Latest news with #PitlochryFestivalTheatre
The National
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The National
Alan Cumming launches summer talks with 'beers and baps' in Highlands
Nestled in his home county of Perthshire, Cumming's new lecture series, A Beer, A Bap and A Boffin, will be held at Pitlochry Festival Theatre. Cumming was elected as artistic director of the theatre in 2024. The series aims to spotlight leading experts from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which Cumming is a member of himself. On Saturday, June 14, the series opens with James Robertson's talk, What's next for Libraries, Literature, and Creativity?, which will explore the state of culture and literature in the library sector, shedding light on the future of our libraries as AI becomes increasingly commonplace. READ MORE: Crew for Christopher Nolan's film starring Matt Damon take over Scottish castle David Field FRSE, CEO of the Royal Zoological Society Scotland, continues the series on Saturday, August 2, with a talk on how to train your wildcat. Field's lecture seeks to uncover the techniques that specialists use to prepare zoo-bred wildcats for release, whilst also discussing the possibility of bringing back Scotland's lost species. On Saturday, August 23, Professor Niahm Nic Daeid FRSE closes the talks with her lecture titled "what is forensic science and why does it matter?" and discuss the crucial use of science in criminal investigation and trial. Cumming said one of the "many surprises" at the theatre is the "explorers garden," adding: "I want to find as many reasons as possible for it to be enjoyed. That's why I thought of A Beer, A Bap and A Boffin! "As a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, I have watched many academics mesmerise with their knowledge and rediscovered how fascinating it can be to learn about topics you'd otherwise never encounter. So, I invited some of these Boffins to do lectures in our Explorers Garden amphitheatre, and with the addition of a wee drink and a bite to eat as they extrapolate, I don't think there could be a better way to spend a summer's day! "Also, full disclosure this is both a steal and a homage to Oran Mor's brilliant A Play, A Pie and A Pint!' Alongside access to the talks, tickets include a complementary beer and a bap. For tickets and further information visit here, or call the Box Office on 01796484626.
Scotsman
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Theatre reviews: Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed
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... Nan Shepherd – Naked and Unashamed, Pitlochry Festival Theatre ★★★★ Meme Girls, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★ Since she first appeared on a Scottish £5 banknote in 2016, interest in the 20th-century Scottish writer Nan Shepherd has soared. Her restoration to national fame, almost 90 years after the success of her first novel The Quarry Wood, turned out to be timely, as readers began to rediscover both her passionate connection with a natural world now increasingly under threat, and the story of her life as a young woman in a male-dominated literary world. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Susan Coyle and Adam Buksh in Nan Shepherd Naked and Unashamed – Photo by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan It was therefore a fine moment, last year, for Firebrand Theatre and Pitlochry Festival Theatre to launch their studio show Nan Shepherd – Naked And Unashamed. Co-written by Firebrand founders Ellie Zeegen and Richard Baron, the play features just two actors, and offers an 80-minute journey through Nan Shepherd's life in flashback form. When it appeared at Pitlochry in 2024, it attracted such a strong positive response that it has now been revived, with a new cast, for another short studio run. Sign up to our FREE Arts & Culture newsletter at So this year, actors Susan Coyle and Adam Buksh lead us through Nan's story, settling briefly in 1981, the year of her death, before leading us through some key turning points in her life, including her early success as part of a radical literary generation that also included Neil Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad In a sense, the sheer popularity and emotional power of Baron and Zeegen's play is difficult to analyse; the play sometimes seems almost more like a lecture than a piece of drama, as – in fairly traditional style – it packs in a tremendous amount of information about this remarkable woman, and the age of war and cultural radicalism through which she lived. Yet there's something about the play's insistent loving care for a neglected part of Scotland's cultural history, and about the open, shining character of Nan herself, that makes this tale of her struggles and successes both deeply absorbing and profoundly touching, not least in its tender use of a now old-fashioned form of middle-class Scots. And in this new staging, both Coyle as Nan, and Buksh as all the men who cross her path, deliver the story with impressive skill and passion; with Coyle's Nan truly touching the heart, as a woman of sparkling wit and joy whose sense of humour endured to the last, and who now – in a final irony – finds herself immortalised on our banknotes in a 'Nordic princess' pose she adopted for a laugh, using a discarded strip of film, during what she intended as a much more serious photo-shoot. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Meme Girls Andy McGregor's latest Play, Pie And Pint mini-musical also involves a generation of young Scottish women struggling for creative expression; but in Meme Girls, the time is now, and the play features two teenage heroines growing up in the Clyde coast town of Largs. Jade is a doctor's daughter with a real gift for songwriting, while bestie Clare has had a much tougher life; and together, they begin to navigate the world of online media, performing Jade's songs, and trying to build up a following on YouTube. Their work fails to go viral, though; and after a wild night at a party leads to Clare achieving an instant online fame that has nothing to do with music, their creative and personal relationship begins to fall apart.
