Friday, December 5

Tag: Chris Coxon

A Toast Fae the Lassies – Pitlochry Festival Theatre
Scotland

A Toast Fae the Lassies – Pitlochry Festival Theatre

A widow, a mother, and a mistress walk into a bar—sorry, graveyard—to mourn the loss of the recently deceased Robert Burns. On seeing the other women there, the group soon end up reminiscing and sparring with each other over their relationships to the late poet and his proclivities. Generously peppered with well-known Burns’ songs, A Toast Fae The Lassies both celebrates Burns as a poet while reprimanding his behaviour as a man through the eyes of the women in his life. The songs are, of course, the highlight of this play, with musical direction and arrangement by Alyson Orr, who also plays Agnes Broun, Burns’ mother. Orr brings spirit to the stage with her charming arrangements, performed beautifully by herself and the rest of the cast. Chris Coxon accompanies the singing on the guitar...
The 39 Steps – Pitlochry Festival Theatre
Scotland

The 39 Steps – Pitlochry Festival Theatre

Based on Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 film, Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s revival of The 39 Steps features femme fatales, a runaway convict, police chases, and a healthy number of sheep.  The film and the play both share an almost identical narrative structure and much of the dialogue has been lifted straight out of the film and into the play - however they couldn’t feel more different to each other.  The play is a spoof of the classic film, and while it still maintains the dry, sarcastic humour of the film, it relies heavily on slapstick comedy.  I was especially pleased to see the iconic train scream being absolutely nailed because nothing is more camp than that.  With only four actors, but about 150 characters, it was a marvel to watch the cast rapidly battling with jac...
The Comedy of Errors – Speke Hall
North West

The Comedy of Errors – Speke Hall

A Shakespearean comedy set around two rival states and two sets of mismatched twins is brought to life in this bright adaptation from Steve Purcell, who also directs, with its central theme of mistaken identity the perfect vehicle for Mark Hayward’s production to explore a number of popular theatre forms in this consistently funny farce that piles error upon error at an increasingly frantic pace. If the challenge of the doubling up of not one but two sets of twins whilst keeping the audience on-board as the only ones who know what is happening on stage wasn’t enough, throw in an open-air venue, forecasted bad weather, and plane disruption from the adjacent airport, and I had everything crossed for the much-reduced cast of four playing all of the roles. I needn’t have worried as with ...
Bleak House: A Radio Play – The Pantaloons Go Online
REVIEWS

Bleak House: A Radio Play – The Pantaloons Go Online

Charles Dickens first penned the satirical Bleak House as a 20-episode serial following which it was published as a novel in 1853. With its array of characters connected through the tale of a family waiting in vain to inherit money from a disputed fortune in the settlement of a lawsuit that has gone on for so long that no one knows what it’s about anymore, and despite criticism from the legal profession, it was eventually to influence judicial review and reform in the 1870s. Considered by many to be Dickens greatest work and the forerunner of the detective novel, given the abuse of power evident in recent times – PPE anyone? – who better than the critically acclaimed The Pantaloons to resurrect this indictment of the self-serving public life enshrined in Parliament, provincial aristocra...