Latest news with #TronTheatre
Scotsman
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Johnny McKnight on his fabulous one-dame Edinburgh Fringe show She's Behind You
Christmas comes early as Johnny McKnight explores the history and cultural significance of the classic Scottish panto dame in his uproarious show at the Fringe. By David Pollock 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... 'I love panto in Scotland, because I think it's different to panto anywhere else,' says actor and writer Johnny McKnight, who's carved a successful career as one of Scotland's most outrageous and effective pantomime dames through his work at Glasgow's Tron Theatre and Stirling's Macrobert Arts Centre. 'Here an actor can be in Medea for the National Theatre, then a month later be on stage at the Macrobert as the Silly Billy, and there's no stigma attached. Panto is theatre for families, it's telling a story, it needs to be well-acted. Music hall's our Shakespeare, it's what our theatre's built on, so we take it seriously.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Johnny McKnight in She's Behind You | Contributed McKnight puts that seriousness to the test this Fringe with She's Behind You, a one-dame show played in character as his outrageous drag creation Dorothy Blawna-Gale. An hour of late-night comedy in the panto tradition, albeit taking the genre out of its traditional pre-Christmas environment, it's also a subversive storytelling dissection of the genre, McKnight's relationship with it and the very nature of theatre as an evolving mirror of the times. Make sure you keep up to date with Arts and Culture news from across Scotland by signing up to our free newsletter here. She's Behind You began life as the second of the Cameron Lectures at the University of Glasgow's Bute Hall in February 2024, with McKnight following in the footsteps of inaugural speaker Alan Cumming. These lectures were founded by John Tiffany, director of apex Fringe hit Black Watch and the West End's Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, in honour of his late former lecturer Alasdair Cameron, under whom Tiffany studied Theatre and Classics at the University in the early 1990s. 'Johnny let loose on a merry festival audience at the Traverse is going to be something to behold,' says Tiffany, who also directs She's Behind You (like Black Watch, it's produced with the National Theatre of Scotland). 'The whole point about these lectures is that they're not really lectures, they're performance art. I knew Johnny's would be hilarious, but it was also raw, honest, heartbreaking and incredibly life-affirming. He managed to articulate the bare bones of what pantomime is, that it's political, it's subversive, it's anarchic and it can be a real force for good.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad From detailing his biggest influences in pantomime, including Johnny Beattie, Janette 'Jimmy Krankie' Tough and Elaine C Smith, that lecture became about so much more than just a history of pantomime. 'I was thinking about the difference in what panto looks like in the 20 years I've been doing it, in terms of gender makeup, cultural appropriation, in terms of how the world's changed and moved forward, or in some places hasn't,' says McKnight. 'When I first started we were still doing Aladdin dressed up like we were Chinese people, and that's not entirely banished. It was 90% men onstage, with one woman who never got a punchline, she was just there to look pretty for the dads. Yet there's always a new generation that fights against that and does even more unexpected, brilliant, push-it-forward stuff. It keeps changing, that's why panto's survived so long.' As well as digging into the medium, She's Behind You is McKnight's personal journey. 'It's about what I've discovered about being a man by being a panto dame, and what I'm still trying to figure out about the world through doing it,' he says. 'I'd only just come out when I started being a dame, so there's me in a dress talking about being a mother, and actually I was still trying to find myself sexually.' The lecture went down a storm. Once word got round, McKnight was invited to give a repeat performance at Glasgow's Pavilion Theatre earlier this year. 'I'd never stood on the Pavilion stage before, that was a dream come true,' he says. 'I just wanted to know what it was like, because when you're talking about panto there's so much that's connected to the Pavilion. 'Janette Krankie Beanstalk Horror', I've a poster of that headline from the Daily Record in my office looking down at me while I work.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Everyone who was at the Pavilion that Sunday afternoon raved about it, and now She's Behind You has arrived in Edinburgh, where the fast-talking, Scots-accented McKnight promises to 'pronounce those Ts and Ds' for an international audience, but absolutely not water down the comedy or dumb down the message. Who knows where it will go after this? 'I came off stage at the Pavilion and felt I was ready to die in an aircraft accident, it was like a retirement party or a farewell tour,' laughs McKnight. 'But it turns out it's Cher's farewell tour and it lasts about 20 years.'
