theatreSCOTLAND

Maureen Carr, Julie Austin and Jacqueline Hughes in The Steamie

17 September 2009 Northings

The Steamie

By Tony Roper. Review.

PEOPLE sometimes say the reason Tony Roper's wash-house comedy works so well – and in Alison Peebles' main stage revival it works very well indeed – is because of its nostalgia. They suggest there's something soft-centred about the way it harks back to the 1950s before the close-knit communities of working-class Glasgow had been broken up by slum clearances. Audiences, they believe, love the sentimental myth about an era when people looked out for each other and nobody was ever lonely.

Robbie Jack as Rab Ruisseaux, a poet, in Perth Theatre's Tam O'Shanter, January 2009

5 February 2009 The Guardian

Tam O'Shanter

By Robert Burns adapted by Gerry Mulgrew. Perth Theatre review.

THERE is a band doing the rounds called the Bum-Clocks who make the unlikely connection between Robert Burns and Iggy Pop. They would be very much at home in Perth, where director Gerry Mulgrew uses Burns's narrative poem Tam O'Shanter as the backbone for a ceilidh celebration of the bard's lust for life. It's more shaggy-dog story than focused drama, but it still hits home as a vigorous bolt of creative energy.

4 February 2008 The Guardian

Of Mice and Men

By John Steinbeck. Perth Theatre review.

"If I was alone I could live so easy," says George to Lennie as the slow-witted giant lands him in trouble again. But the truth of John Steinbeck's heartbreaking drama is that being a team is what sets these men apart. We like to think atomisation is a product of the post-Thatcher era, but in the California of the Depression, there is nothing more suspicious for Steinbeck's farmhands than the partnership of George and Lennie. Their friendship is a subversive act.

6 February 2007 The Guardian

The Little Foxes

By Lillian Hellman

WHEN Elizabeth Taylor made her UK stage debut in a widely savaged production of The Little Foxes in 1982, more than one reviewer likened Lillian Hellman's melodrama to Dallas, the TV soap opera. Substitute deep south cotton farmers for Texas oilmen and you can see what they meant. First staged in 1939 with Tallulah Bankhead in the lead, and later filmed with Bette Davis, the play paints an unflattering portrait of three wealthy siblings whose scheme to extract extra profit from their land turns in on itself with enough plot twists to satisfy any fan of JR.

Kathryn Howden and Anne Myatt in Racine's Phedre

21 March 2006 The Guardian

Phedre

By Racine

IF you're going to do Racine, you're as well to keep it austere. The work of the 17th-century playwright is drama at its most distilled: intense, spartan and unremitting. There is no room for chatter or levity when there are great tracts of poetic soul-searching to get through.

2 February 2005 The Guardian

A Sense of Justice

By Vivien Adam

THE spirit of the Lord Chamberlain is alive and well and prowling the estates of dead playwrights. We should have been seeing Night Must Fall right now, but those entrusted with the legacy of playwright Emlyn Williams refused to sanction director Ken Alexander's proposed update. It's hardly as if Perth is known for avant-garde revisionism, but censorship is rarely logical.

theatreSCOTLAND © Mark Fisher 2009