Slick

© Mark Fisher - published in Northings, Hi-Arts


SLICK (Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 13 August 2008)

14 August 2008

MARK FISHER admires the imagination and inventiveness behind Vox Motus’s combination of puppetry and live actors.

SLICK IS a show that arrives in Inverness after opening in the midst of an Edinburgh Fringe that has been dominated by misery. Theatregoers in the capital have endured scenes involving gas chambers, exploding passenger jets, suicide bombers, mass executions and accidental death. After that lot, you'd expect to be more than ready for the cartoon capers of a daft satire on cruelty, greed and casual violence.

Yet, much as I'm impressed by the visual inventiveness and sophistication of this show by Glasgow's Vox Motus in a Tron Theatre co-production – half-Punch and Judy, half-Biffa Bacon – I find myself wishing that such a talented team of actors and technicians had put their skills to something with more depth.

Call me a killjoy – and judging by the warmth of the show's opening night reception, there are those who will – but Slick strikes me as a show that's high on comic exuberance and low on purpose.

Yet it needn't be so. The story of a hard-up Glasgow family who discover oil spouting from their toilet, setting in motion a plot involving big money and bigger guns, has the potential to parody the politics of everywhere from Texas to the Middle East and – right now – Georgia.

But such is the superficial nature of the plot – in which nine-year-old Malcolm Biggar (Jordan Young) struggles free of his tyrannical parents only to face his duplicitous neighbours in a life-and-death shoot out – that such political resonances are merely cosmetic.

Where the production does score, however, is in a clutch of superb performances, a smattering of funny gags and a novel presentation in which the actors' heads and hands poke out from puppet bodies, allowing them a cartoon-like freedom of movement.

Expertly synchronised with Graham Sutherland's soundtrack, the show takes imaginative journeys to places a regular performance could not, whether it be a high-speed skate-board journey or an intimate operation on an elderly lady's nether regions. For this, it is well worth seeing, even if there's more concept than content.

Slick is at the OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, on 29-30 August 2008.

© Mark Fisher, 2008

The Pipers' Trail

© Mark Fisher - published in Northings, Hi-Aarts

THE PIPERS' TRAIL (George Square Theatre, Edinburgh, 12 August 2008)
Back
14 August 2008

MARK FISHER checks out the Army’s venture into theatre

THE THING that made Gregory Burke's Black Watch feel so radical when it was premiered by the National Theatre of Scotland in 2006 was that it put the voices of ordinary solders on stage. Here was a war play that was less about the rights and wrongs of combat than about the squaddies whom we pay to do a job in our name. Although it raised important questions about the invasion of Iraq, its greatest political challenge was in taking the soldiers seriously.

This, you would expect, would normally be the job of the army itself which presumably accounts for the arrival of The Pipers' Trail, a play designed to showcase the army's "virtues of teamwork, individual excellence and a proper focus on collective endeavour".

Introducing the play, Lieutenant Colonel Stephanie Jackman admits the forces have been "remiss in engaging society" and explains The Pipers' Trail has been put together as a way of reminding us that the military is a part of society, not something separate from it.

Staged by director Bryan Lacey for ImpAct Theatre Company, it is part of a cultural package that included a series of piping and drumming workshops organised by the army on a 470-mile journey from Shetland to Edinburgh, via Orkney, Inverness, Stirling and Glasgow.

Of course, there is something mildly comical about the army putting on a play – especially one that seeks to promote the institution's "values and standards" – but the production has a simple honesty and a fresh-faced energy that make it hard for us to be too cynical.

A morality tale about the 16-year-old Jamie (Gary Morrison) who journeys from Shetland to Glasgow to compete in the World Pipe Band Championship, it suffers from clunky lessons about courage, discipline and respect, but compensates with a brisk pace and frequent musical interludes.

I'm too far beyond the target market to tell whether it would serve as an effective recruitment tool – my guess is any savvy 16-year-old would see straight through its moralising – but tourists and families in the mood for a bit of old-fashioned conservatism will be gently entertained. As for the rest of us, well let's just say the army is not about to steal the National Theatre of Scotland's thunder.

© Mark Fisher, 2008

Whisky Kisses

© Mark Fisher - published in Northings, Hi-Aarts

WHISKY KISSES (George Square Theatre, Edinburgh, until 25 August 2008)
Back
12 August 2008

MARK FISHER finds the RSAMD students dishing up an enjoyable show, but wonders if it loses its bite after a strong start

THERE'S A great premise behind Whisky Kisses, one of the front-runners in the Highland Quest for a New Musical competition, now being given a full production by students from Glasgow's RSAMD. We're in a swanky Manhattan office where high-flying executive Ben has spotted the chance to fill a gap in his whisky collection.

The last remaining bottle of Glenigma, a 100-year-old single malt, has come on to the market and is about to be auctioned. Although it is the day before Tartan Day ("It's my favourite time of the year"), he has no choice but to fly to the foot of Ben Igma to compete with a Japanese collector for the "ultimate dram".

The scene is set for a culture-clash comedy in which the romantic fancies of second-generation Scottish ex-pats rub up against the realities of Highland life. Book and lyric writers Euan Martin and Dave Smith start to stake out this territory, showing the locals deliberately tartanifying the distillery for the benefit of the foreign visitors who, in turn, are perplexed by the idiosyncrasies of bed and breakfast hospitality and the wild power of the landscape.

But for Whisky Kisses to have real satirical life, they need to push this idea further. Until the auction, the plot is driven by the characters and their avarice, which makes them strong comedic targets, but things go wrong through no fault of their own (things are scuppered by the intervention of the Malt Whisky Preservation Society) and after that, they are no longer calling the shots and there is a good deal less to send up.

It remains a reasonably enjoyable show thanks to the strong choral arrangements of Jim Bryce's score and the joyful singing of the young cast. But the subversive tone of the opening scenes fades in favour of clunky gags and a less inspired boy-meets-girl plot, suggesting that in this clash of Broadway convention and Highland quirkiness, it is the same-old-same-old that triumphs.

When the artistic team returns to the rehearsal room to develop a full two-act staging, it'd be good to see them having the courage of their convictions and giving the show its bite back.

(Remaining performances on 12, 14, 16, 19, 21, 23 and 25 August 2008)

© Mark Fisher, 2008

Itsoseng

© Mark Fisher - published in Variety


Itsoseng
Pleasance King Dome, Edinburgh, Scotland; 182 seats; £9.50 $18 top

A Richard Jordan Prods. and Pleasance presentation, in association with Baxter Theater Center, U. of Cape Town, of a play in one act written and performed by Omphile Molusi. Directed by Tina Johnson.

With: Omphile Molusi.

South African theater has reached the outside world in waves. First came the Apartheid plays by Athol Fugard and the Market Theater of Johannesburg. Next were stories of elation and hope -- epitomized by the joyful harmonies of the Soweto Gospel Choir. Now, playwrights have begun facing the realities of a less than perfect freedom. Like Paul Grootboom and Presley Chweneyagae, whose 2006 "Township Stories" exposed South African poverty, Omphile Molusi in "Itsoseng" depicts a country in which the slow pace of change is crushing the old political idealism. If the writer-performer's message lacks the dramatic highs and lows of earlier post-Apartheid theater, it is no less pertinent.

The production -- which has enjoyed sell-out seasons at two venues in its U.K. debut in the Edinburgh Fringe and will transfer to London's Soho Theater for a September run -- could scarcely be more simple. The stage is empty but for 24-year-old Molusi, his suitcase and a scattering of discarded trash.

The actor leaves us in little doubt, however, about why he was selected as the recipient of a life-changing scholarship from the Royal Shakespeare Company that allowed him to receive classical training at Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Under the eye of helmer Tina Johnson, Molusi is a dynamic stage presence, his sense of life and movement creating a solo show that feels as if many more actors are involved. There's a captivating rhythmic quality to his performance -- a dance-like, loose-limbed physicality in his delivery as he circles the stage, draws in to the center and adopts the quirks and qualities of the characters he describes in this tale of 14 years of township life.

Molusi has a love of language and engrosses us with the energy of a man whose story needs to be heard.

That story is told in front of a shopping complex in the township of Itsoseng (which translates as "wake yourself up"), where a character called Mawilla describes the changes of the post-Apartheid years. There is a gentle irony in the setting; even at their most prosperous, the stores of Itsoseng would hardly have been a tourist attraction. But Molusi makes it clear how important they are as a focal point of the community and how much is lost when economic collapse forces such businesses to close.

The shopping center has a further significance: It was here in the months leading up to Nelson Mandela's rise to power that the people indulged in a frenzy of looting -- a rebellious and self-destructive gesture against their "stinking capitalist enemies." That, concludes Mawilla, was the "beginning of our curse." For all the radical change in South Africa, it could never have been rapid enough to stop the food from running out.

As the years go by, it becomes clear that poverty is the greatest enemy and that, coupled with local government inertia, is what precipitates the decline of a once vibrant township.

Molusi gives a human face to this in the sad stories of a political radical who has the revolutionary spirit knocked out of him, and of Dolly, Mawilla's teenage sweetheart, drawn into prostitution. "Soon the people's anger will boil over," he says, suggesting it won't be the last we hear from a country where so much has changed.
More than one option

Lighting, Richard James. Opened July 30, 2008. Reviewed, Aug. 7. Running time: 1 HOUR, 15 MIN.

Lucky You

© Mark Fisher - published in Variety

Lucky You

Assembly Halls, Edinburgh, Scotland; 740 seats; £20 $39 top
By MARK FISHER
A Katharine Dore for Magic Key Prods. and Jon Plowman presentation of a play in one act adapted for the stage by Francis Matthews and Denis Calandra from the novel by Carl Hiaasen. Directed by Matthews.

