Oliver Giggins, Author at North West End UK

17Jan

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

Jekyll and Hyde – Royal Lyceum Theatre

This adaptation by Gary McNair of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, is keen to point to its source's Edinburgh roots, though mostly through the programme and the lead (and only) actor's Scottish accent. Unlike some recent productions of Great Expectations or Dracula however, it stops short of relocating the story to Scotland. But even the medium of a play represents a coming home of sorts: this story began with the true tale of furniture-maker and lock-breaker Deacon Brodie, about whom Louis Stevenson first co-wrote a play entitled Deacon Brodie, or The Double Life, though it was his later retooling of the idea of duality into the novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which would find lasting success. The story is well-known (spoilers) for its crucial dual role, which lead at...

No Spray No Lay – St Augustine United Church

20Nov

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

No Spray No Lay – St Augustine United Church

Bare Productions exists for its local and accessible approach to theatre, with its “Bare Academy” doing the same for dance, vocal and acting skills. It therefore only makes sense that No Spray No Lay is a musical. Written by new writers Kat Dobell and Lara Dunning, who were also creative directors on the project, the show takes place in the ladies bathroom of a night club in 2005. It was intended as an ode to the female experience, with the female toilets creating a micro-society, one notorious for the bonds it creates. And with alcohol known for the drama it can cause (not to mention excusing some first night flubs, such as two characters getting their own names wrong), this club toilet quickly becomes both the eye of the storm and sometimes the storm itself, a centre for all the drama of...

25Oct

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

Nae Expectations – Tron Theatre

As the title suggests, this is a version of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, relocated North of the English border. Young Pip (Gavin Jon Wright) is now a young Scottish lad encountering Scottish versions of Magwitch (Gerry Mulgrew), Miss Havisham (Karen Dunbar) and, unexpectedly, judgemental cows, on a journey from the Scottish countryside to Glasgow. It's a journey of great, and sometimes nae, expectations as he meets and helps an escaped convict and a twisted lady & young girl in a decrepit house, three people who will have far-reaching, and often sinister, consequences in his ongoing journey for personal betterment. Director Andy Arnold, for whom this is the 40th and final directing turn at the Tron called this story "a wonderful mix of dry and caustic wit combined with ...

Dracula: Mina’s Reckoning – Theatre Royal Glasgow

15Sep

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

Dracula: Mina’s Reckoning – Theatre Royal Glasgow

It seems to be, for no particular reason, a big year for Dracula. It isn't the anniversary of its first publication, of the author's birth, the author's death, or of any of its most famous adaptations - apologies, uberfans of The Satanic Rites of Dracula, happy 50th to you - and yet this year we have seen two cinematic depictions of Dracula (the Nicholases Hoult and Cage film Renfield and the adaptation of a single chapter of the original novel with The Last Voyage of the Demeter), with another remake of Nosferatu also being shot this year (and also starring Nicholas Hoult). And of course, latest but not leastest, there is Dracula: Mina's Reckoning, from the National Theatre of Scotland and Aberdeen Performing Arts, in association with Belgrade Theatre, Coventry. As its title clearly st...

Yippe Ki Yay – Gilded Balloon at the Museum

28Aug

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

Yippe Ki Yay – Gilded Balloon at the Museum

The phrase “Yippe Ki Yay” originated in the 19th-century Western United States, making its way into the 1988 film Die Hard entirely within the context of old Westerns: it closes a scene in which Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber accuses Bruce Willis's John McClane of having seen to many John Wayne films and the latter answers he always preferred Roy Rogers. Though the show adds the words “the Die Hard parody” in brackets at the end of its title just to be sure, I wouldn't imagine there is a soul on Earth that went into a show named Yippe Ki Yay looking for a musical about the Old West, such is the hold Die Hard now has over the phrase. It has since been said in every sequel (and a poster) without even an attempt at another cowboy reference, the franchise itself providing its context now. ...

The Last Show Before We Die – Summerhall Roundabout

23Aug

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

The Last Show Before We Die – Summerhall Roundabout

The Last Show Before We Die was created, written and performed by Mary Higgins and Ell Potter, or Ell and Mary as we know the versions of themselves they present on-stage. They are former lovers, and current (still) best friends, housemates and work partners, whose previous collaborations include FITTER and HOTTER. The latter was the last piece of live theatre this reviewer saw before the first lock-down of the pandemic, which was already making its mark when audience members were encouraged to jump up and dance at the end of the show, but to do it without moving around the theatre or coming into contact with anyone. The history the two performers share (with each other, not with Covid, or me) is central to this show, and obvious whether you know about their previous projects or not,...

What Goes On Without Me – the Space On the Mile 2

16Aug

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

What Goes On Without Me – the Space On the Mile 2

Nottingham New Theatre are an English student-run theatre producing over thirty shows a year, ranging from Elizabethan classics to contemporaries plays and original student-written pieces. Their Fringe show this year, What Goes On Without Me, is in the latter category and asks the question “what would you do if, after you died, you could have 10 extra minutes of life that had no impact on anything other than you?” That is the question facing Jude. She has woken up dead, in a waiting room located on the upper east side of the afterlife, and in the company of a slightly dotty omniscient being offering cups of tea, biscuits, some celebrity gossip and the above dilemma (with caveats). Interspersed with vox pops of interviewees trying to answer the same question, this is comedic yet s...

Creepy Boys – Summerhall Demonstration Room

15Aug

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

Creepy Boys – Summerhall Demonstration Room

Two self-identified Creepy Boys in the Shining tradition are throwing their 13th birthday party, with their reluctant babysitter Sharon on tech and an audience full of potential best friends. What follows is a mixture of games, make-belief, some low-level satanism and a surprising amount of 00s (I guess this show definitely earns the right to call them the naughties) nostalgia, mostly around pop songs and the first Spiderman film, all against the cheery backdrop of a seemingly disused Victorian surgery demonstration room decorated with some balloons. (ah, the Fringe, where if it can't be used as a performance space, you're just not trying hard enough. Or maybe you're just trying at all.) Company Scantily Glad Theatre and writer-performers Sam Kruger and S.E. Grummett made their Edinb...

17Jun

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

Into The Woods – Edinburgh College

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Into the Woods musical intertwines the plots of several Brothers Grimm fairy tales, using the beginning of Rapunzel, in which the theft of some plants from a witch's garden by a desperate man (Oliver Payn) forces him into a deal with the witch, as the main link. In the musical, the couple's son, a baker (Darren Walls) and his wife (Justyne Snyder) make their own deal with the witch (Maaike Hillen) in order to have a child, a deal which will lead him to interact with characters and events from "Little Red Riding Hood" (Missy Hingley, with Andrew Lodge as the Wolf / Lucinda and Bo Gourley as Granny / Narrator), “Cinderella” (Fiona Dawson, with Joe Gill as the Prince, Heather Richardson as the Stepmother, Shannon Scott as Florinda and Aric Hanscomb Ryr...

11Jun

By Oliver GigginsNo Comments

Scotland

Childminder – Traverse Theatre

Written by real-life child psychiatrist Iain McClure, the titular ChildMinder (or at least one of them) is Joseph (Cal MacAninch), a man with a secret. Several in fact, and not the kind that live harmoniously with a successful and public career as a child psychiatrist. But buried things often rot and fester, and these secrets have a habit of suddenly robbing even the most pleasant moment of its security as the ground gives out from under him, until the question becomes one of life or death... Or at least that's my byline for the show. The one on the Traverse website talks about "being haunted", "didn't realise", "a modern ghost story" and an "eerie psychological thriller" which, while not entirely inaccurate, really only reflects about twenty minutes in the last quarter of this 90-minut...