The Herald Scotland
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Review: Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed, Pitlochry Festival Theatre
⭐⭐⭐⭐ The quiet renaissance of Nan Shepherd has been a wonder over the last few years. Once neglected to the point of being erased from the twentieth century canon of Scottish letters, the belated publication of Aberdeenshire born Shepherd's masterpiece, The Living Mountain, a personal memoir of the great outdoors that had lain unread in a draw for thirty years, tapped into a readership who similarly felt the transcendent nature of being alive with the hills. These days, Shepherd is rightly held up as great a writer as her peers, and her image can be found on the back of a Scottish five-pound note. Richard Baron and Ellie Zeegen's studio-sized play rifles through Shepherd's back pages for this dramatic homage that attempts to get to the heart of Shepherd while acting as something of a primer to those perhaps unaware of her life and work. Read more: Flitting back and forth through assorted time zones between 1901 and 1981, Baron's recast revival of his production of his and Zeegen's script after premiering in 2024 opens with Nan the child being introduced to the wonders of nature by her father. This sets the tone for a skip through Nan's life as a schoolteacher, her unconventional amour with philosopher John Macmurray and her relationship with the literary scene of her day, her overdue rediscovery by an American journalist, and her final days in Woodend Hospital, Aberdeen. With Adam Buksh playing all the men in this co-production between Pitlochry Festival Theatre and the Borders based Firebrand Theatre Company, his assorted characters are but feeds for the play's leading lady. Nan is duly played by Susan Coyle with guts and gusto that embodies Nan's passion, freethinking libertine spirit and wilful individualism in the face of artistic neglect. The result over the play's seventy-five minutes is a love letter to Shepherd that can only help her work to be discovered in pastures new.
Scotsman
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Alan Cumming on the magic of Pitlochry Festival Theatre: 'I love the soup to nuts aspect of the place'
As Pitlochry Festival Theatre gears up for its summer season, the venue's new artistic director Alan Cumming tells Joyce McMillan what makes it so special 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... It's a beautiful late spring day on the banks of the River Tummel at Pitlochry; and inside the handsome complex of theatre buildings at Port Na Craig, just across the river from the town, the pace of work is intense, as the pressure builds towards the opening performances of this year's summer season. Down in the costume workshop, on the floor below the foyer, wardrobe manager Julie Carlin and her fellow stitchers are creating Teen Angel costumes for this year's in-house production of the musical Grease, and chatting and laughing as a work. 'We're always in a good mood when we're working on Grease,' says Julie, 'because the costumes are such fun. The Great Gatsby - well that's a bit more intense!' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Alan Cumming is artistic director of Pitlochry Festival Theatre | Jane Barlow/PA Wire In the huge carpentry workshop opposite the stage scene dock, meanwhile, a team of three remarkably happy men are singing as they wheel parts of the Grease set out into the sunshine, after some test runs this week, and push them across the yard for some finishing touches. They point out bits and pieces of the set for much-loved 1930s adventure The 39 Steps, while senior carpenter Colin Stephen tells me how much they all enjoy the work, and how satisfying it is to create sets that can cope with the unique challenges of Pitlochry's famous repertory season, which often involves staging performances of four or five different main stage shows in single week - to say nothing, these days, of additional productions in Pitlochry's fine new Studio Theatre, opened in 2022. Up in the big rehearsal room beyond the forest, meanwhile, the cast of Grease - part of this year's 21 strong acting ensemble - are hard at work, rehearsing a show that has been co-produced with the Grand Theatre, Blackpool, but cast and created here at Pitlochry, with some powerful young Scottish talent in this year's ensemble. Grease will open in Blackpool on 4 June, before returning to Pitlochry to become the first main