Tag Archives: Pitlochry festival theatre

LIVE THEATRE – IN THE HILLS

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Pitlochry theatre in the hills

Yesterday saw my return to the auditorium in Pitlochry for sparkling performances of this season’s musical, SUNSHINE ON LEITH, and the incomparable Michael Frayn’s, NOISES OFF.

I’m sure I’m not the only Scot who hasn’t seen Sunshine on Leith, but judging by the enthusiastic singing in the aisles that rounded off the afternoon performance to a packed house, I may be one of few, very few. Stephen Greenhorn’s musical and the songs of The Proclaimers have stood the test of time and, indeed, some topical jokes/references have been included.

Noises Off has also stood the test of time and the cast performed some amazingly complicated physical theatre with aplomb. Everyone who should have tripped over, did, but no one dropped the whisky. I particularly enjoyed Marc Small’s ever-more frantic pacing around the auditorium as the director, Lloyd, and Marc’s pole dancing skills, demonstrated just as the curtain came down, were astonishing.

The range of skills displayed by casts at Pitlochry is wide and varied. Singing, dancing, playing an instrument, acrobatics… And, of course, acting.

The Season at Pitlochry is now in full swing. If I’m reading the diary correctly, two plays remain to open and there are a number of one off or special evenings to come.

The refurbishment is well underway but, in the absence of the restaurant, we ate in Bridge of Tilt at The Loft. Excellen lamb for him and equally good chicken for me. Restaurants in Pitlochry were heavily booked and I met at least one friend who’d eaten Fish ‘n’ Chips in the car park. Book early, folks.

The Season runs until early October. Live Theatre needs you, the audience. Hope to see you there.

City of Discoveries, my Anniversary serial for The People’s Friend, the world’s longest running women’s magazine, can be read here.

Anne

Summer Season Treats – Pitlochry Festival Theatre

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All you need to know...

All you need to know…

Leaving Edinburgh for an overnight stay in Pitlochry is always an activity full of excitement and joyful anticipation. The stationary traffic around Perth’s huge roundabouts throws a dash of cold water over that. We got through eventually and arrived at our B&B, the delightful Derrybeg – hosts Ryan and Bea – in time to change.

First up this time was dinner in the wonderful theatre restaurant. I love it. The food is imaginative, well cooked and nicely presented, but the real attraction is the fantastic outlook over the Tummel and the canopy where you can watch the gulls wheeling in and out. Not quite the toucans of Costa Rica, but possibly more skilled aeronautics.

TRAVESTIES by Tom Stoppard, directed by Richard Baron

Mark Elstob could also be seen from the restaurant going over some of his lines. No wonder as the play is hugely demanding of its main character, Henry Carr. I thought Elstob captured the aged Carr reminiscing and the man in his prime seduced by performance beautifully. It helps audience understanding to have some familiarity with The Importance of Being Earnest which Stoppard used as the framework, but the play exists in its own merit, too.

CHICAGO by Fred Ebb, Bob Fosse and John Kander, directed by Richard Baron

Who doesn’t think they know everything they need to know about Chicago, Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly? There might be opportunity for you to reconsider. Baron’s fast-paced production, with the musicians on-stage throughout, is a searing indictment of how sensationalism skews justice, perception and truth. The theatre was sold out for the matinée and sitting with my book in the shade, I saw coaches leave for Dundee, Laurencekirk & Forfar.

QUALITY STREET by JM BARRIE, directed by Liz Carruthers

Anything by JM Barrie is close to my heart and Quality Street in particular as it’s the last play I ever appeared in. Following our wonderful production of Arms and the Man by Shaw, we in 6th year at West Calder High School were very keen to repeat the triumph. However, the poor head of English, the late Doctor Lillian MacQueen, was a lot less keen. Eventually, she agreed to a curtain raiser of the first scene of Quality Street. I played Miss Susan. I have no idea who else was in the cast, so if you know please leave a comment.

Pitlochry did not disappoint and it was the perfect farewell after the hectic Travesties and Chicago. The clever round set was a delight and the ladies used it well, entering and leaving with just the right amount of fluttering. As always, Barrie’s understanding of the vicissitudes of life as a woman are laid bare, but with humour and a wry glance at what might have been. His mastery does not pall.

All runs continue and you can buy your tickets here

SCROOGE! – The Musical Pitlochry Festival Theatre

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SCROOGE! the musical – Book, Music and Lyrics by Leslie Bricusse  running at Pitlochry Festival Theatre until Friday 23rd is a dramatic delight.

A large cast is headed by Philip Rham and supported by an onstage live band. The band are almost hidden by the set’s chimney pot skyline, but the music is great.