JoLayne Lucks - Nicola Alexis
Shiner - Josh Cohen
Demincio, Moffitt - Geff Francis
Trish, Kate - Alexandra Gilbreath
Chub, Judge Batenkill - Corey Johnson
Amber, Shiner's Ma - Kristina Mitchell
Bode, Sinclair - Paul Reynolds
Tom Krome - Trevor White

Getting the rights to stage Carl Hiaasen's 1997 "Lucky You" wasn't easy. The Florida novelist has turned down purposed adaptations of his works since being disappointed by the 1996 movie made of his "Strip Tease." It took producers Katharine Dore and Jon Plowman and helmer Francis Matthews three years and a private performance in Hiaasen's home to get the go-ahead. But although the production -- which preemed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and has its sights on London --is bright and bubbly, it's hard to see why they were quite so determined to get such a throw-away piece of theater on stage.

Hiaasen has made his name writing pacy fiction gently infused with liberal-left politics -- as well as a particular concern for the environment. Like British novelist Christopher Brookmyre, he gives weight to his humor by satirizing reactionary forces in society, although never to the detriment of his lively plots. It's a feelgood formula that led to one commentator calling him "America's finest satirical novelist."

What comes across most strongly in Matthews' adaptation of "Lucky You" are the colorful, cartoonish characters and the knock-about narrative. This is the story of the sassy and independent-minded young woman, JoLayne Lucks (Nicola Alexis), whose numbers come up in the Florida lotto. A socially minded animal lover, she immediately sees her opportunity to save her neighboring Simmons Wood from being turned into a shopping mall and parking lot ("Like the Joni Mitchell song") by buying it herself.

The future of the planet -- and her 40 turtles -- would be assured were it not for the two red-neck patriots whose numbers have also come up in the lottery. With the warped logic of white supremacists, they reckon they have a claim on Lucks' share of the $28 million and set about stealing it.

The theft is a threat not only to Lucks, who is too self-effacing even to report it to the police, but to the very environmental health of the state. In this way, Hiaasen locks his readers into sharing the same green goals as his heroine.

Throw in a besotted investigative reporter, a jealous judge, a Hooters waitress, a wayward government agent and sundry other larger-than-life characters and the way is set for a comic cross between a road movie and a crime caper.

Matthews' cast has a feel for Hiaasen's broad-brushstroke humor, turning in a bright set of primary colored performances given added theatrical zest by their doubling and fast costume changes. Alexis is a no-nonsense Lucks who shows a warm heart beneath the self-reliant exterior. So eccentric is everyone else that it's hard to distinguish between friend and foe, although Corey Johnson and Paul Reynolds as her adversaries are such prime examples of dull-witted conspiracy theorists that their fall-guy status is in little doubt.

So far, so jolly -- and on a set framed by a giant license plate, the metal ripped in two, with four old-fashioned televisions adding to the imagery, there is an amiable air of fun. The original songs and incidental music by Loudon Wainwright III bolster the atmosphere of knowing irreverence.

But, like many stage adaptations of novels, the narrative begins to dominate, allowing no room for the kind of character development and metaphorical resonance that you expect from an original play. The closer Lucks comes to getting her money back, the more inconsequential the story seems, leaving us with an enjoyable but forgettable experience.


Set, Leslie Travers; costumes, Yvonne Milnes; lighting, Tim Lutkin; original music and songs, Loudon Wainwright III; video, Jonathon Lyle. Opened July 31, 2008. Reviewed Aug. 5. Running time: 1 HOUR, 30 MIN.

Deep Cut interview

© Mark Fisher - published in The Guardian


Edinburgh festival: No easy ending
Can a play get to the truth about what really happened at Deepcut barracks? Mark Fisher talks to one private's parents


In November 1995, Private Cheryl James became the second of four soldiers to die of gunshot wounds at the MoD's now infamous Deepcut training barracks in Surrey. She was reportedly found in woodland with her rifle by her side, a single gunshot wound in her forehead. James, who was just 18 years old, had been in the army for six months.

More than a decade on - after two police investigations, one police review, one defence select committee investigation and one governmental review - her parents, Doreen and Des, are no closer to knowing exactly what happened to their daughter. "I used to refer to people who carry the opinions I carry today as cynics and conspiracy theorists," says Des, seated next to his wife at Sherman Cymru theatre in Cardiff. "The experience has made me extremely cynical of the police force, the government, the MoD and the establishment."

What is most striking about this genial pair - Doreen is a former nurse, Des a human resources director - is not their tears or their anger, but their simple desire to know the truth. Playwright Philip Ralph is on a similar quest, and he is currently telling their story in Deep Cut, a verbatim drama playing at Edinburgh's Traverse theatre. The work is a compendium of first-hand interviews, public statements and source material from soldiers, lawyers, journalists, forensic experts and bereaved parents.

Ralph, who took three years to distil all this into a play, was originally commissioned by the Sherman Cymru to write about the army. He soon found the story of James, born in Llangollen, north Wales, and decided it should be a piece of documentary theatre. "I let the story people wanted to tell me lead me to the play," he says. "I never asked a leading question and was careful to get people to tell me what they wanted to tell me. It's an important story. It goes into every area of the state: the government, the judiciary, the police, the army and the MoD."

The Deepcut deaths raise troubling questions as to whether these four soldiers took their own lives, as the official version has it, or whether they were murdered. "If it was suicide, what made these four children do it?" says Doreen. "There must have been something going on to make four apparently happy and healthy people do that."

The first death was that of Sean Benton from Hastings, who apparently fired five bullets into his own chest in 1995. James died less than five months later, weeks after her 18th birthday. Then, in 2001, came the death of Geoff Gray from Durham, with two shots fired into his forehead, at an angle unusual for suicide. The following year James Collinson, from Perth, died of a single shot through his chin. Although Des and Doreen initially accepted the army's version of events, they became increasingly perplexed. The coroner recorded an open verdict on James's death, but an army board of inquiry later decided it was suicide.

Media attention, including a BBC Frontline Scotland investigation, put pressure on the Surrey police to reopen its investigation which, in turn, was reviewed by the Devon and Cornwall constabulary. Finally came a review of all the official investigations by Nicholas Blake QC, who in 2006 concluded there was no need for a public inquiry, saying that "on the balance of probabilities" the deaths were self-inflicted. In Deep Cut, Ralph refuses to jump to any conclusions. "I do have opinions," he says, "but I wouldn't dream of telling you what they are. I've looked at all the available evidence in the way that Nicholas Blake did in his review. My ideas hold no more water than his. In my opinion, unless you were standing there when it happened, you don't know."

Deep Cut is not the only play to have been written about the barracks. In October, a dramatisation of the story of Geoff Gray - called Geoff Dead: Disco for Sale - will open at Newcastle's Live theatre. "The play is focusing on the parents' quest for justice, rather than speculating on what happened," says writer Fiona Evans. "They know their own children. They were such happy-go-lucky boys and suicide wasn't in keeping with the way their lives were going. They are adamant their children didn't commit suicide - so it follows that someone else killed them."

Des and Doreen are holding out for a public inquiry, but the lack of publicly available evidence means they can only speculate. Des believes the barracks were out of control. "Anarchy on the campus prevailed," he says, pointing to evidence of bullying. "It was subdued after the first two deaths, but it rose again in 2001 and 2002, when you have a similar situation: mysterious deaths and, more to the point, no investigation. That shows the culture in the camp is at the core of this."

For Ralph, the power of his play lies in its lack of an ending - the audience is left to wrestle with many unresolved questions. That's fine for an audience, but do the parents have any hope of closure? "Absolutely," says Des. "It is an appalling wrong, in a civilised society, that four kids can die and we can allow our government to dance around justice in the way that they have. I don't think it's something I can walk away from."

The Tailor of Inverness

© Mark Fisher - published in Northings - Highlands and Islands Arts Journal

THE TAILOR OF INVERNESS (Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh until 24 August 2008; touring February-March 2009)
Back
05 August 2008

MARK FISHER admires Matthew Zajac’s interweaving of the personal and the historical in his new one-man show

MATTHEW ZAJAC'S father used to tell a story about how to catch a fox. The method is to get the creature in the open then circle it. As long as you complete the circle, the fox will stay grounded. Then you spiral inwards and take your prey.

Zajac does something similar to his father. In The Tailor of Inverness (or Krawiec z Inverness), the writer and actor slowly closes in on the Polish-born Zajac senior, giving him enough space to tell his life story in his own way, but not so much room that the old man escapes, fox-like, with his distortions, evasions and rewriting of history.

The one-man show for the Inverness company Dogstar is at once a son's affectionate tribute to a man who maintained his generous spirit despite suffering the privations of war and exile, and a level-headed analysis of how the great movements of history shape us into the people we are.

The play is being showcased on the Edinburgh Fringe before a Highlands tour next year, which will be very much worth catching. By rights, it should be a part of the Edinburgh International Festival, so closely does it fit in with artistic director Jonathan Mills’ theme about borders.

Zajac's father was born in a part of Poland that became the Ukraine, was drafted into the armies of both Communist Russia and Nazi Germany and fled – depending on whose story you believe – across most of Europe before settling in Glasgow and finally Inverness. Even before the added poignancy of the personal discoveries made by the actor after his father's death, the story brilliantly encapsulates the effects of war on individuals, families and societies across place and time.