Daily Record
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Road closures to know as Merchant City festival celebrates 850 years of Glasgow
Glasgow's Merchant City Festival is set to take over the city centre this weekend, as more than two dozen events bring a vibrant mix of music, art, dance and circus to the streets. Running from today, Friday 18 July to Sunday 20 July, the festival is part of Glasgow's ongoing 850th anniversary celebrations and will feature live performances, street theatre, market stalls and family activities across the Merchant City. Several roads will be closed to traffic throughout the weekend to accommodate the festivities, Glasgow Live reports. The event kicks off at midday on Friday with live music and storytelling at the Social Hub stage on Trongate, followed by ceilidh dancing lessons and a mass outdoor ceilidh on Brunswick Street from 4.45pm to 5.30pm. Folk acts and traditional sessions will continue on the Social Hub stage until 8pm, with additional performances taking place in the atmospheric Ramshorn Graveyard. To support the event, a number of road closures are in place from 6am on Friday to 11.59pm on Sunday. Affected streets include Brunswick Street, Bell Street (between Candleriggs and Walls Street), Candleriggs, Garth Street (with local access for resident parking), Wilson Street (between Glassford Street and Candleriggs) and Hutcheson Street. One of Friday's standout events is the return of the Hip Replacement Disco, which will be held at The Old Fruitmarket from 7pm until midnight. The Tron Theatre will also host the St. Teneu Poetry Competition Awards from 7.30pm. On Saturday and Sunday, the popular Surge Festival Street Theatre programme takes centre stage, with quirky and interactive performances popping up across the area. Highlights include 'Charlotte Brontë: Senseless Trash', which reimagines the author as a modern pop culture icon backed by Beyoncé hits; 'Baby Gareth and the Norbert Nannies', starring a towering giant baby; and 'Alien Aquatic', a roaming act that asks what would happen if ocean plastic came to life. Free live music returns to the Social Hub stage on both weekend days, featuring artists such as Sacred Paws, Lezzer Quest, and a joint performance by Vixen Sound, Wends and Dougie No Pain. Families can enjoy a variety of free children's activities, including arts and crafts sessions, a unicorn dance party and a family ceilidh. Meanwhile, shoppers can browse 29 market stalls scattered across the district, open from midday to 6pm on Saturday and Sunday, offering everything from handmade jewellery to street food and art. The Dockyard Social will also be on site throughout the festival providing a wide selection of food and drink. Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. Guided walking tours will provide a deeper look into the city's history, including 'The Listener', which explores Merchant City's links to the Transatlantic slave trade. Other tours include 'Glasgow Through the Ages' and the 'East End Women's Heritage Walk'.
.jpeg%3Fwidth%3D1200%26auto%3Dwebp%26quality%3D75%26trim%3D0%2C2%2C0%2C0%26crop%3D&w=3840&q=100)
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.
Glasgow Times
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Glasgow Times
I saw a one-man play starring River City actor
Life has happened to him in unexpected and cruel ways, and Man's Best Friend, which opened last night at Glasgow's Tron Theatre, is the comical, moving, powerful story of it all. Jordan Young expertly shimmies out of the sharp suits and gangster family he's better known for on River City, to become Ronnie in a masterful performance that expertly captures the highs and deep, deep lows of this ordinary, and not so ordinary, life lived. (Image: MIHAELA BODLOVIC) It's just Jordan on stage for about an hour and a quarter, but Douglas Maxwell's writing is so deft in its ability to have you gulping with laughter one moment and breaking your heart the next, that those 75 minutes whip by, leaving you feeling as out of breath as a dog that's been chasing its own tail in circles. (Image: MIHAELA BODLOVIC) Jordan is brilliant, not just in his portrayal of a man trying desperately to navigate loneliness and loss, but in the way he brings to life the other characters who flit through his story: the dog-owners, like the helpless new parents, the prim and proper old lady, the two Roberts; his fellow dog-walkers, insufferable Jenna and bullish Rosco; and the dogs, of course, including Fury-formerly-Marmalade, wild puppy Rex, the inexplicably-named Coriander and lovely Albert, who might just be as lost as his owner. He has the audience holding its breath at some points, and in uproar at others. The vision of a poo-smeared, panicking Ronnie wrangling dogs as chaos threatens to engulf him on all sides, is not one any of us will easily forget. Man's Best Friend is a fantastic piece of theatre, with a beautifully simple set enhanced by sweet illustrations from Glasgow author and artist Ross Collins, and a stellar performance by Jordan Young. You don't have to be a dog-lover to love it but if you are, brace yourself for the last 10 minutes ... Man's Best Friend is at the Tron until July 12.