Three sets of youngsters take the juvenile roles and we saw The Red Team who were excellent. But I’m confident the two other teams are good, too. If I might be permitted a minor quibble I found the casts’s voices a little over-miked. Really minor though.

Scrooge is of course based on Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, 1843. The programme notes tell us the original was a commentary on Britain’s infamous Poor Laws with their introduction of Treadmills in the Poor Houses. The piece is as much needed today as it ever was.

PITLOCHRY FESTIVAL THEATRE

GAME PLAN by ALAN AYCKBOURN

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Theatre Al Fresco

Theatre Al Fresco

 

Game Plan by Alan Ayckbourn at Pitlochry Festival Theatre was an absolute delight. Directed by Richard Baron and starring three female actors, the play explores that most volatile of human relationships between a mother and her teenage daughter.

Lynette and Sorrel Saxon – Amanda Osborne and Kirsty Mackay – find themselves abandoned (for another woman) and penniless ( internet business is like that). Lynette works as an office cleaner and Sorrel is faced with having to commute into her prestigious London school. While Lynette is securing interviews and calling in favours with various degrees of success, Sorrel goes off to talk to the ‘BAD Girl’ who was expelled from her school for soliciting. She also leans on her dotty friend, Kelly – Gemma McElhinney – to help.

Let the farce begin.

Delicious one liners, slow burning jokes (what is that sink plunger doing there?), excellent costume choices and a superb ending ensure the whole play captures and enthrals from the get-go.

Run continues. Tickets here

Starter’s Orders Pitlochry Festival Theatre

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Pitlochry theatre in the hills

Pitlochry theatre in the hills

Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s 2016 season opened for us with the towering production of CAROUSEL. Musicals often have a dark underbelly camouflaged by sparkling songs, energetic dances and a sharp book. CAROUSEL scores on all levels.

Ferenc Molnar was Hungarian and he wrote the original play, Liliom. According to the programme notes he had already turned down approaches from Puccini and Kurt Weill before agreeing to let Rodgers and Hammerstein have the right to adapt and set it in America.

The Pitlochry production opens with a dance routine and the setting up of the carousel where Billy Bigelow is the barker. Apparently having a young and attractive male barker was the key to running a successful carousel as it drew in the girls. Of course being young and attractive can go to a guy’s head and it’s not long before the conflicted Billy is breaking hearts and breaking his own ties with a job and his self-esteem.

George Arvidson delivers a memorable performance as Billy shining as both actor and singer. He’s from Denver and has already been heard as Count Almaviva in the Marriage of Figaro. He’s well supported by the ensemble cast.

The techies and stage designers have had a great time with this production and bring some wonderfully humorous touches to it just when the audience might be feeling the emotional strain of the domestic violence theme. I won’t spoil that because you’ll want to be surprised in your turn.

Our performance was a sell-out.

Run in repertory with matinées at 2pm and evening performances at 8pm until Saturday 15th October 2016.

tickets here Pitlochry Festival Theatre

Anne Stenhouse’s historical romance is here

Home and Beauty Somerset Maugham

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Home and Beauty by Somerset Maugham is one of this year’s line-up at Pitlochry Festival Theatre.

Directed by Richard Baron the play takes on accepted social norms of 1919 and trashes them conclusively.

Victoria, played with wonderful energy and total self-belief, by Isla Carter is a monster. She manages to equate marrying two DSOs with war-work and Maugham spares us nothing in her hedonistic outlook on life which sees her hogging the coal to have a fire in her bedroom while the rest of the house freezes.

Mayhem ensues from the moment her dead first husband, Major Cardew returns and in a scene of unalloyed farce, takes a wee while to learn that his wife has married his best friend in his absence. Major Lowndes then makes sterling, but ultimately futile, efforts to leave his wife to her first husband.

The play is a delight of exploding social norms, human frailties and that age-old maxim – Be careful what you ask for, lest you achieve it.

The audience need only remember what’s predictable in today’s climate of hapless males being taken to the cleaners by the women in their lives, was by no means expected in 1919. Mark Elstob gave a joyful performance of the divorce lawyer, AB Raham, trashing any regard for the law a lawyer might be expected to hold. In this character, Maugham shows remarkable prescience. Indeed taken as a whole, the celebrity culture of today is laid out by him.

 

Pitlochry Summer Season in the hills

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The brochure for the Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s 2015 summer season has been tantalisingly present in the in-tray for several weeks.

Lots of favourites like an Ayckbourne, a Wilde, A Maugham, a Bennett, A Greig and opening with the truly wonderful A little Night Music by Sondheim.

Here’s a link: Pitlochry 2015 See whether you can make a choice. If not see you at them all.

