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Anna Orton - A Design For Life

Anna Orton never expected to be working with acting greats like Timothy West when she embarked on a theatre design course at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Neither did the thirty-one year old Gorebridge-raised artist expect to be part of a team that was headed up by acclaimed directors such as Sally Cookson and Tom Morris. As Orton makes the final touches on her design for Morris' production of King Lear featuring West in the title role, however, that's exactly what has happened. The production forms part of an ongoing collaboration between Bristol Old Vic, where Morris is artistic director, and the Theatre School. The idea is that, rather than getting a twenty-something student to attempt the gravitas of Lear's title role, a genuine monarch of the stage such as West is brought in alongside other professionals, with the rest of the cast made up of acting students about to graduate. As well as West, when Morris' production opens this week, David Hargreaves will pla

Much Ado About Nothing

Dundee Rep Four stars There may have been a summer nip in the air in Dundee on Saturday night, but onstage in Irene Macdougall's grandiloquent looking revival of Shakespeare's most serious of rom-coms, heat was being generated on every level. On the Sicilian streets crickets chirrupped through the night, but when Beatrice and Benedick rubbbed up against each other in a mutual desire to prove who was cleverer, the temperature soared. In Emily Winter and Robert Jack's hands, such japes look closer to flirting than fighting, with the ongoing sexual chemistry palpable to all except those directly involved. Such a fine romance is offset by the more troubling affair between Hero and Claudio as manipulated by Ali Watt's scheming Don John. In this way, the light and shade of the play is starkly realised, with a clear lurch into darkness at the top of the second half. While there are plenty of biscuit-coloured pillars and hidey holes to manipulate all manner of indis

Robert King – Super 8

When Robert King auditioned to be vocalist for Scars, the Edinburgh band formed on the back of punk, he was reputedly so scary in his performance that the other auditionee watching left the room, never to be seen again. This story is one of many about Scars that pops up in Big Gold Dream – The Sound of Young Scotland 1977-1985, Grant McPhee's meticulously researched documentary excavation of a much unsung era. As Creeping Bent record boss Douglas MacIntyre also makes clear in Big Gold Dream, it wasn't Orange Juice's first single, Blue Boy, that was Scotland's equivalent of Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols, as some maintain. It was actually Scars' ferocious debut, Horrorshow / Adult/Ery, released on Fast Product records in 1979, that sent shockwaves around a younger generation in search of something beyond a one-chord thrashabout. Thirty-seven years on from Scars debut, and thirty-five after the band's solitary album, Author! Author!, with time as an emi

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h

Irene Macdougall, Gordon Barr and Jennifer Dick - Shakespeare in Scotland Now

It's been quite a year for Shakespeare. The 400 th anniversary of the English bard's death on April 23 rd 1616 has prompted all manner of suitably dramatic commemorations. On television, Shakespeare has received a healthy amount of airtime not seen the BBC put his entire canon onscreen during the 1970s and 1980s. This has included an adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream by Dr Who and Queer As Folk writer Russell T Davies, which starred Maxine Peake, Matt Lucas and John Hannah. Elsewhere in the schedules, The Hollow Crown was an all star adaptation of Shakespeare's History plays, while Shakespeare Live! was a live broadcast hosted by David Tennant to celebrate Shakespeare's influence on artforms beyond theatre, such as opera and jazz. Even comedy writer Ben Elton has got in on the act with Upstart Crow, a very sub-Blackadderish take on Shakespeare that features David Mitchell as a hapless bard attempting to climb the literary ladder in the face of personal a

American Idiot

King's Theatre, Glasgow Three stars With the U.S. Elections looming, the uninitiated might presume a show called American Idiot to concern itself with the no longer amusing rise of Donald Trump. As it is, the ever enterprising Sell A Door theatre company's touring revival of American nouveau punk trio Green Day's rock opera stays faithful to the show's loose-knit narrative of three young men coming of age in a post 9/11 world. Director and choreographer Racky Plewes' quasi-boutique production also has the added advantage of real life rock star Newton Faulkner at the centre of Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong's songbook. All of which makes an audience young enough to have barely registered the 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York something of a devoted audience. Faulkner plays Johnny, who with his buddies Tunny and Will ekes out a stoner's existence on the sofa, guitar sometimes in hand. Motivated by the spectacle playing out o

Dominic Hill - Trainspotting and the Citizens Theatre's Autumn 2016 Season

If Trainspotting has ever stopped being in the news since Irvine Welsh's debut novel was first published in 1993, it's renewed profile is currently at a premium. This is largely to do with Danny Boyle's stylish film version of Welsh's tale of life and death among Edinburgh's junkie culture, which became a totem of 1990s pop culture, as its flashy mix of sex, drugs and rock and roll among the dole queue classes went stratospheric. Boyle's film receives a screening at next month's Edinburgh International Film Festival, just as its original cast have reconvened twenty years on to begin work on a sequel. While both Welsh's book and Boyle's film tapped into a zeitgeist that gave voice to a strata of society previously sidelined by the artistic mainstream unless it was American, it has been largely forgotten that Harry Gibson's stage adaptation did something similar between the two. Gibson's version was originally seen at the Citizens Theatre