Under the direction of Ben Harrison – famed for his site-specific work with Edinburgh's Grid Iron company – Zajac proves a compelling storyteller, capturing the fractured English and have-a-go enthusiasm of his father before weaving himself into an increasingly layered narrative.

As the truth becomes less and less certain, so the fracturing impact of the war grows more tangible, lending this touching personal story the grand metaphorical weight of 20th century history. All this and live fiddle too.

© Mark Fisher, 2008

Architechting

© Mark Fisher - published in Variety

Architecting

(Traverse Theater, Edinburgh, Scotland; 110 seats; £16 $32 top)
By MARK FISHER
A TEAM and National Theater of Scotland Workshop presentation of a play in one act written by the company in collaboration with Davey Anderson, Nathan Wright, Dave Polato and Lucy Kendrick Smith. Directed by Rachel Chavkin.

Margaret Mitchell,
others - Jessica Almasy
Rhett Butler, Josh,
others - Frank Boyd
Simon, Oasis Melly, Melanie
Hamilton Wilkes, others - Jill Frutkin
Carrie Campbell, others - Libby King
Henry Adams, Franklin Delmore
McKinnley, others - Jake Margolin
Scarlett O'Hara, Caroline Dixon,
others - Kristen Sieh

In previous Edinburgh Fringe successes "Particularly in the Heartland," "A Thousand Natural Shocks" and "Give Up! Start Over!", Gotham's the TEAM has proved itself a brilliant chronicler of the chaos and contradictions of modern America. Joining forces with the National Theater of Scotland for "Architecting," the dynamic young company once again shows a happy disregard for the unities of time and place, straddling "Gone With the Wind" and Hurricane Katrina with cut-and-paste recklessness. But despite the dynamic performances and theatrical inventiveness, "Architecting" is hampered by an unwieldy script that seems weighed down by its source material.

We are in the Deep South in a space that is variously a country and western bar, a sleepy truck stop and an architect's office about to be demolished to make way for Phoenix Meadows, a 220-acre TND -- or traditional neighborhood development -- where a genuinely traditional neighborhood once stood.

Jill Frutkin welcomes the audience with a self-pitying ballad ("Why has it been 50 f***ing years since I heard a good patriotic song?"), while clips from "The Price Is Right" flicker on the TV monitors above a building-site backdrop.

In a manner reminiscent of the Wooster Group, the company juxtaposes seemingly disparate elements only to reveal the hidden connections beneath the surface. Thus, historian and presidential grandchild Henry Adams (Jake Margolin) constructs a cardboard cathedral, while novelist Margaret Mitchell (Jessica Almasy) bashes away at a Remington typewriter to produce "Gone With the Wind" and a young property developer sizes up the land in a post-hurricane New Orleans.

These characters inhabit the same imaginative space as the film crew putting together a 21st century remake of the Scarlett O'Hara/Rhett Butler classic with a plot doctored for our politically correct era.

"It's very difficult to be a historian if you stop believing in sequences," says one character in a line that could be an ironic comment on the company's creative approach. Helmer Rachel Chavkin delights in picking apart old sequences and building them anew, allowing us to make fresh sense of a world crippled by information overload.

In the cross-cultural scrapbook of "Architecting," a theme about the deep roots of racial discrimination emerges via the historical revisionism of the "Gone With the Wind" movie remake which, the producer hopes, will be made more palatable by the addition of a rose-tinted subplot about the grandfather of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

What also emerges is a theme about the cycle of construction, destruction and renewal, a pressing issue for a generation facing an uncertain future. The show links the Atlanta fire of the 1939 movie to the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and the city's subsequent rebuilding.

Talking in the third-person, Libby King's pragmatic architect says, "Out of sites of devastation, she imagines new beginnings," seemingly oblivious to the cultural richness that has been swept away.

Clearly there is no shortage of ideas in "Architecting" and plenty of evidence of a company tackling the complexities of modern life with boldness, intelligence and wit. As it stands, however, the play needs streamlining. The deeper it goes into "Gone With the Wind" territory, the less clear its purpose, and we are a long way into the two-hour running time before the cultural collisions start making sense.

There are many diversions to compensate -- the always compelling Almasy as Margaret Mitchell, the occasional number on acoustic guitar and a surreal game of cards propelled by an electric fan -- but as it stands, there is more in this mix than can be easily digested.


Set and costumes, Nick Vaughan; sound, Matt Hubbs; lighting, Jake Heinrichs; video, Brian Scott; associate director, Davey Anderson. Opened July 31, 2008. Reviewed Aug. 1. Running time: 2 HOURS.

Fall by Zinnie Harris

© Mark Fisher - published in Variety


Fall

A Traverse Theater presentation in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company of a play in two acts by Zinnie Harris. Directed by Dominic Hill.

Kate - Geraldine Alexander
Evener - Cliff Burnett
Guard - Brian Ferguson
Liddel - Kevin McMonagle
Pierre - Darrell D'Silva
Kiki - Meg Fraser
Howard - Paul Hickey
Justine - Samantha Young

Zinnie Harris couldn't have wished for better timing. As Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic faces a pre-trial hearing before the war crimes tribunal in the Hague, where he must answer charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, the playwright is looking at the awkward question of post-war reconciliation. Completing her war-themed trilogy that began with the Royal Shakespeare Company's "Solstice" and "Midwinter," "Fall" dares to ask how a newly peaceful nation should deal with the ugly legacy of civil war. At the hands of helmer Dominic Hill, the play is as somber and austere as it is gripped by moral urgency.

Where "Midwinter" (2004) took place at the close of a war in some unnamed foreign land and "Solstice" (2005) a decade earlier as that same war approached, "Fall" looks at the realpolitik of a nation taking its first shaky steps toward post-war democracy. Darrell D'Silva's Pierre is a popular prime minister, but feels himself little more than a figurehead whose charisma disguises his political inadequacies.

During an evening of drunken self-pity, he accidentally stumbles on a solution to the problem of dealing with the nation's imprisoned war criminals: If a representative of the people condemns them to death, it will make the government look less callous.

Who better to order the executions than Kate (Geraldine Alexander), a woman whose own husband has been exposed as a notorious war criminal? It is with Kate that the heart of Harris' play lies.

She is a woman of compassion and almost endless understanding, who is so willing to face up to her late husband's newly exposed crimes that she makes repeated visits to the cell of Evener (Cliff Burnett), a character with the same caged ferocity as Dr. Hannibal Lecter and a similarly chilling lack of repentance.

There is no denying this country has been the scene of vicious bloodshed and even humanitarian Kate reaches the limits of her liberal tolerance when she is forced to listen to the evidence against the war criminals. Her agreement to their executions comes as a shock to those of us living in pleasant places where capital punishment is a thing of the past, but Harris convincingly portrays the circumstances in which further violence seems like the only route to a lasting peace.

It makes for chewy, serious drama and helmer Hill, on his debut as artistic director of the Traverse, does all he can to intensify the mood of impending terror. With Tom Piper's colorless set of sliding panels and Chahine Yavroyan's restrained lighting, he creates something of the atmosphere of Eastern European theater, all shadows and grim illumination, and a pace that, for all its boisterous outbursts, is typically ruminative.

His cast is excellent, be it Meg Fraser's out-of-her-depth First Lady, Paul Hickey's Machiavellian prime minister's deputy or Kevin McMonagle's weak and humane lover of Kate. Whether powerful or powerless, they have the flavor of real people swept up in the great tide of contemporary politics in a play that worries away at issues that have repercussions around the world. It is a dense, knotty drama, unafraid to address the big issues of our time head on and a triumphant completion of Harris' trilogy.

Set and costumes, Tom Piper; lights, Chahine Yavroyan; sound, Dan Jones. Opened July 24, 2008. Reviewed Aug. 3. Running time: 2 HOURS, 30 MIN.

Swindle and Death

© Mark Fisher

Tron, Glasgow

Thursday June 19, 2008
The Guardian

Peter Arnott's satirical target is a good one. In Swindle and Death, the playwright contends that state subsidy of the arts, with all its requirements for civic accountability, has the effect of neutering the very work it seeks to support. Such is the hold of the bureaucrats that the only way for a theatre company to survive, he would argue, is to adopt the same dull, utilitarian values.

Arnott invents actor-managers Brian Swindle and Eric Death, who have sustained an ensemble for centuries without a penny of public money. All would be well, if it were not for a Scottish Arts Council that regards itself as an instrument of control, sending a young apparatchik to go undercover as an actor and bring the company into line. "You can't escape," she says in one of the play's funnier lines. "No one escapes from the Scottish Arts Council."

Wild, careless creativity versus a state that wants "a vehicle for positive cultural enforcement" sounds like something from Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution. Arnott's approach, however, is altogether more throwaway, a Crackerjack comedy in which the artists are as clapped out as the bureaucrats. Even before the story takes a silly turn into undead zombie territory, we have to put up with endless scenes of deliberately hammy acting and clunky historical verse dramas. Despite valiant efforts by the actors in Alasdair McCrone's Mull theatre production, it is not funny, largely because it trades in cliche more than truth. Apart from the mole's amusing reinterpretation of Mary Queen of Scots as a woman sensitive to gender equality issues, the play squanders a worthy debate on a feeble fantasy.

· At Byre theatre, St Andrews, tonight. Box office: 01334 475000. Then touring.

Les Parents Terribles

© Mark Fisher
Published in The Guardian
Tuesday June 17, 2008
The Guardian

Jean Cocteau's knowingly bourgeois play, a runaway hit in the Paris of the late 1930s, stretches the form of the domestic drama to breaking point. It is as if Oedipus, Lady Macbeth and Gertrude wound up in the same boulevard melodrama - with a couple more archetypes thrown in for good measure.

