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The Snow Queen
By Mike Kenny. A Dundee Rep review
AT this time of year, even the more sober-minded shows play to the gallery with fart gags and slapstick. The distinguishing characteristic of Jemima Levick's production of The Snow Queen, by contrast, is just how seriously it takes the classic tale. Her staging has warmth and humour but, as any child in the audience will tell you, the stakes are too high to waste time clowning around.
17 September 2012 The Guadian
She Town/The Mill Lavvies
By Sharman Macdonald/Chris Rattray. A Dundee Rep review.
IT'S all go in Sharman Macdonald's She Town. The Dundee mill-workers are angry because their wages are being cut; the choir is auditioning to accompany Paul Robeson, the singer and civil rights activist, at his concert in the city's Caird Hall; and the politically committed are preparing to go and fight the fascists in the Spanish civil war.
The Tempest
By William Shakespeare. A Dundee Rep review.
AT THE hands of director Jemima Levick, Shakespeare's isle is not only full of noise but women, too. As seagulls scream over a very 21st-century set of washed-up bin bags, computer terminals and Irn-Bru crates, Irene Macdougall's Prospero is cynical, bitter Ð and unquestionably female. As well as looking out for Kirsty Mackay as daughter Miranda, she casts her magical control over a boiler-suited Emily Winter as Ariel and a pock-marked Ann Louise Ross as Caliban.
Further than the Furthest Thing
By Zinnie Harris. A Dundee Rep theatre review.
ZINNIE Harris's remarkable play is 12 years old, and shares something of its elemental language and austere settling with David Harrower's play Knives in Hens. Further Than the Furthest Thing takes place on an Atlantic island where years of isolation have created a community that is cautious, plain and blunt. In Harrower's play, it's a flash of imagination that disrupts the old order; here, it's the arrival of modernity.
Cinderella
By Phil Porter. A Dundee Rep theatre review.
CINDERELLA? You know, the one set on a boat with a bunch of retired magicians living on the top deck. They're a bit like the old folk in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; cute, mischievous and wise. Young Cinderella, who does all the work in their floating retirement home, is forever being teased by them.
After the End
By Dennis Kelly. A Dundee Rep theatre review.
WE'RE in the kind of room where Jack Bauer tortures enemy agents. Concrete walls. Featureless surfaces. No windows. Stark shadows. Bleak directional light. Fearsome rumbling soundtrack. And when Emma Faulkner's staging of Dennis Kelly's After the End is at its most gripping, it is not Kiefer Sutherland in the role of stony-eyed interrogator but Helen Darbyshire. So intense is the actor's gaze, so vicious her temperament, she scarcely needs the knife with which she threatens Tony McGeever's Mark, her fellow occupant in this nuclear shelter (actually a storage room behind the main theatre).
Anna Karenina
By Jo Clifford adapted from Leo Tolstoy. A Dundee Rep theatre review.
WHEN Anna Karenina takes up with her lover Vronsky, someone says she has "gained a shadow". She is not the only one. The characters in Jemima Levick's production are forever being cast as towering silhouettes on the flat wall of Alex Lowde's set. That's when there's no smoky video footage of billowing clouds wafting over it. With the dry ice that accompanies the fateful steam engines that top and tail the show, the mood is as much Brief Encounter as Tolstoy.
A Doll's House
By Henrik Ibsen. A Dundee Rep review.
IF Henrik Ibsen had been around to set A Doll's House in the 1950s, as it is here in Jemima Levick's excellent production, perhaps there would have been no need for Mad Men with its polarised genders and conspicuous consumption. The pre-1960s world this Nora Helmer comes to reject is a chic, modernist place, all white walls, spindly furniture and Bing Crosby on the radio, with clear demarcation of roles for husband and wife: business for him, children for her. As Nora skips in with her big skirt and her Christmas shopping, you get a taste of the consumer boom to come. As she stomps out, leaving her children, you feel the first articulation of feminist revolution.
17 September 2010 The Guardian
Sunshine on Leith
By Stephen Greenhorn and the Proclaimers. A Dundee Rep review.
