John Byrne: ‘If I don’t laugh when I’m writing, it gets tossed out’
The Guardian 21 April 2021 If you were in Edinburgh during the 1977 festival there were two shows you couldn’t miss. One was the revue Beyond a Joke starring a…
The home of Scottish theatre
The Guardian 21 April 2021 If you were in Edinburgh during the 1977 festival there were two shows you couldn’t miss. One was the revue Beyond a Joke starring a…
The Guardian 14 April 2021 Like the virus itself, online theatre has come in waves. For much of its 75-minute duration, Stewart Melton’s play seems to belong to the first…
The Guardian, 2 April 2021 What will audiences want after the pandemic? Will it be daft comedies by Noël Coward? Or will they have an appetite for Pulitzer-winning cancer dramas…
The Scotsman 31 March 2021 When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in March 2020, many theatre companies could only shut up shop. Not so Citadel Arts Group. The Leith company, which…
The Guardian 3 Feb 2021 Haruki Murakami would have called it What I Talk About When I Talk About Weightlifting. The title chosen by playwright Stef Smith is The Deadlift.…
The Guardian 31 January 20221 If there’s one festival equipped to adapt to the era of online viewing it’s Manipulate. The Edinburgh-based event is dedicated to visual theatre, a catch-all…
The Guardian 19 January 2021 It was 2010 and the world of Scottish theatre was reeling from the sudden death of Gerard Kelly, one of the great panto stars. I…
How to Write About Theatre 5 January 2021 Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway by Michael Riedel (Simon and Schuster) Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway by Michael Riedel (Simon…
Critical Stages 30 December 2020 It is October 2016, and I am sharing a stage at Trinity College Dublin with Peter Crawley of the Irish Times. We are talking about…
The Guardian 22 December 2020 Did Brian Friel ever write a Christmas show? If he did, it might have looked like this one from the National Theatre of Scotland. Responding…