Any other playwright having dreamed up Yvonne, a matriarchal monster with an incestuous passion for Michael, her 22-year-old son, would have been content to leave it at that. But Cocteau ratchets up the stakes with a husband and sister of such unscrupulousness that the Parisian flat becomes a claustrophobic hothouse of duplicity.

So manipulative are this trio of pleasure seekers that even the conventional goodness of the younger generation is thrown into doubt. Is Michael a corrupted mummy's boy or love's young dream? Is Madeleine genuinely swayed by her love for both father and son, or a two-timing money grabber?

Such uncertainty keeps us gripped enough to forgive the overly explanatory passages of the play, produced here in the sparky 1994 version by Jeremy Sams. These characters are at once grotesque and credible, the more so in a brilliantly acted, late-60s production by Stewart Laing on a superb twin-level letter-box set of his own design.

As Yvonne, Ann Louise Ross gives a great show of volatility, switching by the line from frisky to hectoring to narcissistic. She is matched in spiritedness by Kevin Lennon's Michael, and in deviousness by Irene Macdougall's passive-aggressive sister and John Buick's adulterous husband. It is hard to decide whether Emily Winter's earnest young lover is an innocent party or this frightening family's natural heir.

Laing captures the conflict between primal passions and polite exteriors by tempering the actors' restless energy with a painterly awareness of space. Melodrama rarely looked so good.

· Until June 21. Box office: 01382 223530.

Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland: the winners

The winners of the 2008 CATS were announced last night.

The price of success for Edinburgh comedy

© Mark Fisher
Guardian blog

The last time I saw Doug Stanhope it was 2am and we were in a Las Vegas casino. He'd just come back from the loo and, reaching out to pass him his bottle of lager, I accidentally knocked it onto the roulette table. A puddle of Budweiser seeped across the green felt. "Hey, everybody, I'd like you to meet my friend Mark from Scotland," he yelled, suggesting I place my remaining chips on red 27 before we made a run for it.

Continues here

The First to Go

© Mark Fisher
Published in The Guardian
Three stars
Actor/playwright Nabil Shaban's play about Hitler's treatment of people with disabilities risks the charge of stating the obvious. Obviously, the Nazis were a bad lot. And obviously, the innocent die in the end. State agents repeat terrible truths about fascist philosophy while their intended victims cower in fear. But there are three aspects of this long evening that make it more engaging than you might expect.

The first is on the level of education. It does us no harm to be reminded of the cruel logic of a politics based on racial superiority, nor to see the banality of evil - in this case, the daily justifications of a medical profession working in an atmosphere of intimidation. Shaban points out it was the disabled who were "the first to go", and it was their use as human guinea pigs that put German scientists at the forefront of medical knowledge. Today's debates about medical ethics need to be tempered by this memory.

The second aspect is about the definition of disability. Shaban makes much of the irony of Goebbels, a man with a club foot, pursuing a policy against "inferior" human beings while trying to distinguish between those who were disabled from birth and those whose disability was acquired. The play makes it clear that the distinction is a philosophical one. The experience of disability does not depend on whether you are war-wounded or have an inherited condition. It could affect any of us.

Third is Peter Clerke's production for Benchtours, which breaks a potentially unwieldy script into a series of neat vignettes. Yes, they die in the end - and with a melodramatic flourish - but the route is not always so obvious.

· At the Tron, Glasgow (0141-552 4267), from Thursday until Saturday. Then touring.

Little Otik

©Mark Fisher
Published in the Guardian
Four stars

The creepiness kicks in from the start. The house lights are still up when a young girl in a plain dress appears in the aisle distractedly bouncing a ball. Making a tremendously assured professional debut, Rebecca Smith is like an otherworldly spirit, enigmatic and all-knowing, as if possessing secrets denied the adult world. In Vanishing Point's adaptation of the Jan Svankmajer film, she becomes the focal point of a nightmare fairytale that is a cross between Eraserhead and Little Shop of Horrors.

The central story is about the girl's neighbour, the infertile Bozena Foster, who transfers her maternal longing to a tree stump dug up by her husband. What first looks like neurosis turns out to be chillingly prescient as the wood acquires a murderous life of its own. "Be careful what you wish for" is the moral of the modern-day fable, steeped in a fear of birth and childhood.

Matthew Lenton's production, a collaboration with the National Theatre of Scotland, is visually ravishing. Kai Fischer's set is a field of barren soil, waiting for the rain to usher in new life, while projections of sperm, foetuses and babies flicker across the back wall of the family's flat. There is no such thing as the innocence of childhood for as long as the neighbourhood paedophile is at large.

Extending Svankmajer's surrealism, Lenton's actors coax babies and cabbages from the ground and even find a real cat in a pram, while Christopher Shutt's score keeps the show on an uneasy line between laughter and fear. As distinctive in its way as Improbable's Shockheaded Peter, Little Otik is a macabre delight, even if its love of gothic horror denies the story a lasting emotional impact. At Eden Court, Inverness, tomorrow and Wednesday. Box office: 01463 234234. Then touring.

The Sound of My Voice

© Mark Fisher

An edited version of this review appeared in The Guardian

The Sound of My Voice
Citizens', Glasgow
[**** FOUR STARS]
Emerging a few years after Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City and predating TV's Mad Men, Ron Butlin's short novel is part of a subgenre of alcohol-fuelled, mid-life crises in the workplace stories. But where the American equivalents are set in the glamorous worlds of magazines and advertising agencies, Butlin's debut revolves around a biscuit factory. It's a typically British white-collar setting – dull, downbeat and self-important – that helps explain, with wry humour, the hero's descent into an alcoholic breakdown.

In Jeremy Raison's good-looking studio adaptation, a welcoming tray of custard creams sets the mood somewhere between triviality and desperation. Morris Magellan is a family man and successful company executive, skilled enough at his inane job to disguise his dependency on brandy, even if the strain is beginning to show at home. Played by a dexterous Billy Mack, squirming in his suit like an inebriated Lee Evans, he is all charm and charisma, despite the self-loathing. It's a fine, fluid performance that manages to make a repellent character endlessly watchable.

In his adaptation, Raison emphasises Magellan's dislocation by casting a fresh-faced Rebecca McQuillan not only as wife, secretary, daughter and colleague, but also as an echoing inner voice, capturing both the sense of drunken blurriness and, more importantly, the lost child hiding within the frightened adult.

What's missing, perhaps inevitably in 2008, is the taste of self-interested mid-80s Thatcherite greed – a cultural context to make this more than the story of one man's personal struggle with the bottle. Equally, however, it avoids coming across as an advert for Alcoholics Anonymous, even if Butlin's flashbacks to a fraught father-son relationship seem a little pat. Thanks to superb lighting and sound by Graham Sutherland on Jason Southgate's off-kilter mirrored set, the show creates a vivid theatrical journey with the simplest of means.
Mark Fisher
Until June 7. Box office: 0141 429 0022.

Wild Honey

Pitlochry Festival Theatre
[** TWO STARS]
©Mark Fisher
Imagine a cross between Uncle Vanya, Noises Off and Don Juan with a touch of Hamlet's indecision thrown in for good measure. This is the mongrel territory of Michael Frayn's mid-80s reworking of Anton Chekhov's novice play, usually known as Platonov, which comes across as a midsummer night's sex comedy tempered by moments of existentialist despair, not all of it serious.

Launching the six-play summer repertoire season at Pitlochry, John Durnin's production boasts a number of spirited performances, but it falls in the middle ground between pathos and farce. It is neither serious enough to explain the characters' frustrated desires nor funny enough to show the ridiculous tragedy of their empty lives.

As in later Chekhov, things have grown so desperately dull in well-to-do provincial Russia that the slightest deviation from the norm causes untold excitement. Thus when Mikhail Vasilyevich Platonov, a school teacher with a vaguely unconventional streak, returns to his in-laws' country house for the summer, he becomes the subject of irrepressible sexual yearning. A man primarily in love with himself, he is forced to juggle the advances of three women while his misunderstood wife is indoors with their baby.

Part of the joke is that Platonov is unworthy of such attention; he's just a big-headed dreamer with thwarted ambitions. Even so, it doesn't make sense for actor Greg Powrie to project so weak an impression of the charismatic student Platonov once was or of the "spirit" that is ascribed to him. He is genial and self-absorbed rather than a maverick, which makes it hard to see why the women are attracted to him, especially in the absence of any sexual chemistry on stage. As a result, the comedy of a man besieged by women never sparks into life and the play seems long winded where it should be fleet of foot.
Mark Fisher
Until October 18. Box office: 01796 484 626.

The Drawer Boy

Tron, Glasgow

© Mark Fisher

Andy Arnold begins his artistic directorship of the Tron where he left off in his old job - with stories. His swansong at Glasgow's Arches was a production of Tom Murphy's Bailegangaire in which two daughters crave the completion of their mother's favourite story so they can achieve resolution in their own lives. Now Arnold turns to Canadian writer Michael Healey's The Drawer Boy, a warm-hearted well-made play also about the way stories give us self-definition.

It's inspired by the occasion in 1972 when Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille ventured into rural Ontario to research a play called The Farm Show. Healey eases us in with a gentle mismatch comedy about a naive young actor, Miles, getting to grips with the life-and-death realities of country life. But his deeper purpose is to look at how the fiction of The Farm Show was able to articulate, for the farmers, a revelatory sense of their own experience.

