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.

Wired for sound

If you wanna get ahead you've gotta get some headphones. Edinburgh Puppet Lab's Ghost (returning to the Edinburgh Fringe) required the audience to put on a set and head off onto the streets of Leith to listen to a pre-recorded play. A couple of months ago, Visible Fictions' Prince Unleashed gave young audiences headphones to let them hear the inner thoughts of the characters. Now David Leddy is giving audiences at Glasgow's Botanic Gardens an MP3 player and headphones for Sussurus, a pre-recorded play inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream. Leddy's back with another one on the Edinburgh Fringe, as is Irish company the Performance Corporation.

My Sussurus review is on Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links as is a piece about Mull Theatre.

Moor Moors controversy

Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland, is in The Scotsman today after a BBC programme to which she contributed was pulled from the schedule. It seems she said she'd have been interested to have dinner with Myra Hindley, one of the Moors Murderers. Having met Hindley in prison, Featherstone is convinced she was a reformed person and had a fascinating experience to share.

Despite all the terrible crimes that have happened over the past 40 years, the Moors Murders have not lost their capacity to provoke outrage in the UK. So sensitive the subject, so raw the wound of the victims' families, that it's impossible to say anything about the crime without causing upset.

There's a show called Wasted coming to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe based on transcripts of appeals by Myra Hindley against her life sentence. According to reports, it was banned by the Lakeside Arts Centre in Nottingham on grounds of taste. It's interesting that a verbatim transcript of something that was said in public can be considered bad taste when put in a theatrical setting.

You don't have to believe it's OK to kill five children to question the degree of thought control that's going on here.

Back to more frivolous concerns, new additions to Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links include reviews of Summer Lightning and Chimneys at Pitlochry and a news report on the Edinburgh Fringe for Variety.

Agatha Christie premiere

Not every day you get a European premiere by a long dead thriller writer, but that's what Pitlochry Festival Theatre has come up with this season. Agatha Christie's Chimneys vanished from view after the orginal production was unexpectedly cancelled before the first night, only to resurface in Canada a few years ago. The Pitlochry production is the first time it's been seen in Europe. My review is in The Guardian today.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme launched

The programme for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe was launched on Thursday which means there's no let up between now and August when the biggest arts jamboree in the world hits town. The programme is so vast it's a bit like the Bible - you can prove anything from its contents. But my initial hunch is that there's an uncommon about of verbatim theatre and, perhaps, less frivolity than usual. Follow the link in the Latest Articles column in Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links to see what I've said about it in today's Scotland on Sunday.

Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland: the winners

A lively afternoon at Dundee's Discovery Point yesterday celebrating the best theatre of the past 12 months. See CATS winners for the results.

Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland

Writing this before heading up to Dundee for the ceremony for the Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland. By a neat coincidence, in Scotland on Sunday today is an article I've written about Nothing, which had two nominations in CATS in 2004. The Henry Green adaptation, first seen at the Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow, has been revived for a run in New York under the direction of Philip Prowse. Follow the link at Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links.

Talking of critics, playwright Catherine Czerkawska has taken up a theme from this blog on her Wordarts blog.

The Collection, Gorgeous Avatar and Children's Festival

Been a bit slow adding to my website a couple of theatre reviews I did recently. Follow the links for an impressive revival of Mike Cullen's The Collection by Rapture Theatre and a second review of Jules Horne's Gorgeous Avatar at Edinburgh's Traverse.

Talking of which, Horne's Gorgeous Avatar blog includes information about all aspects of the production process, but no comment on the critical reaction. For a first-time writer, having your work reviewed, favourably or otherwise, must be a novel experience and it would have been interesting to read Horne's reactions on the blog.

But, unlike Catherine Czerkawska whose Wordarts blog talked about the critical response to a play she wrote for A Play, a Pie and a Pint a few months ago, the Gorgeous Avatar blog is silent. That's because it's as much the work of the Traverse Theatre's marketing department as it is of Horne herself and, for perfectly good reasons, the company doesn't want to get into a tit-for-tat spat between critics and writer.

There is a problem about artists responding to critical comments because they're always going to have a vested interest in defending their work. It's too easy for them to sound biased, deranged, defensive, hurt, blinkered, etc - whether or not they are any of those things. This is frustrating because reviews should be the start of a discussion not the end of one. And the blogosphere is the perfect arena for such a discussion to take place.

Czerkawka's most recent post is about her reactions to the TAG/National Theatre of Scotland production of The Crucible (links to my reviews on my National Theatre of Scotland page). I happen to agree with her assessment, but that's not the point. What would be healthy is if more people - critics, artists, audience - joined in the discussion.

But before you do that, do check out the Bank of Scotland Children's International Theatre Festival this week. So far I've seen The Giraffe's Journey, a bonkers Italian show performed in a home-made hut, Them with Tails, hilarious improvisational storytelling by Tall Stories, and Shopping for Shoes, an excellent if too short story about the pressures of global capitalism by Visible Fictions.

National Theatre of Scotland Transform & Royal Lyceum season

The National Theatre of Scotland is operating at all levels of the theatre ecology, which means community projects as well as glamorous nights in posh theatres. Transform is one such community project, taking place in four locations, responding to the ideas of local people and resourcing them on a level much higher than your average amateur show. My interview with Simon Sharkey was squashed into a smaller than expected space in Scotland on Sunday yesteday, so I've put the original article here at NTS Transform

Elsewhere in Scottish theatre, Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum has announced its autumn/spring programme.

