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 Amanda Gordon in Bus Stop |
Bus Stop
By William Inge. A Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
IF you read contemporary accounts of mid-20th century American theatre, you routinely see the names of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and William Inge listed together. The first two are no surprise, but you wonder at the third. In the 1950s, Inge was celebrated for a run of Broadway hits including Come Back Little Sheba and Dark at the Top of the Stairs, and he attracted stars as big as Marilyn Monroe to his film adaptations. Today, he is largely forgotten in the UK.
21 June 2010 Northings
Bus Stop
By William Inge. A Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
IN 1963, the critic John Mason Brown was able to write: "Since Pearl Harbor only three outstanding career dramatists have appeared in America Ð Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and William Inge." Today, we routinely see plays by Miller and Williams, but Inge – at least in the UK – is a rarity. His name is virtually unknown here, yet back in the 1950s, he enjoyed four back-to-back Broadway hits. Although he had less success later in his career before his suicide in 1973, he was considered a force to be reckoned with.
 Dougal Lee, Linsdey Danvers, David Delve, Mark Standford and David Alcock in Rough Crossing |
Rough Crossing
By Tom Stoppard. A Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
LET us agree: theatre does not have to be about big ideas. Let us accept it can be a brilliantly executed artifice, as with Michael Frayn's Noises Off, also playing this season at Pitlochry. Let us acknowledge it can be lightweight, frivolous and throwaway Ð fun for fun's sake. But having allowed ourselves that, can we also make a case for Rough Crossing? What is the purpose, whether it be ambitious or modest, of Tom Stoppard's free reworking of Ferenc Molnr's The Play at the Castle? Is there any reason it should exist?
11 June 2010 Northings
Rough Crossing
By Tom Stoppard. A Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
EVERYTHING looks to be in place for a breezy summer comedy at the start of this production of Tom Stoppard's Rough Crossing. The handsome set by Adrian Rees, a gleaming white cruise liner with jokey seagulls flapping away in the background, scores a round of applause and an early laugh from the audience.
 The cast perform Too Darn Hot in Kiss Me Kate |
Kiss Me Kate
By Cole Porter. A Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
THE lights come up on the second half, and the Pitlochry summer ensemble shows its colours. It is time for Too Darn Hot, Cole Porter's slinky, sticky jazz number, and the large cast is out in force. As with the company's first musical, Whisky Galore, nominated in Sunday's Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland, the actors not only prove themselves fine singers, but also spirited musicians, bringing clarinets and saxophones with them on stage. This time, they also dance.
 Kate Quinnell, Lindsey Danvers, Graham Vick, Jacqueline Dutoit and Greg Powrie in Noises Off |
Noises Off
By Michael Frayn. A Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
AFTER last year's all-Scottish season at Pitlochry, the theatre has lined up a set of plays that look at the idea of going away. You probably wouldn't have spotted that if you hadn't read it in the programme, but it is hard to miss the coincidental theme that is running in parallel. Just as Kiss Me Kate is about a theatre company staging a version of The Taming of the Shrew, so Noises Off is about a theatre company staging a fictitious old-school farce called Nothing On. Elsewhere in the summer repertoire, Rough Crossing is about two playwrights sailing towards a Broadway premiere, and Bus Stop features a nightclub singer and a Shakespeare scholar.
The Life of Stuff
By Simon Donald. A Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
I ADMIT to making the trip to Pitlochry as much to see the audience as to have another look at Simon Donald's 17-year-old play. The Life of Stuff is a black comedy that features drug taking, a severed body part, considerable violence and lots of swearing. It is as far from the sedate image of the theatre-in-the-hills as it is possible for a play to be.
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 Carol Ann Crawford in Good Things, Pitlochry Festival Theatre Pic: Douglas McBride |
Good Things
By Liz Lochhead. A Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
"THE good things some folk throw away," says Alan Steele's Frazer, eyeing up a bin bag of castoffs in Liz Lochhead's midlife crisis comedy. Like clothes in a charity shop, he and Carol Ann Crawford's Susan are good things that have been discarded – he bereaved by his mother, she dumped by her husband for a younger woman. Be it Christmas or Valentine's Day, they are the unwrapped presents nobody wants.
Good Things
By Liz Lochhead. A Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
IT’S RARE enough to see a second staging of a recent Scottish play, but Pitlochry Festival Theatre is earning a reputation not only for championing such work, but for doing it better than the debut productions. After turning out an interpretation of Outlying Islands by David Greig last year that was superior to the Traverse Theatre premiere, the company has revived Liz Lochhead's five-year-old mid-life crisis comedy Good Things and exceeded the fine Borderline original.
What Every Woman Knows
By JM Barrie. A Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
J M BARRIE is best known as the creator of Peter Pan, the boy who wouldn't grow up. Here in the Kirriemuir playwright's 1908 play, What Every Woman Knows, we find another boy who wouldn't grow up, except on the surface the circumstances are very different.
Whisky Galore: A Musical!
By Shona McKee McNeil and Ian Hammond Brown. A Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
GETTING A musical right is one of the hardest jobs in the theatre. Many a brilliant song has been axed on Broadway when it was blamed for hampering the rhythm of the show. And when musicals flop they flop spectacularly. So it's a double credit to Pitlochry Festival Theatre that not only is the premiere of Whisky Galore thoroughly entertaining, but it is also the first musical ever to be staged there. Whether it would survive the rigours of Broadway is a moot point, because Ken Alexander's feelgood production, with a sparkling cast of 14, makes a perfect fit for the theatre in the hills. It’s a wonder they never did a musical before.