He conveys this through two men whose relationship, like George and Lennie in Of Mice and Men, is one of mutual dependency. The stoical Morgan keeps his brain-damaged friend Angus on track by endlessly retelling their life story; Angus, in return, uses his undiminished mathematical skills to do the books. The story is interrupted by a third party, Miles, whose theatrical tales resonate more strongly with Angus as he searches for certainty in a troubled mental world.

Although the play is a little like one of those Canadian beers that boasts of having no aftertaste, it is beautifully observed and subtly constructed in its journey from comedy to pathos. Above all, it is exquisitely acted by Brian Ferguson, Benny Young and Brian Pettifer, and promises more powerful stories to come under Arnold's regime.

· Until May 24. Box office: 0141-552 4267.

Sandy Grierson interview

Published in Scotland on Sunday: 18 May 2008

© Mark Fisher

IF THEATRE was a gamblers' game, you'd want to keep your money near Sandy Grierson. The Edinburgh actor has form. It isn't only that he walked away with the gong for best actor in last year's Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland (CATS) thanks to his "shape-changing" performance in Communicado's Fergus Lamont, it's that he was subsequently in two shows that have just been nominated for this year's CATS, the winners of which will be announced on June 15.

Published today, the nominations include Vanishing Point's Subway for best use of music, and the Royal Lyceum's The Wizard Of Oz for best show for children. Grierson was in both – in one, playing a young man returning to a dystopian Leith, and in the other, a loveable Tin Man – during a year in which everything seemed to go right for him.

"It was a terrifying year simply because it was jam-packed with things I was delighted with," he says during a rare afternoon off while the lights are focused for Little Otik, his latest show with Vanishing Point and the National Theatre of Scotland. "It was a brilliant year."

His output over the past 12 months gives a clear sense of Grierson's range and level of engagement. Not only has he taken on roles as diverse as the socially climbing Fergus Lamont and a tortured Orestes in a one-man Oresteia (standing stock still with his arms in the air for a full 50 minutes), but he has made major creative contributions to the work itself. Subway, for example, began life in a less than sober improvisation involving Grierson and director Matthew Lenton, and by the time a fabulous band of Kosovan musicians had been drafted in, it had become an exuberant tale of social injustice in which Grierson and co-star Rosalind Sydney syncopated their dialogue to the rhythms of the band.

"Subway was very close to my heart," he says about the show in which he played a man searching for his father in a Leith that had been gentrified beyond recognition. "It wasn't autobiographical, but my dad's voice was very present in his wit and banter. It was a show that was close because a whole part of it did come from my and Matt's experience. The musicians were such a great bunch and to perform with them behind you was a joy every time."

Throw in a key role in a Wizard Of Oz that broke all box-office records at Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum ("It was great fun," he says) and you have a run of shows that were as successful as they were varied. It's an achievement that reflects the unconventional route he took into theatre in the first place. Grierson is a child of the more exotic fringes of the Edinburgh festival, having been taken in the Nineties by his mother to see Today Is My Birthday by legendary Polish director Tadeusz Kantor and, later, a protégé of Kantor's, Zofia Kalinska, with whom he trained. While his contemporaries went off to drama school, Grierson was soaking up the techniques of Eastern European theatre, something he has continued in his work with David WW Johnstone of the experimental Lazzi Performance Lab.

The eclecticism continues this week with Little Otik, a stage adaptation of the unsettling Czech movie by the acclaimed filmmaker Jan Svankmajer. Released in 2000, it's a mesmerising film, part social document, part fairytale, in which a childless woman starts to nurture a tree stump carved to look like a baby. What could have been a sad tale about infertility takes a gothic turn when the tree stump comes to life and unleashes its voracious appetite.

As the story veers into territory somewhere between black comedy and psychological horror, you understand how the surrealist Svankmajer came to be such an influence on Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam.

It was Vanishing Point's designer Kai Fischer who first had the notion that Little Otik could work on stage, not only because its Prague-born director trained in theatre and puppetry, but also because the film's heightened quality distinguishes it from cinema's everyday realism. What seems theatrical on film is not necessarily theatrical on stage, however, and the challenge for Vanishing Point has been to find a true equivalent in the new medium.

"The difficulty of transferring it to the stage is not the monster," says Grierson, who plays Karel, the tree stump's less-than-willing adopted father. "It's the complexities of the relationships of the other people. In a film you can take so many shortcuts. Things can be quite fleeting. In theatre everything has an entrance and an exit. You have to give characters a reason to be present but you can't overload it because the thrust of it has to be this fable."

A co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland, featuring a top cast that includes Pauline Goldsmith, Louise Ludgate and Ann Scott-Jones, Little Otik has an advantage over many film adaptations in that the original is an art-house favourite and not a mainstream hit that everyone knows. Unlike the Royal Lyceum's Wizard Of Oz, which trod a careful line between the familiar and the new, Little Otik does not have to worry about upsetting the purists.

"You have got your Svankmajer fan club, but it'd be impossible to mimic the film," says Grierson. "We're trying not to let it have too much of that Eastern European aesthetic, but equally you're not going to see an entirely different story or different characters."

Like all good fairy stories, Little Otik resonates with people of all ages. Based on a traditional story collected by the 19th-century Bohemian writer and folklorist Karel Jaromír Erben, it plays on adult fears of childhood. The way Svankmajer treats the arrival of the tree stump-cum-baby recalls the nightmare birth in David Lynch's Eraserhead. As the stump grows into a monster, it is another child – a neighbour's daughter – who befriends it and aids its reign of terror. "It's about adult fantasies about childhood, whether it be a fantasy that a child of your own could change your life or that a child is complicit in a series of murders," says Grierson. "The neighbour's child herself feels a maternal instinct towards the creature. It's a fantastic modern myth."

Vanishing Point's collective way of creating theatre, in shows such as Man Cub and Lost Ones, means Grierson is comfortable with the idea that a show can change from night to night. "A lot of the work we do is in preparation for that," he says. "With every show we've done, you could do another show out of the cuts we've made. Everyone is kept on their toes and that can be hellish at times, but it's partly what keeps us going and gives the show a heartbeat."

• Little Otik, Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow, Wednesday until May 31 and on tour; Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland, Òran Mór, Glasgow, June 15

Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland: shortlists

The shortlists for this year's Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland have been released.

See here for details:

http://www.scottishtheatreawards.org/

Theatre criticism – how to relish a moving target

Published in Press Gazette

I once sat behind a novice reviewer in a tiny theatre during the Edinburgh Fringe. The show had not begun and the stage was empty, but for a chair. I saw the reviewer make a note and wondered what could possibly have caught his attention. Peaking over his shoulder, I saw what he had written. It was the word “chair”.

It made me laugh, but I recognised his dilemma. What prompted him to note such a banal detail was the fear of a blank page. It’s a fear that never subsides, because, for the theatre critic, there really is nothing to say until the performance happens.

This is why theatre reviewers are an intrepid sort. Not for them the certainties of the cinema, where the seats are in straight rows, the films look like real life and the actors never forget their lines. Not for them the home comforts of the book reviewer, who can read at leisure and refer endlessly back to the written word. And not for them the predictability of the lone artist whose work changes little from gallery to gallery.

Instead, the theatre reviewer needs to relish a moving target. They must accept that the rules of the game are rewritten every night. They must understand that a first-night West End gala is a different beast to a wet Wednesday matinee; that Macbeth in communist Romania is not the same as Macbeth on Broadway.

It means that however much preparation reviewers do – reading the book of the play, researching the history of the production, boning up on the artistic team – their efforts will be wasted if they are not alive to the moment. It’s a scary thought, but one that makes the job exhilarating and, if you are reviewing overnight, more exhilarating still.

In the face of so much uncertainty, it helps to have a clear idea of your aims.

Irving Wardle’s Theatre Criticism is out of print, but seek out a second-hand copy and it will become your constant friend. He talks about questions a review should seek to answer, broadly summarised as: What is the production trying to do; how well did it do it; and was it worth doing in the first place? Answer the first two and you’re doing the job of a reviewer; address the third and you’re turning into a critic.

Then comes the vexed question of who you’re writing for. Theatre is an intimate artform, playing to small numbers at a time. Unlike the film, pop or TV reviewer, you can’t assume your readers will have the chance to experience the event for themselves. Yet some will have been in the audience with you and are looking for a second opinion. It means you must write for novice and initiate alike, producing copy that is as informative as it is insightful. If you can do that with passion, wit and enthusiasm, conveying a sense of the unique qualities of an artform that is never the same twice, so much the better.

© Mark Fisher 2008

Funding drama spells disaster for student actors

Mark Fisher

It's as if someone read about the terrible employment figures for Equity members and decided to fix the problem their own way. Instead of having to cope with all these resting thesps, wouldn't it be better if we just stopped training actors in the first place? Well, of course it wouldn't - the theatre, TV and film industries would dwindle away without a steady flow of versatile young recruits - but that's the likely effect of the cutbacks troubling Scotland's two leading drama schools.

Continued here

Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland

Tickets are now on sale for the
THE SIXTH ANNUAL
Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland
Sunday 15 June 2008
6pm

Oran Mor, 731 Great Western Road, Glasgow

TICKETS £15
(inc VAT & booking fee)
includes wine and light refreshments

Online from:
Tickets Scotland

in person:
239 Argyle Street, Glasgow (next to the Arches)

by phone:
0870 220 1116

Come and mingle with the rising stars of the Scottish stage as the nation's critics make their annual awards across ten categories, from Best Actor and Actress to Best New Play - and drink a couple of glasses of bubbly with the winners!

