The Guardian 11 April 2024 Anyone with half an eye on today’s global politics will know bad things happen when religious zealots come face to face. The same is true in our own history, as Rona Munro reminds us in the latest instalment of her James Play saga about Scotland’s Stewart kings. Compared with the ambitious blockbusters with which she began the series 10 years ago, this episode feels more like a slight if diverting extension of the James Play universe. We have reached 1528 and, reacting to the early stirrings of the Scottish reformation, the Roman Catholic church is treating any oppos ..read more

The Scotsman 8 April 2024 Wouldn’t it be good if we could get rid of nightmares? That is the idea behind Shō And The Demons Of The Deep, a children’s picture book by the Montreal author and illustrator Annouchka Gravel Galouchko. Published in 1995 as Shō Et Les Dragons D’Eau, it is about the inhabitants of a Japanese village who choose to throw their bad dreams into the sea. Seems like a good idea until the ocean becomes alive with scary demons. It takes a girl called Shō to redirect the creatures into the sky – inventing the kite as she does so. Zoë Bullock was given the book by her Japanese ..read more

The Scotsman 26 March 2024 In January 2018, the Edinburgh International Book Festival put on a celebration of Muriel Spark. Taking place in the Usher Hall on the eve of the centenary of the novelist’s birth, it included a rehearsed reading of Doctors Of Philosophy, Spark’s only play. Among the actors was Gabriel Quigley who turned out to have a formidable knowledge of the Edinburgh author. “You really know your Spark,” said director David Greig, impressed. You do not have to talk to Quigley for long to see why. She raves about The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, of course, but her conversation enco ..read more

The Guardian 24 March 2024 It is 2037 and the government has instituted a new system for assessing claims for disability benefits. Having listened to complaints about the old questionnaire, it has reframed its evaluation in more positive terms. This, goes the slogan, is “accessible Britain: a country we can all use”, and now everyone can be provided with work that suits their ability. For Chris (Gillian Dean), the very thought is excruciating. A former police officer, she reluctantly quit her job because of oculopharyngeal muscular dystrophy (OPMD), which is causing her body to progressively w ..read more

The Scotsman 23 February 2024 You are driving down the street, joining in with a song on the radio at the top of your voice. We have all done it. Jo Mango was the same. But this time there was a twist for the Glasgow singer-songwriter. “I was singing away to some stupid pop hit on Radio 1,” she says. “Then in the other direction, this woman came in her car singing along to the same song. We both clocked each other singing. There was this weird moment: she was a complete stranger, but we were connected by the act of singing the same thing.” That moment of connection is what she loves about musi ..read more

The Guardian 19 February 2024 Two Sisters smells like teen spirit. Before the three leads come on in David Greig’s entertaining new play, the stage is filled with youth-theatre actors. They look like a nice bunch: a little surly perhaps, prone to whispering, plotting and occasional recklessness as they hang out on the climbing frame and beach wall of Lisbeth Burian’s sea-view set, but generally good natured. Addressing the audience directly, they ask us to recall our own 16-year-old selves; our enthusiasms, our crushes and our summer soundtracks. Amusingly they incorporate our pre-show questio ..read more

The Guardian 5 February 2024 You can rely on Edinburgh’s Manipulate festival to give you something you have never seen before. This year, it comes in the form of Simple Machines (★★★★☆), an opening weekend treat by Belgian choreographer Ugo Dehaes. His shtick is that it has become too expensive to employ dancers in his company Kwaad Bloed so he has followed the lead of big business and done away with them. Just as Amazon embraces automation and supermarkets use self-service tills to make us do their work, so Dehaes has created a robot corps de ballet and got his audiences to develop their move ..read more

The Guardian 5 February 2024 The playwright and novelist Alan Bissett has been moonlighting as Moira Bell for the past 15 years. His alter ego is a working-class Falkirk everywoman, a hilarious mix of parochialism and honest good sense, anger management and generosity. She is in her element singing karaoke in her local or leading a party in a half-forgotten folk song. Anywhere beyond the Falkirk wheel and she is all at sea. What strikes you about Bissett’s single-sitting staging of the three instalments of his Moira Monologues is how much they reflect the times. The laughs come as Moira tells ..read more

The Scotsman 30 January 2024 Playwright Clare Duffy set up her company Civic Digits to consider what it means to live in a world dominated by the internet. With a commitment to equality, she wanted to ensure nobody got left behind in the rush for social-media likes. She also wanted everybody, girls in particular, to flourish in this technological landscape. And this landscape is not always pretty. Divisive opinions, once held only by crackpots, can wheedle their way into the mainstream through the weight of online numbers. Young people, those digital natives who have never known life without c ..read more

The Scotsman 9 January 2024 The actor and director Matthew Zajac is extemporising a history of theatre in the Highlands and islands. He begins in the 1970s when he was growing up and remembers a short-lived theatre-in-education company run by the newly opened Eden Court Theatre in Inverness. He mentions Fir Chlis, the first professional Gaelic repertory company, that lasted from 1978 until 1981, and would pave the way for Drama na h-Alba, Tosg and Theatre Gu Leòr. And then there was the alternative arts festival he and his friends set up in Inverness in the 1980s. [READ MORE] The post Spark ..read more