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.