theatreSCOTLAND

Kathryn Howden and Lewis Howden as Sadie and Bill in Any Given Day Pic: Richard Campbell

4 June 2010 The Guardian

Any Given Day

By Linda McLean. A Traverse Theatre review.

WITH a Linda McLean play, you can bet on two things. One is characters who are held together by the bonds of family loyalty and the memory of some past trauma. The other is a mould-breaking dramatic structure that reflects the characters' emotional fragmentation. In Any Given Day, which is as bold, unnerving and fraught as anything she has written, you get both.

6 May 2010 The Guardian

Gordon Brown: A Life in Theatre

By David Greig, Rona Munro, Peter Arnott, Vicki Liddelle, Gabriel Quigley, Andy Duffy, Alan Wilkins and David Ireland. A Traverse Theatre blog

IT is 7.30am and I have woken up in a parallel universe. It is one in which Radio 4's Today programme takes cultural matters seriously and routinely weighs into the second collapse of Enron, Paul McCartney's meat-free Mondays and the novels of David Mitchell before I've even finished breakfast. How fantastic it would be if the programme was always like this. But on this day of all days, it's enough to leave a man rudderless. How to vote in the general election without the early-morning instruction of a tub-thumping politician?

27 April 2010 The Guardian

The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?

By Edward Albee. A Traverse Theatre review.

STEVIE finds out about her husband's affair in Edward Albee's thrilling drama from a letter sent by their old friend Ross. What he wrote, she says, was "awful and absurd, but it wasn't a joke". The awful and the absurd are constants in Albee's career, from the excruciating battles of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to the talking lizards in Seascape. You expect The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, first seen in 2002, to fall into the absurd category. After all, Stevie's 22-year marriage is under threat because husband Martin has fallen for a goat.

Anne Lacey and Sean Scanlan in The Garden by Zinnie Harris Pic: Lesley Black

27 March 2010 The Guardian

The Garden

By Zinnie Harris. A Play, a Pie and a Pint/Traverse review

I HAVE been at the theatre when an audience member collapsed, but never have I seen two keel over at once. Such was the unfortunate, not to say unlikely, scene at Oran Mor for this lunchtime performance, bringing Zinnie Harris's two-hander to a premature end. Having consulted the script, I realise we missed only the final few lines of a domestic drama that, like many plays in these apocalyptic times, is about the impossibility of a future.

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.

23 February 2010 Unpublished

What We Know

By Pamela Carter. An Ek Performance/Traverse Theatre review.

WE live in a society disconnected from death. For a certain generation this messy inevitability takes place unseen in far away hospitals and care homes. When finally it intrudes, as intrude it must, it generates a sense of outrage in the bereaved, as if it had no right to be there. This is why so many contemporary plays treat death as the starting point of a study of mourning and not, as in the less sentimental classical tradition, the end point of a tragedy.

theatreSCOTLAND © Mark Fisher 2009–2010