Presented in association with:

The West End Festival
Oran Mor
Glasgow, Scotland with Style

http://www.scottishtheatreawards.org/

Nova Scotia review

** Traverse, Edinburgh

Mark Fisher
Tuesday May 6, 2008
The Guardian

The problem with Nova Scotia is the same problem faced by its central character, Phil McCann. The first time we met this irascible artist was as a quick-witted young colour mixer in The Slab Boys, John Byrne's late-70s comedy set in a 1957 carpet factory. Then McCann was the centre of attention, an angry young man full of violent potential, cornered by the deadening restrictions of the adult world. Fifty years on, the opposite is true. His most creative years are behind him, his younger wife is a Turner prize nominee and his best mate, Spanky Farrell, has enjoyed a far more interesting life as a hedonistic rock star.

So while McCann still has plenty to be frustrated about, he is no longer master of his own destiny. It opens up interesting ground for a comedy about an active but aging generation - Nova Scotia is full of frank gags about illness and death - but it also leaves a dramatic hole at the centre of the play.

There is no shortage of frenetic action as a film crew arrives to shoot a pop video, an arts reporter tries to conduct an interview and long-lost friends appear out of the blue, but McCann's role is passive. He initiates nothing.

So despite Byrne's vivid characters and first-rate performances in Paddy Cunneen's production, Nova Scotia never gets to the point. The action is propelled not by McCann's dilemma, but by a series of farcical accidents, missed planes and lost mobiles. The result is that the climactic revelation of McCann's incestuous parentage carries no dramatic weight; it is a private shock for the character (excellently played by Paul Morrow), instead of a bombshell to turn the play upside down.

· Until May 24. Box office: 0131-228 1404.

Educating Agnes review

*** Citizens, Glasgow

Mark Fisher
Friday May 2, 2008
The Guardian


A standard translation of Molière's L'Ecole des Femmes is a clunky thing. The French playwright's Alexandrine couplets sound awkward in English, the rhythms mechanical, the rhymes forced. But not so in Liz Lochhead's new version, the first major Scottish translation of the play since 1948, when Robert Kemp inspired a generation of McMolières with Let Wives Tak Tent.

In Lochhead's hands, the rhymes dance around this most wordy of comedies, fuelling it with energy, where others would drag it down. Occasionally, she will make a joke out of a blatant rhyme, but more typically she scores her laughs by swinging from highfalutin' to commonplace in a single phrase, making the rhymes a delightful surprise.

"It's a really crap idea," says Sean Scanlon's Chrysalde with comic bluntness in one such moment. He's just heard Arnolphe's plan to marry the virginal Agnes, believing her innocence will protect him from cuckoldry. From there on in, the script is characteristically magpie-like, as likely to reference Desperate Housewives and self-help manuals as to take poetic flights of fancy.

As a result, there is many a laugh in Graham McLaren's production for Theatre Babel, even if it doesn't scale the pantomime heights of a truly delirious occasion. As Arnolphe, Kevin McMonagle has the right balance of sleaziness and pomposity, pursuing his ridiculous experiment in social engineering with unstoppable arrogance. But impressive though his performance is, he doesn't have that crowd-baiting verve that, presumably, Molière himself brought to the part in 1662.

There are strong turns by newcomer Anneika Rose as Agnes and by Maureen Carr, her sharp-tongued servant, but you still come away feeling that the star of the show is the script.

· Until Saturday. Box office: 0141-429 0022.

Yarn by Grid Iron

**** Verdant Works, Dundee

Mark Fisher
Thursday May 1, 2008
The Guardian

Edinburgh site-specific company Grid Iron specialises in after-hours trips into half-familiar spaces - airports, department stores, play parks - always immersing the audience in a world somewhere between reality and make-believe. Each location brings its own costumes, but nowhere has the idea of dressing up been so much to the fore than here in Verdant Works, a jute museum built in a former cloth factory. Working with Dundee Rep, the company interpret the idea of textiles in two ways. One is as storytellers, spinning a line, telling a yarn. A thread of red cotton marks our journey through four spaces, while a metaphorical thread sews together the patchwork of monologues, anecdotes and sketches performed by the six-strong company.

The second theme is about the way we are defined by what we wear. Out of the dressing-up box come stiff Victorian suits, as constricting as presbyterianism; Elizabethan motley that is comically cumbersome, and a floor-length woollen scarf, a symbol of carefree youth. We see clothes full of sexual potency, whether it is the ledger-keeper's Freudian nightmare about his mother, or the woman who uses her burka as a means of erotic liberation. All this is underscored by the child in an Indian sweatshop, realised in puppet form, who dreams of escape while sewing cheap garments for the decadent west.

It is more static than many of the company's promenade shows, but no less inventive. Rich in ideas, vivid in execution, this Yarn forms a delightful fabric that takes time to unravel.

· Until Saturday. Box office: 01382 223530.

Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland

The site for the Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland is newly updated with information about this year's ceremony.

Meanwhile on Scottish Theatre Links you can catch up with John Byrne, with his latest Slab Boys instalment, and Dominic Hill, outlining his plans for the Traverse Theatre.

The sexism of Ratatouille

I wrote this article for The Scotsman at the weekend:

ARE WOMEN JUST HARDER TO DRAW?

I'VE just watched the new Pixar animation, Ratatouille, and I'm aghast. In a cast of 16, there is only one significant female character: Colette, a chef, voiced by Janeane Garofalo. Although she starts off with a plucky speech against the male domination of the food industry, within a few scenes even she has blanded out into the hero's love interest. What kind of message are we sending to our children when every story is about dynamic boys and lovey-dovey girls?

The problem doesn't stop at Ratatouille. With the possible exception of The Incredibles, which does have two or three juicy female parts, every modern cartoon is dominated by men. Of 45 named characters in Cars, a mere seven are female. We're talking cars here: metal things that have no innate gender characteristics. It was the same in Madagascar, a film entirely populated by animals with roles for just three women.

Unthinking sexism is to blame, as is the film industry's obsession with ambitious sons and dysfunctional fathers. Ratatouille is about a food-loving rat misunderstood by his garbage-gorging dad. Finding Nemo (six women out of 24) is about a timid father summoning up the manliness to rescue his son. Chicken Little (four women out of 24) is about a feeble child proving himself to his macho father. In most of these, the mother figure is written out altogether, giving us one-sided visions of the world that are as short in positive role models as they are lacking in satisfying narratives. I say rats to that.

Scottish theatre home and away

Feeling remiss for not posting for so long. Sorry fans.

At home the autumn season has started in earnest with Shakespeares at the Citz and the Royal Lyceum and Davey Anderson's Rupture at the Traverse. I'll be at Dundee's Peer Gynt on Thursday and then in Wigtown for the launch of the NTS Ensemble's revival of Molly Sweeney and the new children's show A Sheep Called Skye at the weekend. Check out Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links for reviews as I remember to post them.

Further afield, Black Watch (aka The Best Play Ever Written In This Or Any Universe Ever) is going down well in Los Angles. A perceptive review in the LA Times.

Meanwhile in the real theatre of war Grid Iron's Ben Harrison has been blogging for The Guardian about his experiences in Lebanon.

While you're on the Guardian site have a look at the fascinating discussion arising from blogs about critics by Michael Billington and Lyn Gardner.

Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland

Someone should write a play based on the meeting when the country's reviewers draw up the shortlists for the Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland. Admittedly you'd want to call it 12 Monkeys rather than 12 Angry Men, but in the passions and politics, the tensions and tantrums, the gags and the gaffes, there'd be all the material you'd need for a hilarious farce if not a gripping drama. Last week's meeting in a Glasgow hotel to hammer out the 2006-07 shortlists even had the perfect nail-biting finish as the assembled critics settled on the final nominations for best production with just two minutes to spare.

Along the way, each critic in turn saw their favourites knocked back and their wildcards supported. Away from the heat of the moment, however, all agreed it was another cracking list of contenders. Those in the running for the ten awards, which will be announced on June 10 at a public ceremony at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, are up against fierce competition. It's testament to the quality of theatre produced over the last 12 months that although the National Theatre of Scotland's universally acclaimed Black Watch has a number of nominations, it by no means dominates the list. Gregory Burke's regimental drama has become regarded as a milestone in Scottish theatre, but the shortlists show it was one of many pleasures over the year.

There are four nominations in each of ten categories. Competing for best male performer are: Liam Brennan, a previous winner, for his role as a father with a job on a production line in Franz Xaver Kroetz's Tom Fool at the Citizens, Glasgow; Sandy Grierson for the title role in Fergus Lamont, the Robin Jenkins adaptation by Communicado; Stuart McQuarrie whose interior fantasises were made flesh in Anthony Neilson's Realism for the NTS and Edinburgh International Festival; and Richard Addison who played the most unlikely have-a-go-hero in Alan Ayckbourn's Man of the Moment at Pitlochry Festival Theatre.

In a formidable year for best female performances, Meg Fraser is in the running for her role as the long-suffering wife in Tom Fool (we also loved her cameo in All My Sons at the Royal Lyceum, but that's another story); Irene Macdougall is on the shortlist for a second time for the outrageous Alexandra del Lago in Dundee Rep's Sweet Bird of Youth; Gerda Stevenson is nominated for her heart-rending performance in Rapture's Frozen; and Jill Riddiford gets her second nomination for the Alan Bennett monologue Bed among the Lentils staged by the Tron and Glasgay.