THE title track is so moving that the audience can't bring itself to clap– people just sit in awed silence. Name any other jukebox musical of which you can say that. From its opening battlefield salvo to the party punch-up that ushers in the interval, Stephen Greenhorn's Proclaimers tribute refuses to play by the rules. In this, it is every bit as idiosyncratic, awkward and lovable as the music of Craig and Charlie Reid.
Sweeney Todd
By Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler. A Dundee Rep review.
CONFIRMING its status as Scotland's first theatre of musicals, Dundee Rep gives a modern-dress take on Stephen Sondheim's story of the demon barber of Fleet Street that is as stunning in its musical accomplishment as it is exemplary in its stagecraft.
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.
The Elephant Man
By Bernard Pomerance. A Dundee Rep review.
THE first time we see John Merrick he is caught beneath a spotlight that cuts through the Victorian gloom and grandeur of Alex Lowde's superb set to cast an unforgiving shadow beneath his chin. But that's the only time Kevin Lennon relies on trick lighting to become the Elephant Man in Bernard Pomerance's sad and wise drama about disability, exploitation and power.
The Cherry Orchard
Translated by Stuart Paterson. A Dundee Rep review.
KEANU Reeves made a surprise visit to Dundee Rep last week. The Hollywood star is soon to start filming Henry's Crime, a romcom about a tollbooth attendant wrongly imprisoned for a bank robbery. The movie features rehearsals for a production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard in which Reeves's character is cast as Lopakhin, hence the actor's research trip.
Balgay Hill
By Simon Macallum. Dundee Rep review
BILLY Mackenzie was one of Dundee's more extraordinary exports. In a city best known for Desperate Dan and William McGonagall, the lead singer of 1980s pop group the Associates did not play by the rules. With his operatic range and lyrics about party fears and country clubs, his quirkiness found favour only briefly even in the tolerant world of pop.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
By Edward Albee. Dundee Rep review.
DESIGNER Philip Whitcomb places Edward Albee's compellingly ghastly drama in the centre of a wasteland. All around the book-lined New England residence of George and Martha lie mountains of black rubble, littered with discarded liquor bottles beneath a cloudy night sky.This post-apocalyptic vision is a metaphor for a dysfunctional marriage. But more than that, it locates this 1962 play in the era of the cold war.
Les Parents Terribles
By Jean Cocteau. Dundee Rep review.
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.
Romeo and Juliet
By William Shakespeare. Dundee Rep review.
WE are used to seeing Romeo and Juliet presented in terms of warring families. Whether it is Jets and Sharks, or mafiosi clans in rival Italian kitchens, directors use the Montagues and Capulets as a metaphor for civil strife in our own era. It might be fanciful to imagine we are free of such conflict today but, judging by director James Brining's production, it is not our most pressing concern.
Peer Gynt
By Henrik Ibsen. Dundee Rep review.
"THE buffet starts in three minutes, so will you please turn off your fucking mobile phones," yells a wedding guest in the foyer, after tumbling out of a stretch limo in front of the theatre and joining in a punky round of Cry Me a River at the bar. She sets the tone for a rude and raucous retelling of Ibsen's existentialist quest that twins the vulgarity of director Dominic Hill's Ubu the King in 2005 with a boisterous theatrical imagination. The result is thrilling.
Happy Days
By Samuel Beckett. Dundee Rep review.
IN 1961, the first audiences of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days would have instinctively tuned in to its atmosphere of post-apocalyptic desolation. The playwright never says as much, but to people living in the shadow of the cold war, the lifeless landscape surrounding Winnie as she sits buried up to her waist in sand would have been a vision of nuclear catastrophe. It is interesting that in 2007 the dazzling sunlight beating down on designer Tom Piper's mound of sacking reminds us of an apocalyptic vision of our own: as her umbrella bursts spontaneously into flames, this Winnie could be a victim of global warming.
Sunshine on Leith
By Stephen Greenhorn. Dundee Rep review.