stage show of the season, and will feature familiar Pitlochry faces Blythe Jandoo and Fiona Wood as the heroine Sandy and rebel girl Rizzo, with David Rankine as Doody, and new graduate Eden Barrie - who grew up in Pitlochry - as Marty. Rehearsals for Grease at Pitlochry Festival Theatre | Contributed All four agree that Pitlochry's move, in recent years, towards creating new in-house productions of popular musicals is providing unprecedented opportunities for young Scottish actors to develop the quadruple-threat professional skills in acting, singing, dancing, and also playing musical instruments, that are involved in the instrument-in-hand style of musical presentation partly pioneered by the theatre's former artistic director Elizabeth Newman, with Grease's musical director Richard Reeday. Newman left for Sheffield Theatres at the end of 2024 after a transformative six years at Pitlochry, during which she fully reconnected the theatre with a Scottish theatre scene from which it had, at some points in its history, become strangely distant. And in the theatre's lovely cafe bar overlooking the river sits the man at the centre of this action-packed moment of transition in the history of the Festival Theatre; at the centre not because he created this summer season - it was programmed by Newman before her departure - but because the future of all that has been achieved here, in the theatre's 74-year history, now depends on the decisions that stage and screen star Alan Cumming will make over the next few years, following his surprise appointment as artistic director last autumn. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'It was Elizabeth Newman who first put the idea into my mind, of course,' says Cumming with a laugh, 'masterminding the whole thing. I met her somewhere a couple of years ago, and when I told her that I had never been to the theatre in Pitlochry, even though I grew up in the area, she invited me to visit, and of course I was just blown away by what goes on here. Rehearsals for Grease at Pitlochry Festival Theatre | Contributed 'Right away, I just loved the soup to nuts aspect of the place, the fact that on this site, they create the whole of this season plus a Christmas show from scratch - sets, costumes, musical presentation, the lot. Elizabeth asked me then if I had ever thought of running a theatre building, and I said no, no, no, of course I couldn't possibly do that. 'But the idea was planted; and when I heard that she was leaving - well I was inspired by the theatre's recent slogan 'Bringing the world to Pitlochry, and Pitlochry to the world.' I thought, wait a minute, I really could help the theatre to do that. So I decided to go for it; and here I am. 'I'm also really passionate about all the great stories Scotland has to tell, and about making sure audiences have access to them - whether it's historic writers like Robert Louis Stevenson, or taking a second look at some of the great plays that have been written in Scotland in recent decades, and often only had very short first runs. I won't be announcing my 2026 programme until September or thereabouts; but I hope to find ways of celebrating some of those great stories, and I'm really looking forward to being deeply involved in it all.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad At the moment, it's impossible to say whether the arrival of the Alan Cumming era will mean profound changes to Pitlochry's time-honoured summer repertory system, and the big acting ensemble that traditionally delivers it. For now, though, he is clearly in listening mode; and noting the vital role Pitlochry has come to play in the last decade, as what is now, by some measures, Scotland's busiest producing house, despite relatively modest support from public funds. 'I've also been really inspired by the story of the theatre's founder, John Stewart,' says Cumming, 'and of how during the Second World War, he left himself a little written message, in a tree by the river, vowing that if and when peace came, he would found a theatre here. 'And in 1945, he came back, found the message still there, and started the process that led to the opening of the original theatre in a tent, in 1951. So I hope that we can mark that in some really special ways, as we celebrate the 75th anniversary next year. 'For me, at the age I am now, this also feels like a homecoming,' adds Cumming, who turned 60 in January. 'Above all, I want to make sure that young people coming into theatre in Scotland now have the same wonderful support and opportunities I had, when I started out 40 years ago; and if I can help achieve that, during my time here, I'll feel that I'm coming full circle and giving something back, in a way that really matters to me.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad
