theatreSCOTLAND

Johnny McKnight in Little Johnny's Big Gay Wedding Pic: Tim Morozzo

8 June 2010 The Guardian

Little Johnny's Big Gay Wedding

By Johnny McKnight. A Random Accomplice/National Theatre of Scotland review.

FOR a recap of the story of modern theatre, check out this daft and delightful mock wedding reception by Random Accomplice and the National Theatre of Scotland. It is a whirlpool collision of performance art, site-specific theatre, pantomime, camp, Broadway musical, sentimental drama, standup comedy and first-person confessional. There's even a line from Shakespeare.

31 May 2010 The Scotsman

Allotment

Various artists. A National Theatre of Scotland review.

THEY tell us we live in a hyper-connected world where anyone who is not already your Facebook friend is only a Chatroulette encounter away. We're still figuring out what all this means, but the extra connectivity seems to have gone hand in hand with greater atomisation. This is the irony played with in Allotment, the final instalment of the National Theatre of Scotland's series of exuberant art events in an empty shop in Govan.

Kirsty MacKay as Wendy and Kevin Guthrie as Peter Pan Pic: Manuel Harlan

30 April 2010 Northings

Peter Pan

By JM Barrie adapted by David Greig. A National Theatre of Scotland review.

IN interviews to promote this National Theatre of Scotland reworking of the JM Barrie classic, director John Tiffany has talked about the ambitious scale of the production. With its 17-strong cast, live music, extensive flying and pyrotechnic magic, it is bigger, he reckons, even than his staging of 'Black Watch'. This may well be the case but, for all the considerable achievements of Tiffany's various collaborators, their combined efforts seem to squash the story's playfulness. It is a production too much about shade, too little about light.

Alistair Beaton's Caledonia by the NTS

27 March 2010 The Scotsman

EIF: Caledonia preview

By Alistair 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.

17 March 2010 Northings

The Miracle Man/Empty/Mr Write

By Douglas Maxwell/Cathy Forde/Rob Drummond. A National Theatre of Scotland review.

THE theme of fathers failing to communicate with their sons is an old one. It is an obsession of today's animated movies and it is central to Miracle Man, Douglas Maxwell's new play for the National Theatre of Scotland’s tdf trilogy.

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.

15 March 2010 The Guardian

The Miracle Man

By Douglas Maxwell. A National Theatre of Scotland production

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.

Ken Fox rides the Wall of Death Pic: Peter Dibdin

10 February 2010 The Guardian

How do you define theatre?

A National Theatre of Scotland blog.

IN a recent interview about Wall of Death, the director, Vicky Featherstone, let slip a revealing phrase. She was talking about the artist Stephen Skrynka's attempt to ride a motorbike around the Ken Fox Troupe's fun-fair attraction, a six-metre-high spherical wall. It was that act, she said, that turned the event into a piece of theatre, then qualified it with the phrase, "whatever theatre means".

8 February 2010 The Guardian

Wall of Death: A Way of Life

By Stephen Skrynka and the Ken Fox Troupe. A National Theatre of Scotland review.

IN April, the National Theatre of ­Scotland is staging Peter Pan. If that production is half as ­weightless as the Ken Fox Troupe riding the Wall of Death, it will be breathtaking. ­Harnessing the properties of ­centrifugal force, this ­family of old-school ­entertainers ride their low-slung Indian motorcycles around a vertiginous drum with heart-stopping panache. You will believe a boy can fly.

24 January 2010 Scotland on Sunday

Douglas Maxwell interview

About Promises Promises and others. A Random Accomplice/National Theatre of Scotland preview.

DOUGLAS Maxwell has a refreshingly honest way of telling you how badly his plays nearly turned out. He spent years, for example, working on a commission from the National Theatre of Scotland only to end up with a 200-page script that was quite unstageable. They described it as more of a novel than a play and, today, he doesn't even think it would have made much of a novel.

theatreSCOTLAND © Mark Fisher 2010