WHY did it take 20 years before anyone noticed the Proclaimers were born to be turned into a musical? Not since Willy Russell came up with Blood Brothers has Britain produced such a perfect and perfectly unexpected marriage of music and theatre. Had playwright and screenwriter Stephen Greenhorn done nothing else, he should be declared a genius for spotting that the songs of Craig and Charlie Reid - with all their emotional honesty, singalong raucousness and political fire - are a true gift to the stage.
4 May 2007 Variety
Sunshine on Leith
By Stephen Greenhorn. Dundee Rep review.
IF the Proclaimers are the unlikeliest of pop stars -- identical twins in unflattering geek glasses singing in broad Scottish accents -- then "Sunshine on Leith" is the unlikeliest of tuners. Eschewing the relentless cheerfulness of jukebox musicals like "We Will Rock You" and "Mamma Mia!," it opens with soldiers singing about death ("Sky Takes the Soul"), offers a completely new set of arrangements with little opportunity for the audience to sing along and presents the title track as a downbeat lament over a hospital bed. Like the band, the show refuses to play by the commercial rules, and, like the band, it comes out on top.
Europe
By David Greig. Dundee Rep review.
IT would be heartening to report that David Greig's 1994 play about xenophobia and social collapse in a changing Europe was now an out-of-date relic from the post-Berlin Wall days of civil war in the former Yugoslavia. If anything, however, the forceful revival by helmer Douglas Rintoul, which opened in Dundee before a run at London's Barbican, shows this crisply written and intelligent play to be more politically pertinent than ever.
Hansel and Gretel
By Phil Porter. Dundee Rep review.
WHERE'S Stuart Paterson when you need him? For over a decade the playwright has dominated the Christmas show market, delivering story-centred scripts to theatres that want some seasonal jollity but find full-blown pantomimes too crass. This year his plays are nowhere to be seen. Change is essential for any artform, but it's hard not to yearn for the old Paterson magic when you see Phil Porter's treatment of Hansel and Gretel.
Sweet Bird of Youth
By Tennessee Williams. Dundee Rep review.
WHEN Alan Turkington's wannabe movie idol, Chance Wayne, hands Irene MacDougall's aging starlet, Alexandra del Lago, a photograph of his naked lover at the age of 15, the older woman freezes. Long after the picture has been snatched back, she sits stock still, staring ahead in glazed horror. She has seen a vision of youth at its most fecund, and her shock casts a chill across the stage.
26 November 2006 The List
Sweet Bird of Youth
By Tennessee Williams. Dundee Rep review.
LADIES, step this way. If you’re up for a sexual thrill, just check out the opening act of Tennessee Williams’ magnificent Sweet Bird of Youth and see Alan Turkington preening around in his pyjama bottoms, flexing his clean shaven chest and looking every inch the 29-year-old gigolo a fading movie star would want to find in her hotel bedroom after a night on the vodka and dope. Irene Macdougall, spilling out of her nightie as the clapped out Alexandra del Lago, can’t even mention sex without Turkington running his hands round his waistband as if permanently primed to leap into bed.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
By William Shakespeare. Dundee Rep review.
IT'S a particularly British sort of midsummer night that drips into life in Dominic Hill's inclement Shakespeare. No breezy June evening this, but a night of thunder, lightning and rain, creating a very wet Dream indeed.
The Talented Mr Ripley
By Phylis Nagy. Dundee Rep review.
DOMINIC Hill has a Macbeth fixation. In the past 18 months, the director has staged the Shakespeare play, the Verdi opera and Alfred Jarry's scatological reworking, Ubu the King. In this context, it's hard not to see Tom Ripley, the psychotic antihero of Patricia Highsmith's novel, as a kind of 1950s Macbeth, resorting to murder every time his hermetic mental kingdom comes under threat.
Ubu the King
By David Greig. Dundee Rep review.
WHEN Dominic Hill's arresting staging of Alfred Jarry's scatological classic reaches London at the end of November, it will be the final installment of the Young Genius season, a joint Barbican/Young Vic venture in celebration of those artists, such as Jarry, Robert Lepage and Christopher Marlowe, for whom inspiration struck early. Hill's own distinctive genius, however, has led him to place this "Ubu the King" not in a world of vigorous youth but in the altogether more doddery setting of a retirement home.
