Review: A Streetcar Named Desire – Macrobert Arts Centre, Stirling

First published in The Times, Friday September 15 2017

Two Stars

The Scottish company Rapture Theatre, which specialises in revivals of classic plays, has mainly focused in the past couple of years on the great works of the American stage. After a production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons and a triumphant imagining of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? it was inevitable that the company, led by artistic director Michael Emans, would get around to staging Tennessee Williams’s most celebrated drama.

Review: Heads Up – Traverse, Edinburgh

First published in The Times, Monday February 27

Three Stars

The stated ambition of Rantin, Kieran Hurley’s acclaimed performance ceilidh, first staged in 2013, was to build a theatrical portrait of what Hugh MacDiarmid described as “our multiform, our infinite Scotland”. The resulting patchwork of text and songs with its “multiple beginnings, abundance of middles and no clear ending” was delivered with warmth, gentle humour and an appealing lack of formality.