Freeway Pro 5.4.2 News and reviews about Scottish theatre http://www.theatrescotland.com/ en Sun, 21 Mar 2010 11:32:03 +0000 You could say this play was purpose-built for readers of this newspaper's ­Education and Society sections. ­Margaret Ann Brodie has just arrived as a supply teacher in a London school when she discovers a community group is about to perform an exorcism on one of her pupils, a six-year-old Somali girl who is an elective mute. The scene is set for a debate about classroom control and multiculturalism: should tolerance of beliefs extend to summoning devils before playtime? http://www.theatrescotland.com/ 752919732248 Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:04:48 +0000 IT TAKES a while to warm to this adaptation of Ben Rice's novel. For one thing, there doesn't seem to be much at stake: just an everyday family hoping to get lucky in Lighting Ridge, an opal mining town in the Australian outback. For another, the production by Catherine Wheels takes a straight-forward approach that rules out the kind of imaginative leaps that children's theatre does best. The initial impression of Gill Robertson's staging is of a routine domestic drama. http://www.theatrescotland.com/ 11229767173 Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:36:18 +0000 8 March 2010 The Guardian Equus By Peter Shaffer. A Dundee Rep review THE director who brought Beauty and the Beast and The Elephant Man to Dundee continues her examination of the animalistic outsider with Peter Shaffer's study of the violent power of sublimated sexual desire. In this stripped-back Equus, Jemima Levick puts the story of Alan Strang and his devotional love of horses under laboratory conditions to reveal a tense drama of personal discovery. Although the argument about the uses of psychiatry seems dated, and the boy's motivation not entirely convincing, the play still drives home with the immediacy of a whodunit. http://www.theatrescotland.com/ 902850205340 Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:14:19 +0000 This week, the parents of Rachel Corrie bring a civil suit against the Israeli defence ministry over the cause of their daughter's death. The 23-year-old campaigner was crushed by a bulldozer in Rafah as she stood in peaceful defence of Palestinian homes in 2003. Her parents hope to put on the public record that the killing was intentional. http://www.theatrescotland.com/ 638089978355 Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:20:29 +0000 Another month, another Douglas Maxwell classroom play. In the excellent Promises Promises (still on tour), he gave us a teacher at the end of her career who snaps under the pressure of long-buried childhood repressions. In The Miracle Man for the National Theatre of Scotland, he gives us Ossian MacDonald, a thirtysomething PE teacher who is living in the shadow of his father. That man, a famous poet, is dying of cancer, giving his son the possibility of escaping his insecurity complex and reaching a delayed maturity. http://www.theatrescotland.com/ 764730657700 Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:49:45 +0000 17 March 2010 The Guardian Empty/Mr Write By Cathy Forde/Rob Drummond. A National Theatre of Scotland review. IMAGINE being the only sober guest at a party of teenagers. Imagine you don't know any of them. Imagine they get drunker still. The evening would be deeply tedious. About as tedious as Cathy Forde's Empty, in which a 16-year-old's attempt to get a snog spirals into an orgy of sex, drugs and flooded bathrooms. http://www.theatrescotland.com/ 158798010162 Wed, 17 Mar 2010 08:51:39 +0000 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. http://www.theatrescotland.com/ 380742113443 Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:22:40 +0000 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. http://www.theatrescotland.com/ 326723829735 Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:25:10 +0000 It is the democrat's dilemma: what if, having given someone a voice, you don't like what they have to say? That is the situation faced by Kate in Gregory Burke's apocalyptic comedy, a lunchtime collaboration between the Traverse theatre and the Play, a Pie and a Pint series. Kate is an undercover activist who has infiltrated a futuristic "contentment facility" in which old people are stored in life-support units before being fattened for human consumption. While freeing the occupant of row NN, pod 777, Kate is alarmed to discover he was responsible for the death of the environment. http://www.theatrescotland.com/ 1219724795883 Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:34:47 +0000 TO GET to Peter Brook's office, you come in off a grimy Parisian street at the back of the Gare du Nord, head along a nondescript corridor, cut across the stage of the Bouffes du Nord – half faded glamour, half rough-and-ready empty space – before climbing a staircase that is open to the crisp December air, as if you were approaching a fairytale turret. http://www.theatrescotland.com/ 740951592853 Sun, 21 Mar 2010 11:20:39 +0000