Theatre for children and young people remains on a high and there are worthy potential winners in Nicola McCartney's The Lion of Kabul for Catherine Wheels and Andy Cannon's Is this a Dagger? for Wee Stories. The prolific David Greig meanwhile is behind two nominations, the exuberant party antics of Gobbo with Wils Wilson for the National Theatre of Scotland and the harrowing teen drama of Yellow Moon for TAG.

The Lion of Kabul also pops up in the best design category thanks to Karen Tennant's all-encompassing tent of a set. She's up against Naomi Wilkinson and Bruno Poet for their atmospheric work on Dundee Rep's very wet A Midsummer Night's Dream; Francis O'Connor and Chris Ellis for the prison interior of Man of La Mancha at the Royal Lyceum; and Keith McIntyre and Jeanine Davies for the cartoon landscape of The Unconquered by Stellar Quines.

We were spoilt for choice in the best director category, narrowing it down to Clare Lizzimore for Tom Fool; John Tiffany for Black Watch; Martin Duncan for Man of La Mancha and John Dove for All My Sons.

Fergus Lamont, Black Watch and Man of La Mancha crop up again in the best ensemble category. Those impressive teams will be vying with the actors of the Traverse's three-play Tilt series for the award which recognises the contribution of the entire performing company.

One of that Tilt trilogy – Distracted by newcomer Morna Pearson – has been singled out for inclusion on the best new play shortlist. It's up against Gregory Burke's Black Watch, David Greig's Yellow Moon and Torben Betts' The Unconquered.

The CATS also recognise the frequently unsung contribution of the backstage crew. In the best technical presentation category, Communicado's Fergus Lamont, the NTS's Black Watch and the Royal Lyceum's Man of La Mancha crop up again, alongside the ambitious two-company collaboration between Dundee Rep and Scottish Dance Theatre on Monkey.

For best use of music Nerea Bello and Galvarino Ceron-Carrasco brought a hot Spanish flavour to Amada at the Arches; Davey Anderson introduced high Scottish romance to Black Watch; Gordon Rigby audaciously filled Oran Mor with a whole orchestra for GBH; and Robert Pettigrew drilled a superb team of actor-musicians in Man of La Mancha.

Finally, we come to the coveted gong for best production, an award previously picked up by Grid Iron's Roam, Anthony Neilson's The Wonderful World of Dissocia and Dundee Rep's Scenes for an Execution. In the running this year are Spend a Penny, an intense series of monologues performed one-to-one in the cubicles of the Arches Theatre toilets; Tom Fool, the much admired Kroetz play about a soul-destroying economic system, at the Citizens Theatre; Black Watch, the radical portrait of the ancient regiment in Iraq, by the NTS; and Aalst, the harrowing semi-verbatim court-case reflections on a real-life child murder case, also performed by the NTS.

The Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland 2006-07, June 10, Pitlochry Festival Theatre.

For reviews see Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links.

Blackbird in NYC

David Harrower's Blackbird has a rave review by Ben Brantley in today's New York Times. He says the play by "a largely unheralded" writer (like Knives in Hens never happened) "promises to be the most powerful of the season". Talking of the central characters, he says: "Both Una and Ray have read deep in the psychological literature of sexual abuse, and it doesn’t begin to encompass what they experienced. The miracle of “Blackbird” is that it does."

David Rooney in Variety is slightly cooler, but generally positive: "While it ultimately doesn't achieve the psychological clarity to fully illuminate the moral morass it uncovers, "Blackbird" is a dark, dangerous love story in which the past casts an unhealthy shadow."

New look theatre site

I've done a bit of a re-jig of my website. See what you think: Scottish Theatre Links

Watch out! It's the Black Watch watch

Black Watch continues to plough a path to theatrical domination as John Tiffany wins best director in the Critics Circle Awards. All the other winners are for productions south of the border: Best new play: Rock 'N' Roll by Tom Stoppard; Best musical: Caroline, or Change; Best director: John Tiffany (Black Watch); Best actor: Rufus Sewell (Rock 'N' Roll); Best actress: Kathleen Turner (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?); Best Shakespearean performance: Tamsin Greig (Much Ado About Nothing); Best designer: The Punchdrunk Faust Company; Most promising playwright: Nina Raine (Rabbit); Most promising newcomer (apart from playwright): Connie Fisher (The Sound of Music) and Andrew Garfield (Beautiful Thing/ Overwhelming/ Burn/ Chatroom/ Citzenship).

Meanwhile, I've got a new blog on the Guardian site about the strange case of the Maltings Theatre in Berwick wanting to charge Scottish audiences more than locals.

Playing at friends

I know it's pathetic to have enjoyed reaching the milestone of 100 MySpace "friends", many of whom I have never met nor even communicated with. But how much lower have I sunk now I'm making friends not with strangers, not with theatre companies, but with individual plays? I'm deeply ashamed to reveal that instead of going down the pub, I know hang out with Black Watch and the NTS Young Company's The Recovery Position. Apparently, The Recovery Position is an Aquarius who doesn't want kids.

In yesterday's Scotland on Sunday you could read me on Star Catchers and theatre for the under-threes. There was also an interview with ex-Lyceum head honcho Kenny Ireland Ireland about a sitcom he's in.

Playwright Stuart Paterson was unusually absent from Scottish stages at Christmas, but he hasn't been idle. Nick Hern Books has just published his recent adaptations of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book and Michael Morpurgo's Kensuke's Kingdom.

Who watches the Black Watch watch?

Black Watch has won the South Bank Show Award for theatre, giving me a topical way into talking about the building-less nature of the National Theatre of Scotland in a Guardian blog.

Don't suppose it's healthy to write blogs about blogs, but I've been trying to find a place for those Nicholas Hytner quotes since October. Glad they've finally got a home of their own.

Earlier this week, I did another blog about the imminent departure of Paul Gudgin from the Fringe Office.

Big Brother and the theatre

Like the rest of the world, the Scot-Nits email group lapsed into a discussion of Big Brother last week. There was initially nothing to distinguish the comments from those of any other group, but it started to get interesting when people applied the debate to theatre. I've just thrown in my tuppance ha'penny worth with the following:

One area that hasn't been mentioned so far is documentary theatre, whether in the form Jeremy Weller pioneered in the early-90s with the Grassmarket Project, in which roles were played by homeless people, juvenile delinquents or sex workers, or in the form of verbatim plays such as Black Watch, The Exonerated, My Name is Rachel Corrie or Bloody Sunday.

Interestingly, such plays have stirred up a debate similar to a recent exchange here in which someone suggested Big Brother was in some way not real.

It's true that as soon as something real is mediated through the lens of an artist or an editor, it ceases to be real. The editors/directors make so many choices, from the selection of the subject in the first place to the editing of the script, that even the most faithful piece of documentary theatre has to be regarded as subjective.

But taking that as a given, I'm puzzled by some of the comments here about Big Brother that suggested the programme didn't present a good opportunity for actors to study human behaviour. One of the key reasons for the programme's success is that it allows us to watch what happens when a group of people are put together in extraordinary circumstances.

On a literal or metaphorical level it's what theatre is about, whether it's Shakespeare seeing what happens when a bunch of sailors get thrown together on an island in The Tempest or Arthur Miller seeing what happens when a family tries to live together in the face of a lie in All My Sons.

Now, you can make all sorts of criticisms of Big Brother - that it celebrates the cult of personality, that it is cynical in its casting (though surely no more cynical than casting Iago in the same play as Othello), that it doesn't have the dramatic arc of a properly constructed play and, most damning to my mind, that it's rather tedious - but to suggest that it doesn't reflect some aspect of life as we know it is to be worryingly dismissive of the huge audiences that watch it.

If you're subscribed to this mailing list, you probably think theatre can capture the human condition better than Big Brother. Fair enough. I agree with you. But Tom Freeman is right when he says practitioners risk losing touch with their audiences if they regard theatre as an implicitly higher artform. The human needs that Big Brother is catering to are not so different to the needs theatre is catering to.

Some theatre is better than Big Brother. A lot is worse. It'd be a foolish theatre practitioner who dismissed the programme's phenomenal success without analysing why it was so popular.

The fact that theatre has provided us with Black Watch, The Exonerated, My Name is Rachel Corrie, Bloody Sunday and many more suggests that society's recent thirst for "reality" extends beyond Pop Idol and Wife Swap. I'm not saying verbatim theatre is the way forward - my guess is that it's peaked as a form - but the reality format is currently satisfying a deep human need that people are bothered to talk about. Anyone working in theatre should be getting to grips with what that need is.

All My Sons

I was grumbling to myself that the standard 300 words in The Guardian wasn't enough to sum up the Royal Lyceum's All My Sons. Then they phoned up and asked for an extra 50. Not a huge increase, but enough to say how good so many of the performances are. One thing I didn't have space for was the set. I can't quite decide if the realism of Michael Taylor's imposing design, living grass and all, is another case of big-set syndrome – the kind of thing that looks impressive but risks overwhelming the creative life of the play. It works well enough for Miller's back-yard naturalism and in the end I'll give it the benefit of the doubt, but film does this stuff so much better.

Sunshine in January

There seemed to be enough of a buzz about Sunshine on Leith, Stephen Greenhorn's musical using the songs of the Proclaimers, to justify writing about it now even though it doesn't open until April. My article was in yesterday's Scotland on Sunday. A bit like the National Theatre of Scotland's stage version of Tutti Frutti, it's one of those ideas that seems so right, you can't imagine why no one's ever thought of it before. Greenhorn told me he was acutely aware of that sense of expectation, making it all the more important for them to get it right.

Where are the Creative playwrights?

