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The Herald Scotland
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
The Lord moves in mysterious ways in this rapid fire play
Theatre 118, Glasgow Everyone has their crosses to bear in Chris Patrick's new play, in which a couple of believers meet in the sort of outdoor venue where decidedly unchristian things might happen in order to curry favour with the big guy upstairs. Our hapless pair aim to do this by way of hammer, nails, some handy DIY and a lot of faith to muffle the screams. When an angel finally does turn up to show them the way, rather than some beatific saviour bathed in a holy glow, this winged wonder is a grumpy naysayer who keeps his halo in his briefcase and is in permanent dispute with his boss. The Lord moves in mysterious ways in Colin McGowan's rapid-fire production that sees Patrick's stream of one liners go beyond what initially looks like an extended routine into a scabrous comic look at the painful extremes of blind faith. Erin Scanlan's naive disciple makes a kooky comic foil to Ross Flynn's self appointed right hand man of God, played by Flynn as a kind of ecclesiastical middle manager. McGowan himself plays Angie the Angel as the sort of fly patter merchant with an attitude problem not seen since Peter Cook played the devil in his and Dudley Moore's groovy swinging sixties take on Faust in Bedazzled. Read More: Patrick's play forms the first edition of Play of the Week, a new venture set up by the recently formed Theatre 118, who have found a home in a former office block on Osborne Street in Glasgow's city centre. This is at the behest of Outer Spaces, the innovative organisation set up to fill empty shops and offices with artistic life as makeshift studios, galleries and venues. This has enabled Theatre 118 to tap into a necessary need for cheap grassroots theatre spaces in which artists can experiment without financial risk. With a background in scratch nights, play readings and other self generated developmental initiatives, Theatre 118's move into full productions looks promising. As the Play of the Week name suggests, this inaugural season of four short plays running each Thursday to Saturday showcases work that once upon a time might have ended up on TV. This follows in a tradition forged by the likes of A Play, a Pie and a Pint's lunchtime theatre institution in that it works from the ground up. The unseen saviour in Patrick's play might not approve, but the resurrection of grassroots Scottish theatre might just start here. Hallelujah to that.
The National
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Douglas Maxwell's touching dog-walker play fetches more plaudits
The winning plays – The Sheriff Of Kalamaki (2023-24) and So Young (2024-25) – speak to the profound humanism, the insightful humour and the poetic sensibility in his writing. So, too, does Man's Best Friend – a piece originally written for the lunchtime theatre A Play, A Pie And A Pint – which is now being staged in a new, slightly longer version by the Tron. In this cleverly-structured monodrama, the excellent Jordan Young takes on the role of Ronnie, a young man from Edinburgh who resides in Glasgow, but never quite feels that he belongs there. A professional dog walker, he stumbled into his line of work almost accidentally while walking his own dog during the Covid pandemic. READ MORE: 'Completely unprecedented': BBC cuts live feed for Kneecap Glastonbury performance In the play's very funny first half, Ronnie wanders around designer Becky Minto's ingenious, quasi-abstract set (which manages to evoke simultaneously the paths and hills of Ronnie's walks and the solitary domesticity of his home life). As he does so, he regales us with hilarious tales of the trials and tribulations of walking five dogs attached to the 'central belt'; the dog-walking device he created and which he wears around his waist. Ronnie's encounters with a macho dog trainer and a hippy-ish animal lover are a source of tremendous comedy. So, too, are the dog walker's embarrassed recollections of the incident in which one of the pooches in his care managed to ingest a significant quantity of a well-known energy drink (the consequences of which would be best described as scatological). As Ronnie introduces us to his five charges – Albert (his own dog), Coriander, Fury, Carlos and Rex – illustrator Ross Collins offers us charming canine animations which are projected cleverly onto the set. To synopsise the second half of the play in any detail would be to commit a crime of spoiling so grave as to merit one being dragged through park mud by five energetic mutts. Suffice it to say that a dramatic, dog-related discovery takes Ronnie – and us, the theatre audience – into an emotional space that is radically different from the light-heartedness of the play's opening section. As Ronnie recalls two parallel stories of love and loss, the almost forensically empathetic dimension in Maxwell's writing comes to the fore. The turn in the narrative is executed to great dramatic effect, not only in the author's writing and Young's compelling performance, but also in Minto's set, which (with the help of Grant Anderson's superb lighting design) is transformed powerfully. Director Jemima Levick's production is sensitive and precise in equal measure. Patricia Panther's sound and music are appropriately atmospheric. What begins as a humorous monologue about professional dog walking ends as a touching and hopeful play about our collective experience of Covid and the universal experience of grief.
