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Great Expectations

Dundee Rep Five stars It is a bleak and austere house that Pip and Estella find themselves in at the opening and close of Jemima Levick's production of Charles Dickens' classic treatise on class, power and the perils of having ideas above one's station. Using Jo Clifford's original 1987 adaptation which has continually regenerated over the last three decades, Levick has utilised the script's rich and brutal poetry to create a magnificent and stately piece of darkly comic gothica that retains its period lyricism while becoming a profoundly pertinent play for today. As a role-call of grotesques step through the walls of empty picture frames where still lives were once captured on Becky Minto's set, Pip is thrust from a poor provincial existence to the mysterious wonders of Miss Havisham's loveless parlour before being whisked off to London where he learns the ways of the world. “If they do cut your throat,” says lawyer's clerk Wemmick to Pip

Charlie Sonata

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars The last time Douglas Maxwell developed a play with students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland it finished up as Fever Dream: Southside, this year's main-stage professional offering at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow. Whether this picaresque metaphysical fantasia will go the same way following Matthew Lenton's production performed in the Tron's bijou Changing House space by an ensemble of final year BA Acting students remains to be seen, but there are similarities. Lenton's production finds Charlie 'Chick' Sonata slumped unconscious, a hip-flask by his side. Around him carouse the flotsam and jetsam of a life carelessly lived, a mixture of now domesticated drinking buddies, old flames and accidental angels who seem to have embarked with Chick on some celestial bender. Sat round a hospital bed where teenage Audrey lays unconscious, Chick's life flashes across his eyes as he is lurched Scrooge-like across a life-l

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Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars “We have a parliamentary democracy for a reason,” says the once thrusting but now cancer-ridden right-wing atheist academic in the second act of Mike Bartlett's epic expose of a Britain on the verge of collapse. “The people can't be trusted.” Hearing those words in the heat of the anti-capitalist Occupy protests when the play was first seen in 2011 is one thing. Hearing them just a few grim weeks after the Conservative Party's Westminster victory in this May's UK General Election sounds chillingly pertinent. This is especially the case in a production performed by a large ensemble about to graduate from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's BA Acting course. An entire nation may be having bad dreams at the start of Ben Harrison's production, but in the midst of a criss-crossing array of increasingly troubled lives in motion, hope comes along in the form of John, a park-side anti-war preacher resembling a leftover from Spe

Samantha Jones – Don't Come Any Closer

There were several versions of some time Joe Meek and Burt Bacharach collaborator Charles Blackwell's mini Greek tragedy in words and music, but none can match the barely restrained melodrama of the 1965 original by the artist formerly known as Jean Owen. Owen had started out as one of the Vernons Girls, the sixteen-piece female choir founded at the Liverpool-based football pools firm, who appeared on TV rock show, Oh Boy! in the late 1950s, and recorded albums for both Parlophone and Decca in a slimmed-down three-piece version. Some former Vernons Girls went on to form splinter groups such as The Breakaways, The Pearls and The Ladybirds, the latter of whom provided backing vocals on Jimi Hendrix's Hey Joe before becoming stalwarts of The Benny Hill Show. Others married into rock and roll aristocracy, with The Breakaways Vicky Haseman wedding Joe Brown, while Joyce Smith got hitched to Marty Wilde, with both partnerships ensuring musical dynasties continued with Sam Brow

What the F**kirk?

Slamannan Community Centre, Falkirk Three stars To suggest that novelist Alan Bissett's latest piece of stand-up theatre is close to home is something of an understatement. What the F**kirk? was written as part of Falkirk Story, an artistic initiative developed by Falkirk Community Trust as a result of the town winning a Creative Place Award. This has also enabled the publication of Alight Here, an anthology of Falkirk writers edited by Bissett. All of which finds him taking a week-long tour of the area's outlying community centres with a cheeky piece of oral history driven by a polemical intent. Ushered in by live guitar loops played by Adam Stafford, who soundtracks throughout, Bissett's chatty, speak-easy demeanour takes us through his love/hate relationship with the town of his birth along with a potted history of some of its key moments . As well as the Battle of Falkirk that inspired Braveheart, more recent inventions include the world's first Irn Bru fact

Hidden Door - Week 2

The Secret Courtyard, Edinburgh When Ultras vocalist and former Over The Wall lynchpin Gav Prentice says of the massive drum kit sat between him and his fellow band member that it is there not for them to play, but to provoke the audience into some interactive horseplay that “breaks the fourth wall, as we say in the trade,” he inadvertently sums up the spirit of Hidden Door's nine day DIY festival of music, theatre, art and film, which ended this weekend. The drums actually belonged to Stealing Sheep, Friday's headlining band of regular live music night night Limbo housed offsite in the Bongo Club. Stealing Sheep's female trio were equally conceptual, and not just for their audacious mix of martial mediaeval chorales and electro pop, but for the way their assorted colour-coded leads and cables matched their rainbow-hued hosiery. It was within the sprawl of Hidden Door's main multi-space venue in the former City of Edinburgh Council building that's just b

Jo Clifford and Jemima Levick - Great Expectations

Waking up on Friday May 8 was strange experience for Jemima Levick and the cast of her production of Great Expectations, which opens this week at Dundee Rep. It was the morning after the General Election, and slowly but surely it began to sink in that, while Scotland had voted for an almost Tory free zone, England had given what seemed to many to be one of the cruellest Westminster governments in modern times an increased majority that ended the need for any kind of coalition to prop up their austerity-driven powerbase. “It was the weirdest day,” says Levick. “and suddenly it felt like there were these two very different places that existed, and that seemed to reflect what Jo Clifford's version of the play is about, and what Charles Dickens' novel is about.” Great Expectations charts the travails of Pip, an orphan who, after encountering an escaped convict at his dead parents graveside, embarks on an adventure of poverty, riches and thwarted love involving an array of col