Don’t forget to build in time to walk round the Plant Explorer’s Garden. Accessed from the theatre car park, it’s a fascinating haven just off the A9.

PASSING PLACES by STEPHEN GREENHORN

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Passing Places by Stephen Greenhorn, has always been on at the wrong time or in the wrong place for me so I was really glad to be able to catch it last Saturday evening at Pitlochry.

It did not disappoint. Richard Baron’s fast moving direction made excellent use of the unusual set by Adrian Rees.

The programme note by Baron refers to the different aspects of Scotland the play tackles such as “geography, its industry, history, and ethnicity,” One thing, however, I found in the play was an underlying hymn to the break-up of family and the reconstituting of ‘family’ for those abandoned or ejected.

Alex seems to have no Dad. Brian had a mum, who destroyed his life-changing project, but she dies, Mirren has a dad and no mum either. Mirren’s dad has no wife and now his daughter can’t bear to live with him. The villain, Binks, has a mum he clearly adores in the sentimental way that gangsters are often portrayed as doing. How did they get so far off the rails, then?

There’s no sense that Greenhorn is advocating the ubiquitous ‘family values’ beloved of desperate politicians, but there is a strong sense of how people fit in. It’s a poignant moment when Diesel tells Mirren she’s not right for his commune.

Coming of age was never more beautifully depicted – oh, and that’s an important word in this script.

Dates until Friday 17th October 2014. Treat yourself, and the family, whoever they are.

Mr. Bolfry by James Bridie: Pitlochry Festival Theatre

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Mr. Bolfry by James Bridie is in the 2014 season at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre. It’s directed by Patrick Sandford.

It’s really hard in this age of anything goes behaviour to remember what it was like to be discreet on a Sunday, to avoid offending the ‘man of the house’ or of ‘the cloth’ and to listen while an elder told you his philosophy of life. Plays that use exposition are definitely in the minority.

And yet…

In Mr. Bolfry, Bridie captures so much of what shapes our humanity and our relations with other humans. The Meenister is on his pedestal, but he’s had an inner demon to overcome and is all too ready to see Mr. Bolfry as a dream spectre and manifestation of his own disordered mind. Bridie was a doctor, remember.

Mrs. McCrimmon, beautifully rendered by Isabella Jarrett, is a character who has a position to uphold, but that position depends on the man she married. As sometimes happens, it becomes more important to her to keep the rhythms of her household unchanged and unchanging lest the Meenister be in any way unsettled.

The catalysts for bringing all the seething to the surface are two-fold. Jean. a wayward niece, is recuperating with her aunt and uncle after a bomb scare in London and the two engineers billeted on the manse are bored nearly to death by the Highland Sunday.

Summoning up devils seems like a really good lark until Bolfry, in the commanding presence of Dougal Lee, appears among them.

I loved the open stage set with its views of the endless mountains and the encapsulated closeness of the manse. I thought the second world war was brought to the stage with a light hand. I enjoyed the niece’s pointing up of the immeasurable gap between her and her relatives. I’m glad the theatre re-visited this piece.

 

Perfect Days: Pitlochry Festival Theatre

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Perfect Days by Liz Lochead and directed by Liz Carruthers is a play of its time: the biological clock as a topic of conversation was once very hot. In the Director’s cut for Perfect Days in the programme, Liz Carruthers confesses she was aware of it throughout her own thirties and had her first child aged forty-one. So one is not surprised by the wonderfully sympathetic tone of the production.

Perfect Days is also about obsession. What is it like to be obsessed by something to the extent that all pride and dignity are set aside by the compulsion to satisfy that obsession? And it’s about a lot of the other small things of life that make a complete personality. Mothers and daughters have their ups and downs, but there’s always time to resolve matters, isn’t there? When we are THE ONE helping with something, we deeply resent anyone else muscling in, don’t we?

And Perfect Days is about language. Sharp Glasgow patter updated to encompass the passage of time since the play made its first appearance.

Everyone adores Barbs, the celebrity hairdresser, and wants a share of her – their share. Her perfect cleaner (Mum), her perfect ex, Davie, her perfect friend, Alice, employee, Brendan and lover, Grant. Barbs wants a baby. She doesn’t want to go on living her perfect life as it’s seen by these others, without that tiny person.

One of the most powerful scenes in the play is Barbs’ attempt to make her mother understand the depth of her longing for the unknown baby. Why won’t her mother agree that single mums can do a good job – didn’t she?

It’s a gleeful celebration of modern urban life and the new family realities. A strong cast, wonderful set and sympathetic direction made the whole production an entertaining and thought-provoking afternoon. Truly worth catching, if you can.

Run, in rep, at  Pitlochry Festival Theatre till Thursday 16th October 2014 at 8pm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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