goes way back to my childhood,” 79-tar old Gretzinger explains on the eve of his parallel universe's first appearance outside the U.S.A.. “I was fascinated with maps, and would imagine these places, because we didn't travel much. Then at some point I started making my own. That grew out of playing with my brother on this little plot of land we lived on. We created this little model v

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Three stars The programme for Pitlochry's latest festive outing may claim Thomas M. Sharkey's stage adaptation of Frank Capra's seminal 1946 film inspired by Philip Van Doren Stern's short story, The Greatest Gift of All, to be 'A New Musical!', but the show is actually some twenty years old. While there may be good reasons why it's taken so long for Sharkey's take on things to receive its Scottish premiere, after last year's success with White Christmas, it is nevertheless a bold move for director John Durnin to programme something so rarely seen onstage, however iconic its source. Much of the story remains unchanged, as small-town everyman George Bailey attempts to throw himself off a bridge before an angel called Clarence steps in with what these days would be deemed an intervention. The first half has Clarence watch over George as a celestial narrator to see how he got to such a state, while in the second,

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars The stage adaptation of the Irving Berlin scored 1954 feelgood movie has been on the circuit for almost a decade now. Going by this latest outing for David Ives and Paul Blake's version, it hasn't lost any of its sparkle. For anyone who's been stranded in a remote ski lodge, the story revolves around successful showbiz duo Bob Wallace and Phil Davis, who learnt their song and dance chops when in the army during World War Two. Womanising Phil cons straight-laced Bob into boarding a train to wintry Vermont with singing sisters Betty and Judy Haynes. The hotel they're staying at turns out to be run – badly - by Bob and Phil's much-loved former General, who inspires his former charges to stage a benefit show in his barn, while love between the two double acts blossoms out of season. It's a heart-warmingly sentimental romance that must have had a significant resonance when first seen so soon after the war. Almost

It's somehow fitting that Rachel O'Riordan's swansong as artistic head of Perth Theatre is Cinderella. Here, after all, is an age-old tale of how a young woman went to the ball as a stranger before leaving all about her dazzled before she disappears. So it has been with O'Riordan's three-year tenure in Perth, which has seen the Cork-born director arrive in Scotland as an unknown quantity and pretty much revitalise one of the country's oldest producing houses with some bold programming and even bolder results that have increased audiences, drawn critical praise and won awards. For her final production, O'Riordan persuaded playwright Alan McHugh to re-jig his original script so that the action now takes place in a theatre rather than the stately home of his original. Coming on the eve of the theatre going dark for two years as it commences a fourteen million pound redevelopment, this is O'Riordan's way of saying goodbye to the theatre she's c

When Daniel Padden went to the first read-through of David Harrower's play, Ciara, he didn't think it required any music to accompany it. Given that the Glasgow-based composer and musician had just been commissioned to write a score for the play, this looked like it was going to be a problem. As it turned out, while the play was led by Blythe Duff's solo turn as a Glaswegian art gallery owner and daughter of a recently deceased gangster, Padden framed the play with a soundtrack that helped to accentuate the mood of the piece even more. “Finding music to put into the play was a real challenge,” says Padden of Harrower's Herald Angel winning Fringe hit, which returns to the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh this week. “In physical terms, it's just one woman onstage telling a story, with no action or set-pieces that offer a composer the opportunity to do something, so just finding a space for music was a challenge. In David Harrower's writing, every word

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars There are few better symbols of the early twenty-first century's ongoing era of recession and austerity culture than Charles Dickens' nineteenth century meanie, Ebeneeza Scrooge. Neil Duffield's stage adaptation of Dickens' novel is brought to life in Andrew Panton's production in a way that emphasises the error of Scrooge's greedy ways without ever losing sight of the story's power as family entertainment. With the narrative spread out between an eight-strong ensemble cast, who play assorted musical instruments to accompany their singing of traditional carols, Scrooge's Christmas Eve epiphany is conveyed in an impressionistic fashion by a magnificently pop-eyed Christopher Fairbank. As he humbugs his way through the streets, Fairbank's Scrooge resembles the sort of mean-spirited and compassion-free politician who believe poor people are penniless by choice, and that beggars are little more than sc

Dundee Rep Four stars A birthday party to beat them all is the result when a children's entertainer fails to turn up in David Wood's stage adaptation of Roald Dahl's classic story about a little girl called Sophie's unlikely friendship with the Big Friendly Giant, who whisks her away from the orphanage she lives in. By framing the story with another girl called Sophie's party, as she and her pals hit the dressing up box to tell Dahl's story, it takes an imaginative leap into a world of creative play which the young audience can draw inspiration from in Joe Douglas' bright and bold production. The appearance of Sophie and The BFG in both human and puppet form lends proceedings an even more fantastical essence. Ali Craig's BFG is a wide-eyed vegetarian hippy type who collects dreams before planting them in the minds of sleeping children. Isolated from his flesh-eating contemporaries for simply being too nice, and with a unique line in word-i