9 October 2005 The Sunday Times
Gypsy
By Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim. Dundee Rep review.
The Visit
By Peter Arnott. Dundee Rep review.
THIS month's big theme in Scotland's theatres is the shaky relationship between language and truth. And here in The Visit, a whole town uses linguistic camouflage to justify the barbarous murder of a pillar of the community. Friedrich Dürrenmatt's play is a brilliant satire of corruption that viciously exposes the warped logic of self-justification. Tempted by the incredible wealth of Clarrie Zachanassian, a local girl made good, the townsfolk use all-too-credible reasoning to persuade themselves that her demand for a human sacrifice is morally acceptable.
Merlin the Magnificent
By Stuart Paterson. Dundee Rep review.
"IMAGINE a world without light," says Merlin at the start of Stuart Paterson's 1982 Christmas show and director Robert Paterson takes him at his word. For the opening sequence, you can barely make out John Buick's long-bearded wizard or Irene Macdougall's creepy Morgana so hazily are they pictured in the spooky blue light. The young audience do well not to be freaked out.
10 September 2004 The Guardian
Macbeth
By William Shakespeare. Dundee Rep review.
"BLOOD will have blood," is the Hollywood-style slogan on the posters, and director Dominic Hill plays his most gory card first when John MacAulay's bleeding captain arrives on a stretcher from the battlefield. Nearly upstaged by his own wounds, the mutilated soldier is only one blow away from a bodybag.
Flora the Red Menace
By Kander and Ebb. Dundee Rep review.
FOR a populist form, the musical has tackled some pretty unlikely subjects. Who would have thought that Argentine politics, the Nazi persecution of the Jews or the poetry of TS Eliot could have inspired three of the best-loved shows of the 20th century? Evita, Cabaret and Cats prove that, even when playing to the mass market, you don’t need to create popularity by committee. Innovation, boldness and the unexpected still count for something. That’s the case with Flora the Red Menace. You can just imagine how the men in suits would have reacted had they ever been asked to rate the chances of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s 1965 musical. Far from being an escapist fantasy, it’s about the struggle of poverty-stricken Americans during the Great Depression. Rather than serving up an apolitical piece of whimsy, it has two central characters who are card-carrying members of the Communist party.
28 June 2004 Northings
Flora the Red Menace
By Kander and Ebb. Dundee Rep review.
WHEN you've loved a show and raved about it, as I did Flora the Red Menace when it was first seen at Dundee Rep last year, you return to see it again with a sense of trepidation. What if it isn’t as good as you remembered? What if you’d been in an unusually benevolent mood the first time? What if the production has lost the special spark it once had?
Scenes from an Execution
By Howard Barker. Dundee Rep review.
LAST month, the Scottish Executive launched a "cultural commission" to take stock of arts provision. Its policy document was full of phrases such as "best value" and "accessibility", the jargon beloved of politicians and anathema to art. Hopefully, the document's authors will make it along to Dundee where Howard Barker's brilliant 1984 drama about art, politics and religion is playing in the round in a bold and lucid production by Dominic Hill.
Dumbstruck
By David Kane. Dundee Rep review.
THE people behind the zombie movie Shaun of the Dead are calling it the first rom-zom-com. But they were arguably beaten to it by David Kane's 1994 farce, given a welcome revival here for the first time in a decade. The corpses that litter Kane's stage are not strictly zombies, but they have a very similar way of twitching back into life. Meanwhile, a kind of romance develops between an evangelical devil-hunter masquerading as a man from the social security and a young music-hall entertainer masquerading as an elderly writer of hymns.
Twelfth Night
By William Shakespeare. Dundee Rep review.
ONE of the great advantages of Dundee Rep having a permanent company of actors is that touring is relatively easy. If it has a successful show that deserves to be seen more widely, it doesn’t have to regroup the actors or worry about their salaries, which are budgeted for already. And happily, the company has been clocking up a fair number of successful shows, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night included.
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