Welcome! I am a freelance journalist and theatre critic for The Times in Scotland. I also write short fiction, which has been broadcast several times on BBC Radio 4 and published in anthologies such as Out There, Elsewhere, ImagiNation, Gutter, Markings, New Writing Scotland and The Best Gay Stories.
First published in The Times, Thursday June 9 2022
FOUR STARS
The premise of Tom McGrath’s 1976 play is literally out of this world. Two old pals meet in the afterlife and try to make sense of their career as cinema’s best-loved comic double act. “We’ve been dead for years,” says Stan Laurel, played in Tony Cownie’s revival by Barnaby Power. “The people want to know who we really were.”
Continue reading “Theatre review: Laurel & Hardy – Lyceum, Edinburgh”First published in The Times, Thursday April 7 2022
FOUR STARS
Ellen Wilkinson — one of the first female members of parliament — may not have the name recognition of some of her male counterparts, but her life and political career were no less eventful. As the Labour MP for Middlesbrough East from 1924-31, then Jarrow in Tyne and Wear between 1935-47, she organised and participated in the most famous of the “hunger marches” of the 1930s. She rubbed shoulders with Ernest Hemingway during the Spanish Civil War, and later served as a minister in Churchill’s wartime coalition and in the postwar Attlee government.
Continue reading “Theatre review: Red Ellen – Northern Stage, Newcastle”First published in The Times, Wednesday March 9 2022
TWO STARS
The new drama by Zinnie Harris, the award-winning Scottish playwright and director, presents an assortment of characters trying with varying degrees of success to say the unsayable. In the opening sequence Luci (Neve McIntosh) resorts to locking Christopher (Peter Forbes), her husband of 21 years, in their bedroom, with supplies of food and wine, so she can confront him about a suspected affair. In a later scene their daughter Caitlin (Leah Byrne) spins a grotesque and increasingly elaborate lie to reconnect with a former lover, Sally (Saskia Ashdown).
Continue reading “Theatre review: The Scent of Roses – Lyceum, 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.
Continue reading “Review: Christmas Dinner – Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh”First published in The Times, Thursday March 5 2020
Two Stars
On paper this gender-swapped version of Bertolt Brecht’s 1940 comedy looks intriguing. The novelist Denise Mina adapts, with the redoubtable Elaine C Smith in the lead and the award-winning Turkish director Murat Daltaban at the helm. Yet while the production features some fine flourishes, there is no escaping the overall sense of a messy and incoherent assemblage.
Continue reading “Review: Mrs Puntila and Her Man Matti – Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh”
First published in The Times, Monday October 28 2019
Four Stars
In Inua Ellams’s acclaimed play, the barber’s shop is much more than a place to go for a haircut. “This is a space for talk,” says Emmanuel (Anthony Ofoegbu), the proprietor of the busy gents hairdresser that provides the play’s recurring setting. There is a sense throughout that no subject is off limits.
First published in The Times, Monday September 16 2019
Four Stars
The best-known novel by the Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem is a story that never dies. Solaris, which depicts a group of scientists attempting contact with a seemingly sentient planet, has been filmed three times, notably by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and Steven Soderbergh in 2002, and has been adapted several times for theatre and opera.
First published in The Times, Monday August 20 2018
Four Stars
In Marguerite Duras’s 1982 novella, The Malady of Death, a man pays a woman to spend time with him at a seaside hotel in order that he might “try to love”. The author sought to recreate on the page the immediacy of the theatre: the spare text is reminiscent of a script with stage directions. At one point, Duras describes the room in which her characters meet as a “theatre”.
Continue reading “Review: La Maladie de la Mort – Lyceum, Edinburgh”
First published in The Times, Thursday May 3 2018
Four Stars
August Strindberg wrote Creditors in 1888 as part of the creative torrent that also produced his most famous work, Miss Julie. Both plays exhibit the visceral dialogue and intense exploration of shifts in power within relationships for which the prolific and influential Swedish playwright is known, while also giving vent to his mordant and rather contradictory view of women. He was known to refer to Siri von Essen, the first of his three wives, as “the vampire”, though he also maintained that “the presence of women tends to elevate men”.
First published in The Times, Tuesday February 20 2018
Four Stars
While Hannah Cowley is hardly a household name today, the playwright was well known to audiences in the late 18th century, at a time when the theatre was at its peak as a popular art form. Her most successful work, The Belle’s Stratagem, which premiered in 1780, and is a response to George Farquhar’s The Beaux Stratagem, was one of the most revived comedies of the period.
While originally set in London, the action transposes neatly to Georgian Edinburgh in Tony Cownie’s sparkling adaptation, with references to the burgeoning New Town, the loyal toast to the “King over the Water” and cameos from luminaries of the period, including the fiddler, Niel Gow.
Continue reading “Review: The Belle’s Stratagem – Lyceum, Edinburgh”
Allan Radcliffe 