NobodyWillEverForgiveUs5a24 November 2008 The Guardian

Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us

By Paul Higgins. Traverse Theatre review.

YOU can tell Paul Higgins has spent time on the set of The Thick of It. The first-time playwright, who played a hate-fuelled press officer in the vicious political satire, rarely lets a line go by without a wounding barb or a sardonic put-down.

11 November 2008 The Guardian

The Dogstone/Nasty Brutish and Short

By Kenny Lindsay/Andy Duffy. Traverse Theatre review.

IF new plays are a measure of the times, the National Theatre of Scotland's series of Traverse Debuts tells us these are depressing days. After Sam Holcroft's unsettling Cockroach, with its gloomy prognosis that war is a Darwinistic inevitability . . .

28 October 2008 The Guardian

Cockroach

By Sam Holcroft. Traverse Theatre review.

No one could accuse Sam Holcroft of lacking ambition. Her full-length debut is an attempt to marry Darwin's theory of evolution to the male propensity for war, suggesting that the violence in our society, from rape to genital mutilation, is a consequence of our preprogrammed need to ensure the survival of the fittest. What starts off like a routine episode of Grange Hill mutates into a radical feminist answer to Lord of the Flies. Although erratically structured, it features one image of such disturbing intensity that Holcroft has to be taken seriously as a compelling theatrical voice.

5 October 2008 The Guardian

Something Wicked this Way Comes

By Ray Bradbury. Catherine Wheels review.

AS every reader of Pinocchio knows, there is not a boy who can resist the pull of a funfair. When the carnival comes to town it brings the promise of something magical, transgressive, illicit; the possibility of escaping everyday life for easy rewards and sensual pleasures. That is the allure of Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show when, heralded by the smell of candyfloss and a midnight lightning storm, it arrives in an Illinois backwater in Ray Bradbury's classic 1962 novel.

19 September 2008 The Guardian

One Giant Leap

Wee Stories review.

PROFESSOR Michael Reiss should have bided his time. Instead of causing all that hullabaloo over creationism in science lessons, the Royal Society's now ex-director of education should simply have prescribed One Giant Leap for every school in the land.

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25 August 2008 Variety

365

By David Harrower. NTS review.

PERHAPS no show could live up to the weight of expectations. The prospect of a National Theater of Scotland collaboration with David Harrower was impossibly tantalizing. Would the company that brought us "Black Watch," still on a world tour after two years, prove a winning combination with the Scottish playwright whose international hit, "Blackbird," is newly slated to transfer to the bigscreen? That "365" does not scale the heights of those earlier plays is hardly surprising; that it struggles to get off the ground, however, is a disappointment.

24 August 2008 Scotland on Sunday

365

By David Harrower. NTS review.

FEW shows have opened at the Edinburgh International Festival with a greater weight of expectation. Here was the National Theatre of Scotland, the company that brought us Black Watch, tackling another contemporary issue – the question of what happens to teenagers when they leave state care – in an equally bold theatrical style.

21 April 2008 The Guardian

The Emperor's New Kilt

Wee Stories review.

"SOMETIMES the scariest thing can be your own imagination," says the independently minded Rhona as she explains to a golden eagle (by the name of Glen) that the giant crow he is frightened of is actually his own shadow.

18 April 2008 Hi-Arts

The Emperor's New Kilt

Wee Stories review.

THE first one to get naked is not the emperor at all. It's Ramsay, the loveable sheep, whose fleece is sheered off to supply the wool for the laird's new birthday suit.

28 February 2008 The Guardian

The National Theatre of Scotland gets its two-year check-up

VICKY Featherstone says she imagined the inaugural production of the National Theatre of Scotland would transform lives forever. It didn't work out exactly that way, but how inspirational to have an artistic director who believed it might.

21 February 2008 The Guardian

Six Characters in Search of an Author

Translation by David Harrower. Royal Lyceum/Citizens' Theatre review.

IT strikes us as being the most modern - indeed, postmodern - of plays, yet Six Characters in Search of an Author is also very much of its time.On the one hand, Luigi Pirandello came up with an idea that continues to feed into the culture in forms as diverse as Acorn Antiques and Being John Malkovich. On the other, the theatre world he turned inside-out in 1921 was one of leading ladies, proscenium arches and melodramatic pot-boilers.

20 February 2008 The Guardian

Putting experimental theatre to the test

I LAUGHED out loud when I read Armando Iannucci's analysis of experimental theatre in the Observer at the weekend.

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