theatreSCOTLAND

Nalini Chetty as Mary Rose in Magnetic North's After Mary Rose

1 May 2009 The Guardian

After Mary Rose

By D Jones. Magnetic North review.

IT'S common for playwrights to take a fresh look at a classic, picking apart the period details to recapture the electricity of the original. But the world was not waiting for a new version of JM Barrie's Mary Rose - a largely forgotten piece of gothic fantasy driven by the author's preoccupation with ageing.

28 April 2009 The List

After Mary Rose

By D Jones. Magnetic North review.

IT'S credited to playwright D Jones, butAfter Mary Rose is primarily the work of JM Barrie. Collaborating with director Nicholas Bone of Magnetic North, Jones has given Barrie's 1920 ghost story Mary Rose a dust down so it has less of the creaky haunted house about it and more of the privations of war. But in structure and detail, she sticks closely to the original – so closely, in fact, it's odd for her to claim sole authorship at all.

28 April 2009 Northings

After Mary Rose

By D Jones. Magnetic North review.

THERE'S a poignant moment towards the end of Peter Pan when a grown-up Wendy realises she can never recapture the present-tense wonder of childhood. If Peter had the emotional depth to think about it, he too would mourn the way the real world gets old while he stays eternally young. It was a theme that obsessed playwright J M Barrie, both privately and professionally and, 16 years after Peter Pan, he was still exploring it in Mary Rose.

My Old Man starring Frank Kelly (of Father Ted fame) and David Ireland Pic: Kevin Low

28 September 2005 Northings

My Old Man

By Tom McGrath. Magnetic North review.

SAM MacRedie wakes up. He's in a hospital bed, with an oxygen mask strapped to his face and a doctor telling him he's had a stroke. He doesn't believe it. Surely he's still the same man who lived life to the max, a jazz-loving musician who'd worked the cruise ships, leaving women and children in his wake, heading off in reckless pursuit of heavy drugs and hedonistic pleasure.

28 September 2005 The Guardian

My Old Man

By Tom McGrath. Magnetic North review.

IN a month of album releases by Paul McCartney, 63, and the Rolling Stones, collective age 237, it is timely that the playwright Tom McGrath, 64, should redefine our idea of the elderly. If it were ever right to view the aged as kind-hearted relics of a more innocent time, the image of today's oldie has to be filtered through an era of drug busts, love-ins and counter-cultural insurgency.

theatreSCOTLAND © Mark Fisher 2009