Writer James Graham welcomes 'beast of an actor' to latest play
Graham said of Brian Cox: "He is a beast of an actor. I have admired him for years and years."People know him from television but he's a theatre actor at heart."You feel so presumptuous and at times you pinch yourself – the 11-year-old boy who was making up stories in his room gets to work with these Hollywood actors, these legends. "You feel incredibly lucky."Produced by the National Theatre of Scotland, the play will preview in Cox's home town Dundee before moving on to Edinburgh.
The playwright said his passion for writing was fuelled by his mother who bought him a typewriter at the age of just six.He said: "I loved writing stories and I was very lucky that my mother – rather than rolling her eyes and saying 'get a proper job', really encouraged me from a young age."Dear England, the story of Gareth Southgate and his England football redemption, picked up the Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2024.It is set to go on tour from September, as well as becoming a BBC television series with Joseph Fiennes reprising his role as the former England manager.
Meanwhile his adaptation of the 1980s television series Boys from the Blackstuff opens at the Brighton Theatre Royal on Tuesday."To work with Alan Bleasdale- someone I grew up watching on the sofa with my mum when I was eight or nine – to actually spend time in a room with him building this for the stage was one of the honours of my life to be honest," he said.Graham said that living in Sussex helped to provide a peaceful base for his writing."I need the peace and quiet to be able to write and to hear my own thoughts and from the first time I arrived in West Sussex I just could not believe it – the beauty of it," he said."I got taken there by friends and just fell in love with it and just knew it was going to be a really inspiring place to live and work."
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Daily Mail
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Tom Holland and fiancée Zendaya enjoy romantic stroll together in Scotland before climbing onboard speedboat to film new scenes for upcoming epic The Odyssey
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Telegraph
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How resurgent Aberdeen is capitalising on its maritime heritage
The only problem with having dinner at The Silver Darling is the likelihood of having your main course interrupted by the hooting of a horn at industrial volume. The restaurant – its name a poetic term for the herrings so abundant in Scottish waters – occupies a former customs building at the entrance to Aberdeen Harbour, looking directly onto the mouth of the River Dee. You can almost touch the giant ships which chug through this narrow channel, emitting a noisy hello or farewell as they pass. There is something thrilling about observing an ocean-going vessel at close quarters; that stately progress across green-blue depths. Better still, it is a spectacle that will be on offer in Aberdeen, with an extra elegance, this coming weekend. Ever since they were first staged in 1956, the Tall Ships Races have been one of the world's premiere maritime extravaganzas. The festival assembles an ad-hoc fleet of the planet's foremost wind-powered vessels, gathering them in major ports where they can be admired by the public – then unleashes them in competition, each ship speeding to the next appointed harbour on a fully crewed voyage. Over the past half-century, this forest of masts has taken shape in places as diverse as Gothenburg, St Petersburg, Hamburg, La Coruña, Quebec City, Bordeaux, Hartlepool… and Aberdeen; the 2025 iteration of the races – which will also call upon Le Havre, Dunkirk, Kristiansand (in Norway), and Esbjerg (in Denmark) – will be its third encounter with Scotland's third biggest city, following previous visits in 1991 and 1997. The city is braced for four days (July 19-22) of crowded streets and carnival atmosphere – up to half a million people are expected to attend the various events and concerts of what will be Britain's biggest free event this year. A total of 49 tall ships are due to be moored in the main harbour; vessels of different sizes and ages, but each an echo of the golden age of sailing which spanned much of the 19th century. The Belem, a French barque, is a relic of that era, its beams and boards dating to 1896. Others are a little younger – Dutch schooner Gulden Leeuw (1937); Norwegian windjammer Christian Radich (1937); three-masted Polish training ship Dar Mlodziezy, launched in 1982, which was part of the 1997 celebrations. The city will also witness the homecoming of the Malcolm Miller, which was hewn by Aberdeen shipbuilders John Lewis & Sons in 1967. A rich shipbuilding history The schooner's arrival will be a reminder of what Aberdeen has lost. For two centuries, it was one of Britain's busiest shipbuilding hives; around 3,000 vessels were crafted on and around its wharves between 1790 and 1989. But the RMS St Helena (built to service the British Overseas Territory of the same name), launched in that latter year, was the final Aberdonian ship down the slipway. The Hall, Russell & Company shipyard responsible for the cargo liner's construction – the last in the city – ceased active operations in 1992. Aberdeen's role in North Sea fishing is also diminished, with the core of the region's trawler fleet now berthed 30 miles up the coast, in Peterhead. The covered fish market that had stood on the harbour's Commercial Quay for 118 years was demolished in 2007. These economic gaps have been filled by Aberdeen's involvement in off-shore oil and gas. But beyond this, 2023 brought a new layer to the city's maritime armour – the opening of the freshly constructed South Harbour, a mile from the original, on the other side of the Greyhope headland. Completed at a cost of £420 million, this new enclave offers four further quays, and enough room to accommodate ships of up to 984ft (300m) in length. In a somewhat bleak turn, one of the current 'beneficiaries' of all this space is the Solong – the cargo ship whose fatal collision with the US-registered tanker Stena Immaculate in the North Sea on March 10 is now the subject of court proceedings. Rather more positively, the South Harbour has provided a massive boost to Aberdeen's status as a cruise destination. Some 70 cruise ships are scheduled to visit the city this year – the vast majority mooring at one of the new quays. This will be a 40 per cent increase on 2024, with operators such as Ambassador Cruise Line, Renaissance and Viking all due to drop anchor. 'The South Harbour has been a complete game-changer for the city,' says Roddy James, the commercial director of the Port of Aberdeen. 'By contrast, the main harbour has not really changed shape in 150 years. When the tall ships are in, you should be able to imagine how it looked all that time ago.' Reasons to visit the 'Granite City' There is much about the present to enjoy in the 'Granite City', whose famous grey walls have a silvery nobility under the summer sky: the lively bars and restaurants along Belmont Street and Correction Wynd; the murals on and around Union Plaza, a legacy of the Nuart festival, which sees further creations added to this urban canvas every summer. But retrospection is also widely available. Particularly up the slope from the harbour, where Aberdeen Maritime Museum casts its gaze all the way back to 1136; the year the port was effectively founded, when the Bishop of Aberdeen was given the right to charge docking fees by Scottish king David I. Exhibits cover fishing, whaling, oil and shipbuilding (including a fond glance at the Malcolm Miller), and acknowledge the Aberdeen Line – the shipping company, founded two centuries ago this year (in 1825), which gave birth to one of Britain's most venerable ships, the Thermopylae (see below). Similar currents are trawled at Aberdeen Art Gallery – which, as well as a rich seam of painting, plays host to the Aberdeen Harbour Board Archive. The treasures here include more than 5,000 photographs capturing the port as it looked in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries: a dredger breaking ice on the Dee in the winter of 1910; cargo ship the SS Woodfield being towed out to sea in 1920; Upper Dock in 1914, the city rising behind it. The gallery also features the Register of Arrivals: heavy tomes documenting the daily entry and exit of shipping, along with snippets of contemporary commentary. A note for June 6 1916 is a shocked blast from the First World War, detailing the death, via a German mine lurking in the waves west of Orkney, of the man who, as Secretary of State for War, stared out from recruitment posters. 'Dreadful news,' a fastidiously neat hand declares. ' HMS Hampshire down with all hands off Orkneys, Lord Kitchener on board.' Ships will be the meat of the conversation this weekend – but the tidings will be brighter.