Scotsman
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Theatre reviews: Water Colour
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... Water Colour, Pitlochry Festival Theatre ★★★★ Goodbye Dreamland Bowlarama, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★ It's no news, to anyone paying attention, that young people in the 2020s have it tough, with many struggling to imagine any future at all, in a world so royally messed up by previous generations. So it's perhaps not surprising that the mental distress of young people is becoming an ever more present theme in theatre; and nowhere more so than in Molly Sweeney's debut play Water Colour, winner of this year's St Andrews Playwriting Award. Directed with skill and feeling by Sally Reid, the play premiered in Pitlochry's studio theatre last week; and there was no mistaking the strength of the audience response to Sweeney's story of two young people in contemporary Glasgow whose paths cross at a moment of crisis, with huge consequences for both of their lives. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Molly Geddes (Esme) and Ryan J Mackay (Harris) in Water Colour Esme, beautifully played by Molly Geddes, is a postgraduate student at Glasgow School of Art, about to fail her masters course because she has sunk into a profound depression. Esme is gay, has felt desperately socially isolated ever since her schooldays; and when her tutor damns her belated final art work submission, she finds herself on a bridge over the Clyde, preparing to end it all. Harris, meanwhile, is a chirpy lad of the same age, who has ambitions to become a chef, and is feeling upbeat because he has just landed a new job washing dishes in a cordon bleu restaurant. So when Harris spots Esme apparently preparing to jump, he acts decisively to stop her, reassuring her that things will and must get better. The play's subject, over a powerful and often moving 80 minutes, is the impact of that decisive moment on both Esme and Harris, as she begins to piece her life back together, and he – by contrast – finds that the incident unleashes inner demons that he has been suppressing for years. The criss-cross structure of these intertwined monologues is beautifully handled by both actors, with Ryan J Mackay as Harris stepping up to play Esme's mother and counsellor, among other characters. And both round out their own characters with memorable pathos and intensity; in a play that comes across as a vital dispatch from the front line of the mental health crisis among young people, delivered with real passion, and a memorable strand of pure poetry. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Taylor Dyson and Ewan Somers in Goodbye Dreamland Bowlarama The central character in new Play, Pie and Pint play-with-songs Goodbye Dreamland Bowlarama, by Taylor Dyson and Calum Kelly, is also a young woman of 20 or so suffering severe mental distress; although in Charlie's case, she hides her grief and depression – following the deaths of her much-loved parents and grandparents – behind an increasingly frenzied display of upbeat optimism, and of improbable passion for her dead-end job as an assistant at the Dreamland Bowlarama, Inverness. It's a bloody incident at the Bowlarama, though, that finally bursts Charlie's delusional bubble, and sends her into a fugue state. She leaves behind her long-suffering brother Ross and his wife and baby, and flees towards Dundee, a city she has always wildly idealised as the home town of her beloved grandad, whose long lost twin brother she decides to track down. Her quest is a crazy fever-dream of a journey, full of wild gothic incident, comedy, rejection, and another bridge incident. And in Beth Morton's light-touch production, Ewan Somers as Ross and other hilarious and surreal characters, and Taylor Dyson herself as Charlie, make fine work of this unconvincing but vividly entertaining tale, which first shows us a young woman completely dislocated from reality, and then – in time honoured musical comedy style – suggests that she can be healed almost overnight by a crisis survived, a forgettable song, and a little soft-shoe dance.