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Scotsman
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Theatre reviews: Man's Best Friend The Inquisitor
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Man's Best Friend, Tron Theatre, Glasgow ★★★★ The Inquisitor, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★ The Croft, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★ It's a truth universally acknowledged that during the pandemic, the relationship between people and their pets gained a whole new significance and intensity. I'm not sure, though, that that inflexion-point in human-pet relations had ever been celebrated in theatre, until the moment in 2022 when Douglas Maxwell's monologue Man's Best Friend first appeared at A Play, A Pie, and A Pint. Jordan Young in Man's Best Friend | Mihaela Bodlovic The monologue tells the story of Ronnie, who, after the tragic loss of his wife, and a decision to walk away from his job, finds himself - as the world opens up again - working as a dog-walker to five rowdy canine charges, four of them owned by his Glasgow neighbours. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Now Ronnie reappears - at the Tron and on tour - in an expanded 80 minute version of the play, directed by Jemima Levick, and performed by Scotsquad star Jordan Young; and three years on, Man's Best Friend emerges as an even more powerful response to a moment in history that changed so many lives, and left unresolved pain in so many hearts. In this version, the show receives a slightly more elaborate staging, courtesy of designer Becky Minto and lighting designer Grant Anderson. In truth, though, it hardly needs them, so clearly does the play's strength lie in Douglas Maxwell's writing - often hilariously funny, yet also profound, and sometimes richly poetic - and in the performance at the centre of the show. In this version, Young takes centre stage as a fine tragi-comic actor at the absolute height of his powers; younger than Jonathan Watson's original Ronnie, but all the more poignantly lost for that - until the play's pivotal moment, when his own dog leads him towards s shocking discovery that, at last, begins to awaken him from the long sleep of grief. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad This week's final spring season Play, Pie and Pint show is likewise a profound and thoughtful monologue; but in Peter Arnott's The Inquisitor - a 2007 play restaged to mark Arnott's 40th anniversary as a playwright - the speaker is not alone. He is an investigator conducting a final interview with a man accused of terrorism; but he finds that his interviewee will not speak, and sits in silence throughout the encounter. The effect is to create a monologue in which the speaker - powerfully played by Tom McGovern - spends an all but fruitless hour trying to bring his interviewee (an eloquently silent Michael Guest) back from his exalted commitment to a martyr's death, to the compromised, messy yet magical stuff of ordinary human life. McGovern's style, in making these arguments, is deliberately quixotic, and a shade hyperactive, as if he barely trusts Arnott's powerful words to carry the weight of the play. Carry it they do, though; to a conclusion that has only become more telling, as definitions of terrorism and hate crime grow ever more far-reaching, and the morality of those in power ever more compromised, and contested. The Croft | Contributed There's no such gravitas, alas, about Ali Milles's touring play The Croft, at the Festival Theatre, which takes a potentially powerful drama about love between women across three generations - all connected to a remote seaside croft in the western Highlands - and makes the fundamental mistake of trying to turn it into a horror movie. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad An impressive cast give the show their best shot, with Gracie Follows and Caroline Harker as lovers Laura and Suzanne, and Liza Goddard as 19th century crofter Enid, all turning in bold performances. In the end, through, a dramatic script has to play to its strengths; and here, that strength lies in the portrayal of brave women trying to defy patriarchal thinking down the ages, rather than in the cheap suggestion of some nameless supernatural evil, lurking in the very stones of the place.
