The Scotsman 1 June 2024

You have to admire Nicole Cooper’s stamina. She has only just finished her globe-conquering turn in Macbeth (An Undoing), Zinnie Harris’s radical rewrite in which Lady Macbeth was repositioned as the central character of Shakespeare’s play. Having premiered last year, the show hit the road three months ago and toured to London, New York and Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum.

That sounds demanding enough, but even before her final performance, Cooper had turned her attention to Hedda Gabler. She will star in the Henrik Ibsen classic – with its great self-destructive female lead – as part of the summer season by Glasgow’s Bard In The Botanics.

And that is not all. In the middle of rehearsals, she has to pop back across the Atlantic for the Drama Desk Awards on 10 June. She has been nominated, alongside such luminaries as Jessica Lange and Juliet Stevenson, for Outstanding Lead Performance In A Play. One New York critic said her Lady Macbeth was a “bravura performance, exuding superhuman strength”. [READ MORE]

By Mark Fisher

MARK FISHER is a freelance theatre critic and feature writer based in Edinburgh and has written about theatre in Scotland since the late-1980s. He is a theatre critic for The Guardian, a former editor of The List magazine and a frequent contributor to the Scotsman and other publications. He is the co-editor of the play anthology Made in Scotland (1995), and the author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (2012) and How to Write About Theatre (2015) – all Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. He is also the editor of The XTC Bumper Book of Fun for Boys and Girls and What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book (both Mark Fisher Ltd).