Children's Festival and Don Quixote review

Two articles published yesterday about the Bank of Scotland Children's International Theatre Festival, plus a review of Don Quixote by Theatre Modo. Find them all at Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links.

So-so sofas: review of Gorgeous Avatar

Recently a director told me she had it on good authority that we critics were agreeing on our opinions before we'd written our reviews. The allegation was that now we were presenting the Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland we wanted to show a united front.

The idea is ridiculous. Apart from the impracticality of getting everyone to agree when most of us have deadlines less than 12 hours after the end of the performance, the truth is we are meticulous in not sharing our opinions with anyone before we write. None of us likes the idea of being influenced by our colleagues.

All the same, I wouldn't blame Edinburgh's Traverse if it accused me and Neil Cooper of collusion this morning. My review of Gorgeous Avatar in The Guardian opens with: "There was a time when the Traverse's script-reading panel would throw away any play requiring a sofa. Today, living room dramas are the official house style."

Neil's in The Herald begins: "Confronted with yet another living room sofa in a rural domestic interior, one's heart sinks on entering the premiere of Jules Horne's debut full-length play."

Needless to say, there was no plagiarism involved, but equally our train of thought is more than coincidental. Consider this sequence of Traverse productions since 2004: The Nest, set in a bothy up a mountain; Shimmer, set in a guest house in the country; In the Bag, set in a Chinese yuppie flat; I was a Beautiful Day, set in the living quarters of a long-term care home; East Coast Chicken Supper, set in a Fife living room; and Melody, set in an Ayrshire living room. The only play that bucks the trend of small-scale domesticity is The Found Man which is set in a number of locations around a costal village.

Of course, it's not Jules Horne's fault that Gorgeous Avatar adds another play to this sequence, but the production is symptomatic of two things. One is the reluctance of writers to think on a big scale (though plays have to be set somewhere and living rooms were good enough for Sean O'Casey, Noel Coward, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller et al). More significant is the Traverse's default position of naturalism, always providing a real sofa where an imagined one might be more liberating and theatrical. Are playwrights well served by such literal interpretation of their work?

You can follow the progress of Gorgeous Avatar on Jules Horne's blog.

CATS Awards and reaction to SAC move

The shortlist for the Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland has been released. My colleagues and I spent a long day in a Glasgow hotel at the weekend, deliberating over the ten categories. Putting a dozen of the most opinionated people in Scotland in a room for six hours is always a high-risk strategy - and the day did have its outbursts - but we survived it in remarkably good humour. We even hit the pub that evening for a few more pints than was sensible on an empty stomach. A pariticularly strong shortlist this year, I think.

Meanwhile, The Stage reports on the fallout from the Scottish Arts Council publishing its internal reports online. It isn't too specific about where the "backlash" is coming from, though. Borderline, of course, is disgruntled, being one of the companies facing the axe, but it was disgruntled before the reports were made public, so its reaction is hardly a backlash. It'd be interesting to know who "many of the country’s leading theatre organisations" are - especially when, by the article's own admission, Lizzi Nicoll, director of the Federation of Scottish Theatre, has welcomed the move.

New on Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links today, a review of Ali Smith's The Seer.

Scottish Arts Council goes public with its theatrical opinions

The Scottish Arts Council has always kept quiet about its internal discussions of artistic standards. In fact, for many years, you could believe it didn't consider art to be of much importance at all, so obsessed was it with the tick-box mentality of audience targets, etc.

But two things have happened to change all that. Firstly, the organisation has made a policy shift away from the audience and towards the artist - although it still sounds confused about what that means. Secondly, it has responded to pressure from aggrieved theatre companies by making public its internal assessments of their work. You can download pdf files of the SAC's reviews here.

Having scrolled through a few of them, I'm stuck by how poorly written many are. It doesn't inspire confidence in the writer when an assessment is riddled with mistakes. I know these were never intended for public consumption, but internal communications need to be literate too.

As for the assessments themeselves, there is the odd quirky opinion, but on the whole they're reasonably close to the mark. And better that the companies know how their work is being treated than the former clandestine approach.

New on Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links: a review of Elizabeth Gordon Quinn, an interview with up-and-coming tenor Nicky Spence and a behind-the-scenes look at Pitlochry Festival Theatre.

Coming soon: a review of Ali Smith's The Seer and the shortlist for the Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland.

Ali Curran leaves Tron/Male and female audiences

After a year as artistic director of the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, Ali Curran is heading home to Ireland. The surprise departure comes just as she was about to launch the company's 25th birthday celebrations. Reasons are unclear, but she is said to have "burgeoning commitments" in Ireland and an advisory role in Romania for Sibiu's European Year of Culture 2007.

On Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Links today is another review of Good Reason by Reeling and Writhing. Someone observed that the women in the audience are leaving in tears and the men are leaving wondering what all the fuss was about. I was in the last camp. Could it be that there are different aesthetics for men and women? Am I just conditioned to respond to the "masculine" action of a tightly plotted play? Could I be reconditioned to accept the rules of something concerned more with exploring emotion than with narrative drive? Or is it universally true that the best way to explore emotion is through the forward thrust of a dynamic plot?