The Herald Scotland
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Review: The mystery of the Inquisitor and the Prisoner is compelling
Oran Mor, Glasgow 'You are us,' says the Inquisitor of Peter Arnott's play to his silent Prisoner at one point. This is a telling moment in this unspecified war of attrition that reveals the similarities as much as the differences between those in one conflict or another. Whether political, religious or generational, as the Inquisitor expounds on morality, ethics and all the contradictions at play that give us the excuse to square any circle we like in the name of whatever cause is going, for a veteran like him, this time it seems, it's also personal. Tom McGovern's Inquisitor is every inch the well-heeled establishment mandarin in Liz Carruthers' suitably elliptical production, the final lunchtime offering from A Play, a Pie and a Pint's spring and summer season. Sat in the old school splendour of designer Heather Grace Currie's set, McGovern waxes forth from his desk while his Prisoner, initially bound, but always captive, acts as a human sounding board, never giving anything away in Michael Guest's concentrated portrayal. Read More: A bold concert with a mighty juggernaut 'Charm aplenty' - Review: Goodbye Dreamland Bowlarama, Oran Mor Review: You Won't Break My Soul, Oran Mor, Glasgow Just what alliance the Prisoner appears to have betrayed is never revealed, but both men are facing the consequences of whatever actions got them here. Is the Prisoner a terrorist sympathiser infiltrating the system in order to corrupt it? Or is he merely an angry do-gooder who got in too deep? As for the Inquisitor, how did he end up where he is now? And why does he appear to be as trapped as his captive? Arnott sets up the sort of circular debate we don't see enough of on stage in an expansive probing of belief, faith and how far someone will go to get what they want. Flanked by cosmic film footage, the Inquisitor's speech is part TED talk, part confessional before the two men finally find some kind of accord beyond the silence. Just who is seeking to be released, however, no one is saying in a fascinating and compelling hour.
The Herald Scotland
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Review: The Haunting of Agnes Gilfrey, Oran Mor, Glasgow
⭐⭐⭐⭐ A storm is brewing over Mull in Amy Conway's new comedy thriller that forms the latest offering from A Play, a Pie and a Pint's current season of lunchtime theatre. Agnes and her American TV actor husband James have arrived late at the old house where they are having a belated honeymoon. Greeted unexpectedly by housekeeper Mrs Carlin, Agnes and James are also seeking to escape other domestic pressures. Once things start going bump in the night, however, old ghosts making their presence felt see things spiral into a nightmare. Only when Agnes confronts a few demons does the storm calm. Shades of Inside Number 9's meticulously observed pastiches of hammy horror pulp fiction TV tropes abound in Katie Slater's production of Conway's script. This is the case from the creepy portrait of the former lady of the house Constance Laird resembling real life characters, to at one point having Manasa Tagica's Jack appearing to believe he is in a reality show. Then there is the way absolutely everyone in a 1970s thriller has a high-flying job in one creative industry or another. It is there most of all, however, in Mary Gapinski's larger than life embodiment of Mrs Carlin, whose deadly patter sounds purloined from a Victorian tombstone. Read more theatre reviews from Neil Cooper: Beyond such wilfully OTT archness there is some serious stuff at play here that says much about women, autonomy and the impending tick of the biological clock that has seen the female of the species too often presented as a mad woman in the attic of one sort or another. Played out on Fraser Lappin's pitch perfect depiction of a crumbling Highland pile and co-presented with Mull's arts centre An Tobar and Mull Theatre, Conway and Slater's construction sees Gapinski, Tagica and Sarah McCardie's Agnes having tremendous fun with all this. Conway's play nevertheless reclaims old myths in a deceptively subtle fashion to put women at the centre of this new spin on gothic fiction.
