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Emma Faulkner joining Dundee Rep as trainee director

23 July 2010 theatreSCOTLAND

Appy ending

THEATRE critic Thom Dibdin has proved the power of the blog after his very thorough road test of the Edinburgh Fringe's new iPhone app prompted a speedy response from the designers. Story continues here.

23 July 2010 theatreSCOTLAND

Boyd, Featherstone . . . Faulkner

THERE will be a new trainee director in the house when Emma Faulkner (pictured) joins the team at Dundee Rep in August. Story continues here

23 July 2010 theatreSCOTLAND

Autumn line-ups

STILL with Dundee Rep, the theatre has announced its autumn season. Story continues here

SCOTTISH THEATRE REVIEWS AND ARTICLES

Amanda Gordon in Bus Stop

27 July 2010 The Guardian

Bus Stop

By William Inge. A Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.

IF you read contemporary accounts of mid-20th century American theatre, you routinely see the names of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and William Inge listed together. The first two are no surprise, but you wonder at the third. In the 1950s, Inge was celebrated for a run of Broadway hits including Come Back Little Sheba and Dark at the Top of the Stairs, and he attracted stars as big as Marilyn Monroe to his film adaptations. Today, he is largely forgotten in the UK.

16 July 2010 The List

Teatro en el Blanco's Diciembre

Edinburgh International Festival preview

GUILERMO Calderon was 17 and in his first year of university when Augusto Pinochet stepped down as president of Chile and returned the country to democracy. It should have been a moment of liberation, but for Calderon, whose whole life had been shaped by the dictatorship, it was a big disappointment. 'My generation grew up during the dictatorship and then we were welcomed into this new democracy, which we didn't like. We wanted to challenge it.'

16 July 2010 The List

Ontroerend Goed's Teenage Riot

Edinburgh Fringe preview.

EVERYONE who visits Alexander Devriendt in the rehearsal room says he must be crazy. He is 33 years old, yet he thrives on working with the most exuberant of teenagers. 'It's not about wanting to stay young, I don't think about it,' says the Belgian theatre director. 'I don't mind the chaos and the noise.' This is just as well. It was Devriendt who was responsible for Once and for All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen, the high-energy hit by Ontroerend Goed that blasted onto the Traverse stage in 2008. It was a remarkable show – as remarkable in its own way as the same company's other Fringe sensations The Smile off Your Face and Internal – the more so because it was performed by 13 teenagers.

Dougal Lee, Linsdey Danvers, David Delve, Mark Standford and David Alcock in Rough Crossing

17 June 2010 The Guardian

Rough Crossing

By Tom Stoppard. A Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.

LET us agree: theatre does not have to be about big ideas. Let us accept it can be a brilliantly executed artifice, as with Michael Frayn's Noises Off, also playing this season at Pitlochry. Let us acknowledge it can be lightweight, frivolous and throwaway Ð fun for fun's sake. But having allowed ourselves that, can we also make a case for Rough Crossing? What is the purpose, whether it be ambitious or modest, of Tom Stoppard's free reworking of Ferenc Moln‡r's The Play at the Castle? Is there any reason it should exist?

The cast perform Too Darn Hot in Kiss Me Kate

15 June 2010 The Guardian

Kiss Me Kate

By Cole Porter. A Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.

THE lights come up on the second half, and the Pitlochry summer ensemble shows its colours. It is time for Too Darn Hot, Cole Porter's slinky, sticky jazz number, and the large cast is out in force. As with the company's first musical, Whisky Galore, nominated in Sunday's Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland, the actors not only prove themselves fine singers, but also spirited musicians, bringing clarinets and saxophones with them on stage. This time, they also dance.

13 June 2010 Scotland on Sunday

Edinburgh Fringe preview

A first run-through of the 2010 Fringe programme

LIVING in Scotland, it is easy to take the Edinburgh Fringe for granted. Veterans of the world's biggest arts jamboree flick through the programme and think they know it all. Others observe it is too big Ð as they have been doing since the whole event was the size of just one of today's bigger venues Ð and consider this a justification to ignore it altogether. Yet name any other city on the planet where, in the space of three weeks, it would be anything less than extraordinary to see shows in the back of a campervan (Running on Air), on the swings of a play park (Decky Does a Bronco) and in a real apartmen t done up like the home of a woman sex-trafficked to Scotland from Nigeria (Roadkill).