 Whisky Galore: A Musical! at Pitlochry Festival Theatre Pic: Douglas McBride |
18 June 2009 The Guardian
Whisky Galore: A Musical!
By Shona McKee McNeil and Ian Hammond Brown. A Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
WHAT took them so long? Pitlochry Festival Theatre is a place you'd expect a musical to go down well, yet this adaptation of the Compton Mackenzie novel is the first one in the theatre's 60-year history. It sets the summer season off to such a rousing start, with one of the strongest casts I have seen here, that the Pitlochry musical deserves to become an institution.
Outlying Islands
By David Greig. Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
FIVE years after Outlying Islands made its debut at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 2002, playwright David Greig translated The Bacchae by Euripides for the National Theatre of Scotland.This was the show in which Alan Cumming played Dionysus, the god of good times, upturning the prim and proper world of Pentheus, played by a buttoned-up Tony Curran. With this in mind, it's fascinating to return to Outlying Islands, superbly staged by Ken Alexander as the last show of the Pitlochry season, and see that it is about exactly the same struggle between order and chaos, the head and the heart.
The Philadelphia Story
By Philip Barry. Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
THE Philadelphia Story is the play that was made into the film with Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart before being transformed into High Society, the Cole Porter musical. On one level it's a story of an upper-class American family who risk being humiliated on the daughter's wedding day by a magazine story about an adulterous affair between the father and a chorus girl, a scandalous prospect staved off only by a counter plot to blackmail the publisher.
Passing Places/The Philadelphia Story
By Stephen Greenhorn/Philip Barry. Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
THE latest two plays to join the summer repertoire at Pitlochry are journeys of self-discovery. In Stephen Greenhorn's Passing Places, two lads from Motherwell venture north in a stolen Lada and eventually find that they, like Scotland itself, have more going for them than they ever thought possible. In Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story, the over-assertive Tracy Lord finally finds the humility to make the right choice in marriage (which just happens to be the choice she made in the first place).
24 July 2007 Northings
Passing Places
By Stephen Greenhorn. Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
IN a country that has so recently voted in a nationalist government, you'd expect there to be a unified sense of what it means to be Scottish. But if Scotland has any distinctive quality it is surely not so much its coherence as its cultural diversity. It is a land of Highland tele-cottagers, Central Belt financiers, Polish hotel workers and island oil workers. Even the tourists must see through the clichés of bagpiping kilt-wearers and shortbread-making crofters.
 Carol Ann Crawford in The Flouers o' Edinburgh |
20 May 2007 Scotland on Sunday
The Flouers o Edinburgh/Snake in the Grass
By Robert McLellan/Alan Ayckbourn. Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
I write in praise of Carol Ann Crawford. For too long this fine actress has been seen in smaller character roles or behind the scenes working as a dialect coach. But those who remember her from major parts at the Traverse and the Royal Lyceum in the 1980s and 90s or who saw her performance in Further Than The Furthest Thing last year will know she's worth very much more than that. Should you be in any doubt, just check out the opening productions in Pitlochry's summer season and watch her command the stage in two completely contrasting parts.
Chimneys
By Agatha Christie. Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
THE opening week of the summer repertoire at Pitlochry has been dogged by ill luck. A key actor in Ayckbourn's Man of the Moment was unable to perform after dislocating her knee, and a power cut interrupted Wodehouse's Summer Lightning.But neither of these compares to the misfortune suffered by Agatha Christie's Chimneys. Scheduled to appear at London's Embassy Theatre in December 1931, it was mysteriously cancelled before the first night. Just as mysteriously, it resurfaced in Calgary in 2003 after an original copy was sent anonymously in the post. Its European premiere has come 75 years late.
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Adapted by Giles Croft. Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
ONE of the things that makes the original film of Kind Hearts and Coronets so special is that the many members of the aristocratic D’Ascoyne family are played by the one actor: Alec Guinness. It seems to us a theatrical idea because it breaks the naturalistic conventions of cinema. The film lets us in on its own self-conscious joke.
 Dougal Lee as Sir Thomas More, Hywel Morgan as Thomas Cranmer and Jonathan Coote as the Duke of Norfolk in A Man for All Seasons |
A Man for all Seasons
By Robert Bolt. Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
IN his programme note, director Richard Baron points out the similarities between A Man for all Seasons by Robert Bolt and The Crucible by Arthur Miller. Even though both are historical plays – Bolt writing about Sir Thomas More in the early 16th century; Miller writing about the 17th century witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts – they tell us a lot about the political atmosphere of the 1950s when they were written.
The Government Inspector
By John Byrne. Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
THE multi-talented John Byrne has had two translations staged in Scotland in quick succession. Earlier this year Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum presented his version of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, retitled Uncle Varick. Now Pitlochry has given his ribald treatment of Gogol’s The Government Inspector its first Scottish airing since its London debut in 1997.
The Shop at Sly Corner
By Edward Percy. Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
VILLAIN number one is a Frenchman with a secret. Subtext: never trust Johnny Foreigner. Villain number two has a host of unpleasant traits, the most damning of which is his supposed homosexuality. Evidence: he wears silk underwear. Villain number two is blackmailing villain number one which is just the kind of behaviour you'd expect from his sort.
31 May 2004 Northings
The Shop at Sly Corner
By Edward Percy. Pitlochry Festival Theatre review.
AS plays and styles go in and out of fashion, there’s always a case for re-evaluating neglected works from the canon. Tastes change, society changes, ideas of what constitutes theatre change. There was a time in the 18th century when King Lear was considered unstageable – now, many people regard it as the greatest play ever written. In a more minor way, Stephen Daldry allowed modern audiences to see JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls as something richer than the repertory warhorse it had become by presenting it in a fresh and original style.
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