Review: Christmas Dinner – Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh

First published in The Times, Monday December 13 2021

FOUR STARS

Amid this year’s seasonal feast of pantomimes, musicals and comedy shows, the Lyceum, Edinburgh, is serving something altogether different. Christmas Dinner is a new play — written by Robert Alan Evans and produced in association with Catherine Wheels, a leading children’s company — that seeks to celebrate no less than the redemptive power of theatre itself.

Review: The Dark Carnival – Tramway, Glasgow

First published in The Times, Tuesday February 26 2019

Four Stars

Visions of the afterlife in drama can range from the terrifying to the strangely reassuring. Vanishing Point’s meditation on death, the torment of grief and the comforts of the supernatural imagines Hamlet’s “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns” as a gothic mirror of the world above ground, in which the dead reciprocate the pain and grief of the living.

Review: The Destroyed Room – Tron Theatre, Glasgow

First published in The Times, Wednesday March 2 2016

Three Stars

A single image can change the entire public conversation. The most powerful recent example was the picture of three-year-old Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach, which inspired a softening in attitudes towards the Syrian refugee crisis. Nonetheless, in today’s world, where we are bombarded with images of human suffering, online and on television, it is increasingly difficult to interrogate and fully process what we are seeing.