Kate Quinnell, Lindsey Danvers, Graham Vick, Jacqueline Dutoit and Greg Powrie in Noises Off

10 June 2010 Northings

Noises Off

By Michael Frayn. A Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.

AFTER last year's all-Scottish season at Pitlochry, the theatre has lined up a set of plays that look at the idea of going away. You probably wouldn't have spotted that if you hadn't read it in the programme, but it is hard to miss the coincidental theme that is running in parallel. Just as Kiss Me Kate is about a theatre company staging a version of The Taming of the Shrew, so Noises Off is about a theatre company staging a fictitious old-school farce called Nothing On. Elsewhere in the summer repertoire, Rough Crossing is about two playwrights sailing towards a Broadway premiere, and Bus Stop features a nightclub singer and a Shakespeare scholar.

27 March 2010 The Scotsman

EIF: Sin Sangre/The Man who Fed Butterflies preview

Teatro Cinema interview

TO say I am late getting to see Sin Sangre is an understatement. It is the day when the first snow of the winter has fallen and the transport system has all but ground to a halt. My plane has sat for two-and-a-half hours on the Edinburgh runway and, by the time I get through passport control in Paris, the show has started. I arrive at the Théâtre des Abbesses, on one of the slippery streets of Montmartre, just as the final applause goes up.

Alistair Beaton's Caledonia by the NTS

27 March 2010 The Scotsman

EIF: Caledonia preview

By Alastair Beaton. A National Theatre of Scotland preview.

IT is a story about easy money in a get-rich-quick culture. It is a tale of calamitous financial mismanagement. It involves reckless risk, poor planning and ends up with the economy of a whole country in crisis. Yet the investors most responsible for the disaster get their money back. And then some. ¥ Alistair Beaton Ring any bells? It did with playwright Alistair Beaton when he stumbled across the story of the Darien Scheme.

27 March 2010 The Scotsman

EIF: The Sun Also Rises preview

Elevator Repair Service interview

ANYONE addicted to the frenetic pace of the festival should be grateful New York's Elevator Repair Service is bringing only the third part of its trilogy of novel adaptations to Edinburgh and not the first. That show, a staging of The Great Gatsby, retitled Gatz, lasted a full six-and-a-half hours. The reason for such length? The company performed every last word of F Scott Fitzgerald's 1920s classic. It took a long time but was, said the New York Times, "thrillingly theatrical and moving". By comparison, the company's version of Ernest Hem ingway's The Sun Also Rises is modest in ambition, although extreme by the standards of most adaptations.

21 March 2010 Scotland on Sunday

Preview: Edinburgh International Festival

EIF 2010 comment

WHEN Jonathan Mills took the top job at the Edinburgh International Festival four years ago, he made a study of the organisation's history. The year that particularly caught his eye was 1983. That was when the outgoing artistic director John Drummond put together his Vienna 1900 programme, inviting companies as diverse as the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre and the Tokyo Quartet to take a fresh look at the Austrian capital at a time of great cultural flowering.

17 March 2010 The Guardian

Edinburgh International Festival looks to the New World

EIF 2010 blog

THE programme for this August's Edinburgh International Festival is out and, of all Jonathan Mills's lineups to date, it is the one that shifts our centre of gravity the farthest. The theme running throughout the three-week festival is to do with the New World, drawing attention to those cultures that naturally look to the Pacific rather than the Atlantic, whether that be a dance company from Auckland or orchestras specialising in the music of 15th-century Bolivia and Mexico.

17 March 2010 Variety

Edinburgh Intl. Fest looks to Americas

EIF 2010 news report

THE lineup of the 2010 Edinburgh Intl. Festival focuses on the Americas and the New World, with helmer Jonathan Mills shifting the character of the traditionally Euro-centric event to include more theater, dance and music from countries such as Chile, Brazil and New Zealand.

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