Coffee-Table Notes

On December 21 st 1988, Pan Am flight 103, a Boeing 747 named Clipper Maid of the Seas, which was making a regular trip from Frankfurt to Detroit via London, fell from the air over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie, in Dumfries and Galloway. The aeroplane's 243 passengers and sixteen crew members were killed by a bomb placed inside a suitcase stored onboard the aircraft. As the plane careered into residential areas of Lockerbie, eleven people on the ground were also killed. Passengers on the flight included Paul Jeffreys, onetime bass player with Steve Harley's Cockney Rebel, and poet Joanna Walton, a former girlfriend of Robert Fripp who had written lyrics for Fripp's 1979 album, Exposure, and who had coined the term Frippertronics to define Fripp's tape-looping techniques. The subsequent arrest and imprisonment of Libyan national Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, followed by his release from Greenock Prison by the Scottish Government in 2009 on compassionate

When Elliot Roberts saw writer and performer Rob Drummond's show, Bullet Catch, at the Arches in Glasgow, he never thought he would end up working as assistant director on a new play by the prolific writer and performer presented on the main-stage of the Traverse, the world-renowned Edinburgh-based new writing theatre. Three years on, however, and Roberts has been installed for the last few weeks on Traverse artistic director Orla O'Loughlin's production of Drummond's play, Grain in the Blood. This co-production with the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, where it opens this week, finds Drummond putting a noirish thriller into a rural landscape where a prodigal's return home to an isolated community steeped in local folklore raises moral dilemmas about personal sacrifices made for a greater good. For Roberts, his tenure on Grain in the Blood also marks a breakthrough for the young director and former dramaturgy student at the University of Glasgow enabled by a bursary i

Kirkton Community Centre, Dundee Three stars Things have changed since John McCann's pre-independence referendum fantasia first appeared in Edinburgh during the summer of 2014. Then, with the actual vote looming, McCann imagined newly appointed SNP Foreign Minister Fiona preparing to square up to her Westminster counterpart as the world's press watched sovereignty being handed over. Somewhat symbolically pregnant, Fiona also looked set to have her wings and her upstart tendencies clipped by Mark, a junior bureaucrat with a nice line in managerialist gobbledegook who had been sent to make sure she didn't go off message. Now, in this updated version rewritten by McCann for Dundee Rep Ensemble's latest community tour, the 2014 No vote a bittersweet memory for both parties. Set in 2020, a second indy referendum may have finally got a result, but there is the lingering mess of the post-Brexit fall-out to deal with as well. As the play opens, Fiona rises from a smal

Dario Fo Comedian, Playwright, Director, Performer, Activist, Painter, Designer, Theatre-maker Born March 24 1926 ; died October 13 2016 Dario Fo, who has died aged ninety following a lung-based illness that saw him hospitalised two weeks ago, was a radical maestro who understood the power of laughter beyond polemic. The news of his passing comes in the midst of Dancing With Colours, Whipping With Words, a month-long celebration of the Nobel Prize winning author of now classic works such as Accidental Death of An Anarchist and Mistero Buffo, which is currently ongoing in Edinburgh. Fo himself, whose works have been heard in more than thirty languages, was due to travel to Scotland to take part in an onstage conversation at the Royal Lyceum Theatre with his biographer, translator and greatest champion, Joe Farrell. It was Farrell's rollicking versions of Fo's key works that brought them to Scots audiences in a series of productions produced by Borderline Theatre Comp

Shed 36, Port of Dundee Four stars It's like Christmas and a trip to Blackpool at once as the audience for Grid Iron theatre company's latest site-specific extravaganza are bussed out from Dundee city centre to one of several massive sheds used by the city's Port Authority, transformed here into a theatre space. As it is, the array of lights that flank the shed belong to three stationary exploration rigs that tower over the company's exploration of the oil industry. Inside the shed, video projections at the back of Becky Minto's tiered steel set beam out statistics of how many barrels of oil are drilled during the course of the ninety minute show as several stories play out between a barrage of historical information. Much of the latter in director Ben Harrison's script is provided by Texas Jim, a big-talking cipher of how oil has made a few people like him rich, while the people and places exploited along the way are mere collateral damage. In the Nig

In an upstairs room in Leith, Grid Iron theatre company are going for gold. The prize is the Edinburgh-based company's latest site-specific extravaganza, Crude, a dramatic study of oil, the slippery substance that powers the world, making some people very rich. For those on the frontline, the human cost sometimes proves even greater. This is easy to see in the mock up of a hotel bar and bedroom where a one-night tryst between characters played by Phil McKee and Kirsty Stuart takes place. There are brief monologues from survivors of oil rig disasters such as the one that happened in 1988 when an explosion happened on the North Sea based Piper Alpha rig, which was destroyed in a blast that killed 167 people, including two rescue workers. A memorial to those who died sits in Hazelhead Park in Aberdeen. In another scene, McKee's character is tied to a chair and tortured. Inbetween all this, a man in a stetson called Texas Jim swaggers about like J.R. Ewing, the slickly deviou

Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh Four stars “Please,” says Italian actor Mario Pirovano after a lengthy introduction to his interpretation of his long-time collaborator Dario Fo's solo study of Saint Francis of Assisi. “Relax. It's only theatre.” Given what happens over the four 'episodes' that follow, such a pre-cursor to the main event is self-deprecation as arform. The first two pieces find Francis dealing with a possibly symbolic wolf before being forced to make a speech to war-torn Bologna. So powerful is his stand-up satire, it seems, that peace breaks out three days later. Both are sublime, but it is the second half's extended riff on Francis' attempts to tell the gospel in a more down-to-earth lingo than Latin where Pirovano really flies, before things finish up with the saint's final transcendent hours. Inbetween playing assorted popes, cardinals and other animals, Pirovano presents Francis, not as the beatific Dr Doolittle figur