theatreSCOTLAND

Alan Bissett, Andy Gray and Denise Hoey in Gregory Burke's Battery Farm Pic: Lesley Back

18 March 2010 The Guardian

Battery Farm

By Gregory Burke. A Traverse/A Play, a Pie and a Pint review

IT is the democrat's dilemma: what if, having given someone a voice, you don't like what they have to say? That is the situation faced by Kate in Gregory Burke's apocalyptic comedy, a lunchtime collaboration between the Traverse theatre and the Play, a Pie and a Pint series. Kate is an undercover activist who has infiltrated a futuristic "contentment facility" in which old people are stored in life-support units before being fattened for human consumption. While freeing the occupant of row NN, pod 777, Kate is alarmed to discover he was responsible for the death of the environment.

24 February 2010 The Guardian

Heaven

By Simon Stephens. A Traverse Theatre/A Play, a Pie and a Pint review.

I HAD assumed Simon Stephens would have reworked his short two-hander since the summer when the Traverse gave it a breakfast reading on the Edinburgh fringe. But here it is in a fuller but still bare-bones production for A Play, a Pie and a Pint, the lunchtime theatre season, with the same oddball charm and the same feeling that its deeper meaning is just out of grasp.

15 April 2009 Northings

Djupid (The Deep)

By Jon Atli Jonasson. A Play, a Pie and a Pint review.

A LIFE at sea is tough. Every fisherman contends with long days away from home, brutal working conditions and primitive domestic arrangements. It's the same in all northerly waters: the unforgiving sea does not care what country you have sailed from. That is why Jon Atli Jonasson's short, vivid and intense monologue will carry as much resonance for audiences in Halkirk, Skerray and Durness as it does for those in the playwright's native Iceland.

6 April 2009 The Guardian

Lucky Box

By David Harrower. Traverse/A Play, a Pie and a Pint review.

AS the younger character in David Harrower's drama suggests, Lucky Box is "some kind of fucked-up fairy story". It takes place one afternoon on a forest path where a middle-aged man in a suit is sitting on a plastic container, making it hard for 17-year-old Jack to get by. Played by Stuart Bowman, always an intimidating actor, the man is just the kind of big bad wolf your mother warned you about: tricky and volatile.

11 March 2009 The Guardian

Kyoto

By David Greig. A Play, a Pie and a Pint review.

DAVID Greig has long been fascinated by the contrast between public and private. His characters are always finding themselves in airports, stations and hotel lobbies, places where no one feels at home. This is how it is for conference delegates Lucy and Dan as they stumble into a chilly hotel room in a former communist state for a night of illicit sex.

14 November 2008 Northings

The Tobacco Merchant's Lawyer

By Iain Heggie. A Play, a Pie and a Pint review

IT'S common for writers of science fiction to travel to the future to tell us about the here and now. By contrast, playwright Iain Heggie has gone in the opposite direction, taking us to the Glasgow of 1780 to create a light-hearted play for today.The Tobacco Merchant's Lawyer is a monologue about a credulous lawyer, Enoch Dalmellington, who suffers his own personal credit crunch after investing in an ill-fated trade mission to Virginia.

3 September 2008 The Guardian

Mums and Lovers

By Ian Pattison. A Play, a Pie and a Pint review.

A PLAY, a Pie and a Pint is the most unlikely success story of Scottish theatre. Run by David MacLennan, a veteran of the 7:84 and Wildcat theatre companies, it has been attracting sizeable lunchtime audiences for the past four years. Indeed, so many people turned up to claim their pie and pint before curtain-up on Monday that the performance was forced to start late.

theatreSCOTLAND © Mark Fisher 2009–2010