Among the 20 artists shortlisted for the Scottish Arts Council's Creative Scotland Awards is a disappointing number from the world of theatre. Two, in fact. Playwright Peter Arnott would like to spend the £30,000 on a trilogy of plays about how we can live while we're waiting for the end of the world. And performance art maverick Ian Smith wants to develop a multi-media performance lecture based on the significant mischief making artists of the past 150 years.

Although £30,000 is a substantial sum of money, it doesn't go far in collaborative enterprises, which is why novelists, composers and artists apply more readily than theatre-makers. But I wonder why only one playwright has made the list?

This week the Stand comedy club in Edinburgh started a daily lunchtime session with food included in the ticket price. A bargain at £5. Further thoughts about eating and entertainment on the Guardian's arts and entertainment blog.

Scottish actors and writers abroad

Away from home, playwright Stuart Paterson has an adaptation of Michael Morporgo's Kensuke's Kingdom playing at London's Bloomsbury Theatre; actor Alan Cumming has got married; Ian McDiarmid is to star in John Gabriel Borkman at the Donmar Warehouse; and David Harrower's Blackbird will star Jeff Daniels in its Broadway production at the Manhattan Theatre Club.

Sing like a Boyd

Yesterday's Sunday Times reported that Billy Boyd is trying to get a musical off the ground. Actually, it made it seem he was "to star in a Gorbals musical" as if the whole thing were all in the bag. Further reading revealed that he's still to have discussions with John Tiffany of the National Theatre of Scotland. If it comes off, however, it could be a welcome addition to the small pool of home-grown musicals. More on Boyd here.

Meanwhile, we await the opening of Stephen Greenhorn's Sunshine on Leith, set to the songs of the Proclaimers and opening in Dundee in April before a Scottish tour.

Spring season theatre highlights

Most companies have published their spring programmes now. Highlights of the forthcoming season include All My Sons, Mrs Warren's Profession, Monks and Man of La Mancha at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh; David Greig's Europe at Dundee Rep; The Little Foxes, Humble Boy and Fergus Lamont at Perth; The Bevellers and Angels in America at the Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow; and the Scottish premiere of Eugene O'Neill's Hughie at the Arches.

At the Traverse, Edinburgh, there are new plays by Alan Wilkins (Carthage Must be Destroyed) and Linda McLean (Strangers, Babies).

For these and other programmes follow the companies links on my website.

Black Watch watch

The National Theatre of Scotland has launched its programme until June. For commentary and reflection on the company's first year see my interview with Vicky Featherstone in Scotland on Sunday.

One of the company's revivals is Black Watch which is among the nominations for this year's South Bank Show Awards.

Happy new theatre year

Oh dear. Got a bit creaky with the blog updates recently. Must do better in 2007. Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links continues to be updated, however. Latest changes include new pages for listings of forthcoming Scottish theatre productions, now itemised by month: January, February and March.

There's also a round-up of 2006, a few pre-Christmas reviews and some blogs I've been doing for the Guardian's expanded arts and entertainment blog pages.

Sweetness and shadows

My latest articles include a review of Sweet Bird of Youth at Dundee Rep and an interview with Cara Kelly about Shadow of a Gunman at the Citz. Despite her winning the Best Female Performer gong in the Critics Award for Theatre in Scotland this summer, this is only her third ever interview.

Sweet Bird of Youth is very good. If you're making the trip to Dundee this week, get there a couple of hours early so you can see the excellent Killing Time exhibition at the neighbouring DCA.

Read more at Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links

Latest theatre reviews

Just spent rather too long updating my website. Check out Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links for reviews of the Tron's production of The Tempest, Random Accomplice's Something Wicked, Visible Fictions' Jason and the Argonauts, Dudendance's Droopy Met Hal, as well as features about Dundee Rep's Sweet Bird of Youth and Douglas Henshall in London.

MSPs miss the NTS

A revealing claim in the the Observer yesterday that no leading MSP has attended a performance by the National Theatre of Scotland. I agree with Ruaridh Nicoll that it's a shocking state of affairs. Theatre is part of our civic life and for parliamentarians to avoid it is a derelection of duty. I don't imagine they were too busy catching up with other performances to find time for the NTS.

Meanwhile at the Traverse, artistic director Philip Howard is following the Tony Blair school of resignation. A story in the Scotsman at the weekend revealed he will leave the Edinburgh theatre at the end of 2007.

Among articles of mine published yesterday were interviews with Alasdair Gray, Nicholas Hytner and Zofia Kalinska. Links at Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links

Autumn almanac

Seems it's been a while since I've posted anything here. Sorry to let down all my billions of readers. There's just been too much darned theatre to see.

Usually there's a bit of a lull in September while the theatre world has a lie down after the Edinburgh festival and takes a deep breath before the autumn season. Not so this year. Thanks in large part to the National Theatre of Scotland, there's been loads to see already - and we've not even reached the end of September.

There are the three shows by the new NTS Ensemble – all of which are worth seeing if you can make it along to the community centres where they're performing – the first tentative steps of the NTS Young Company, which has performed one lunchtime show and is about to open another as part of Arches Live, and there's the high profile Tutti Frutti (I expect my review to be in tomorrow's Guardian).

This is in addition to the Play, Pie, Pint lunchtime series, now operating in Glasgow and Edinburgh, the busy Arches Live programme and new productions from the Royal Lyceum, Boilerhouse, Wee Stories (Is this a Dagger? is a great mini-Macbeth), Catherine Wheels, TAG, Borderline, Dogstar and others.

All this and more on Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe reviews

As always the Edinburgh Fringe is all-consuming, so no time to waste. There are links to some of my most recent theatre reviews and previews at Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links.

Kylie in Edinburgh

My exploits with Kylie Minogue are published on the Guardian's Culture Vulture blog today. That version's been cut down to size. The full text is below.

On Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links today, there's a load of new links to Edinburgh Festival and Fringe articles I've recently been churning out.

Here's my Kylie piece:

This is what it's like at the Edinburgh festival. One minute you're getting all intense over My Name is Rachel Corrie, the true-life tale of a woman killed by an Israeli bulldozer, the next minute, you're out on the town with Kylie Minogue, fending off autograph hunters and getting nasty looks from neighbouring tables for making too much noise in an Italian restaurant.

On Saturday night, little Kylie – who is made of porcelain and takes up less space than a mobile phone – flew up from London with her two-strong management team to see Finding Marina at the Royal Botanic Garden. The show, performed by young victims of Sri Lanka's civil war, is directed by Toby Gough, who famously cast – or should that be miscast? – sister Dannii as Lady Macbeth in the Botanics in 1999.

Kylie has lent her support to the Sri Lankan project, sponsoring one of the performers in last year's tsunami-themed Children of the Sea, and visiting the country earlier this year when her course of treatment for breast cancer came to an end in Melbourne. Staying in true pop-star style on Taprobane, a tropical island hideaway (listen out for her forthcoming song about it), the 37-year-old hung out with the young performers, rode on the back of an elephant and joined in a sing-along on the company bus.

So in Edinburgh, after enjoying Finding Marina and walking straight past the paparazzi photographer who somehow failed to notice her getting into the black limo behind him, she made a bee-line to Gough's other show, a Cuban dance spectacular called Havana Rumba! which is playing to sell-out audiences at Assembly's St George's West.

Tipped off that the princess of pop was in town, I arrived at the theatre to the sound of the final applause only to discover that Kylie had taken to the stage for the final number. She'd alarmed her management by dancing on Gough's shoulders, wobbling precariously in front of the audience, many of whom had no idea who this diminutive unannounced guest was.

Dressed in a peaked blue John Lennon-style cap over tight-curled blonde hair, Kylie was every bit as pleasant and polite as they say. When she was interrupted later in the evening by a fan who spotted her in Giuliano's, the Leith Walk Italian family restaurant, she gamely agreed to have her photo taken, but quietly said no to an autograph.

By this time, Gough, fuelled by copious quantities of Cuban rum, was holding forth at a volume more suitable to addressing 27 Sri Lankans in the open air. "You're the loudest bullshitter I've ever heard," said one disgruntled diner as he left, not realising he was shouting over the shoulder of the most famous woman on the planet.

Kylie, meanwhile, was unperturbed, picking at her vegetarian anti-pasti and deep-fried calamari, and trying out an Indian dance routine as Gough told her she should be trying to break into the Bollywood market. She left at 1.30am, promising to hook up with the Sri Lankans the next morning, before vanishing again into the mysterious land of pop.

Slope theatre review and further huffing and puffing

I'm still going on about the Scottish smoking ban, this time on the Guardian's Culture Vulture blog. Two people have joined in the discussion there so far, but the Scotland on Sunday page is up to 114 responses.

Meanwhile on Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links there's a link to my theatre review of Slope by Pamela Carter, directed by Stewart Laing.

Smoking, promoting and theatre reviewing

Been away for a few days, so haven't drawn attention to two articles from last weekend. One is about Culture Ireland giving Scottish theatre a run for its money on the Edinburgh Fringe. The other, which I didn't write, but I did do most of the interviews, is about the smoking ban on stage.

Why has one attracted 107 responses and the other none?

Meanwhile, my colleague Shona Craven has started a new theatre review website called On Stage Scotland. I'll be adding details to Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links soon.

Glasgow/Russia/the world

New on Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links today: a touching story of teenagers from Glasgow and Russia joining forces and a profile of Edinburgh company Highway Diner as it prepares a work-in-progress presentation of Building Skyscrapers for the Arches.

Stewart Laing's Slope

Interview with Stewart Laing and Pamela Carter about Slope in yesterday's Scotland on Sunday. Follow the link on Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links.