Glasgow Times
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Glasgow Times
River City gangster on his 'polar opposite' role in Glasgow
Jordan Young, the actor who plays both, agrees. 'That's the absolute beauty of being an actor - you hope you will be able to play a huge variety of roles with as much colour and character as you can,' he says, with a grin. 'And with these two, I've been very lucky, as they are polar opposites.' Jordan Young outside the Tron Theatre (Image: Colin Mearns/Newsquest) Jordan is about to take to the stage at the Tron Theatre as the aforementioned Ronnie in Douglas Maxwell's Man's Best Friend, a one-man play about love and loneliness. 'It struck a chord with me immediately,' nods Jordan. 'It's a huge challenge, of course, just me on the stage for an hour and a half.' He pauses. 'The fear of it …' he says, paling slightly. 'It's relentless. There's no time to breathe, or pause while the other actors do their bit, because it's just me. 'It's my job to bring out the story. If you're a runner, you prepare for a 5k, then a 10k, a marathon, then an ultramarathon … this is definitely an ultramarathon.' (Image: Colin Mearns/Newsquest) Writer Douglas Maxwell, who staged his first play at the Tron Theatre 25 years ago, says a one-person show is 'an intimate thing.' He adds: 'It can create a powerful theatrical connection between a skilled storyteller and an audience, built in empathy, imagination and shared experience, which in the end becomes something much bigger. 'That's also what Man's Best Friend is about. Our need to connect with the world, to be of use, to be bigger. And dogs. It's also about dogs.' 'I genuinely love dogs,' says Jordan, enthusiastically. 'My mum was a dog trainer and she used to show dogs. My entire life has been spent with dogs – sometimes we had about 10 in the house at the one time 'So this is the perfect part for me.' Ronnie is 'very complex', says Jordan, adding: 'I mean. there isn't a human being alive who isn't complex, but I feel like there is an awful lot going on in Ronnie's life. And he's not in charge of any of it. 'Life happens TO him, he's not proactive. It's a comedy, but a dark one, full of pathos, with a lot of heart.' Jordan grew up in Fife, where he was 'never one of those really young kids who went to acting classes', he says. 'I just liked making people laugh,' he explains. 'There was probably always a bit of a performer in there. 'I lost my dad at 14, and while I didn't know it at the time, I think maybe I found drama cathartic, a way of coping with an incredibly difficult time in my life.' He pauses. 'It's only looking back that I can work that out now. 'And it just grew from there. I went to drama college, and 30 years later, here I am.' Jordan as Alex Murdoch with Dawn Steele in River City (Image: BBC) Jordan is a popular and respected stage and screen actor who has appeared in everything from Shetland and Still Game to Rebus and Scot Squad. It is as notorious villain Alex Murdoch in River City, however, that he is probably best known. The news that River City will end next year was a 'bolt out of the blue', he admits. 'It will definitely be a seismic change in my life, but it was never a job for life – there aren't many of those any more, and especially not in this industry," he says. 'When I was leaving drama college, if you'd said I'd have a job that would last 12 years, I would not have believed it.' He will miss Alex, he acknowledges with a laugh. (Image: Colin Mearns/Newsquest) 'Yes, talk about complex characters ...' he says, smiling. 'Alex just never seems to be able to do the right thing. 'He's been a joy to play though, and I've had the chance to work with some amazing folk. It is sad, of course, because River City is a huge part of the Scottish industry's eco-system.' He pauses. 'But you have to look at the positives, always, and this is a reset for me,' he adds. 'It's an opportunity to get back out there, to see what else there is.' Originally staged at Òran Mór as part of A Play, A Pie and a Pint, this longer and fully-staged version of Man's Best Friend, directed by Jemima Levick, will be at the Tron Theatre from June 19 until July 12.
