Published: February 21st, 2013
 Irene Macdougall, Emily Winter, Jessica Tomchak and Andy Clark in Time and the Conways at the Royal Lyceum Theatre. Photo © Tommy Ga-Ken Wan Royal Lyceum Theatre
18 Feb – Sat 9 March
Review by Thom Dibdin
Conflicts of class and family are tickled and teased with alluring attention to detail in Jemima Levick’s articulate production of Time and the Conways at the Royal Lyceum and transferring to Dundee Rep.
JB Priestley’s script provides a splendid reminder of what a well-crafted three act play looks like. If his An Inspector Calls has become his best known play in recent times, Levick’s direction justifies his own opinion that Time and the Conways was his finest.
First performed in 1937, when the world was on the brink of War even if it didn’t know it, the play depicts a well off family in a Northern English industrial town, then and now. … Continue reading Review – Time and the Conways
Published: December 4th, 2012
 Julie Heatherill as Cinderella and Martin McCormick as Prince Pierre in the Royal Lyceum’s production of Cinderella. Photo by Eamonn McGoldrick Royal Lyceum
Guest Review by Irene Brown
A child scattering her mother’s ashes with her bereaved father is an unusual, to say the least, opening to a Christmas show.
Yet this is exactly how playwright Johnny McKnight opens his novel and totally updated version of the classic fairy tale of Cinderella. He has taken the bones of the well-known story and dragged it in its fantoush footwear across the channel to not just contemporary Paris but also to a land even more foreign: that of reality TV.
The original tale, of Cendrillon, came from French writer Charles Perrault in the 17th century. So McKnight is just sending it home in a new set of 21st century clothes, wonderfully designed by Ken Harrison.
Cinderella (Julie Heatherill) and her widowed Papa (Grant O’Rourke) are living simply and contentedly in a Paris gently evoked by accordion, baguettes and … Continue reading Review – Cinderella
Published: May 16th, 2012 * * *
 The finale for In The Same Boat in Southern Light Opera's production of Curtains © Southern Light Opera Royal Lyceum Theatre
Review by Thom Dibdin
It is unclear whether the book for Curtains, Southern Light Opera’s latest offering which is at the Royal Lyceum all week, is brave or simply foolhardy. But it certainly leaves its performers with a mountain to climb.
Not content with killing off its leading lady within five minutes Curtains goes on to describe the body of the hardworking, faithful theatre critic in the most vicious terms imaginable.
All of which is fair play and nicely ironic comment, to be honest, from a writing team that includes Rupert Holmes, music by John Kander and lyrics by Red Ebb. Less easy to master is the musical within the musical: Robbin’ Hood, which is just coming to a calamitous ending on its opening night as the curtain of Curtains rises.
Playing “bad” with any real conviction is a notoriously difficult art to master. The problem is making clear where the effected discords, missed cues and poor staging stop, and … Continue reading Review – Curtains
Published: October 11th, 2010 * * * *
 Kirsty Mackay as Juliet and Will Featherstone as Romeo. Photo © Tim Morozzo The Royal Lyceum
By Thom Dibdin
Simple, clear and astonishingly vivid, Tony Cownie has taken Shakespeare’s most performed play and, with one brilliant little twist, created a fresh and timely production.
In many way’s Cownie’s direction is not groundbreaking. He extracts articulate, passionate and engaging performances from his cast. And he continues the Lyceum’s tradition of ensuring that Shakespeare’s lines are spoken in such a way as to make them obvious to a modern audience.
Ben Deery is pitch perfect as Benvolio, a steadying influence on his cousin Romeo and quick wit when Grant O’Rourke’s hilarious, utterly brilliant Mercutio starts mocking his pal about nightly visitations from the fairy Queen Mab.
Alexandra Mathie breaths real life into Nurse – equal to the lads’ vulgar jokes when running errands for Juliet, but not over bawdy in herself. She ensures the audience know that hot lust not pure romance is what lies at the base of Romeo and Juliet’s love. … Continue reading Theatre Review – Romeo and Juliet
Published: May 14th, 2010 * *
 Royal Lyceum Theatre
Review by Thom Dibdin
Gritty, earthy and full of the sort of language that ensures it is exclusive to those aged 14 and over, Des Dillon’s Blue Hen tumbles onto the Lyceum stage with a tin of Special Brew in hand and a couple of unopened Buckfast bottles stashed down its trousers.
Des Dillon’s wee Glasgow gadgies, John and Paddy, are brought to life with raw energy by Charles Lawson and Scott Kyle. Their banter is a brilliantly accurate as mourn the death of their pal, Peetsie Finnigan, from who’s wake they have just come, after his tragic suicide.
From before the off, Blue Hen sets itself up to be something special. The pre-curtain music is loud, raucous and sentimental in exactly the way a West Coast wake should be.
For a few fantastic scenes, Dillon sustains that energy. Lawson and Kyle are solid in their creation of two, clearly interdependent misfits. The language drives the production, crude and erudite by turns as the two wonder about what to do next and begin to obsess about turning the drying green of their tenement into a garden with tatties and a chicken coop. … Continue reading Theatre Review – Blue Hen
Published: April 19th, 2010 ***
 - Matthew Pidgeon & Maureen Beattie in The Cherry Orchard, Royal Lyceum Theatre. Photo Alan McCredie
Royal Lyceum Theatre
By Thom Dibdin
Uprooted from its original time and place, John Byrne’s new version of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard transplants the action to Scotland in 1979, on the eve of Thatcher’s first term in office.
It’s a move which leaves Chekhov’s orchard still growing, but transformed.
The trees cross the landscape in lines that are true – but it feels as if the political contours of the Seventies have been altered to fit the regimentation of the orchard, rather than the trees planted so as to fit the landscape.
There’s a lot more that is right about the play and production than there is wrong, however. Byrne succeeds in finding the comic power of Chekhov and although it is sometimes overplayed under Tony Cownie’s direction, it is the laugh-out-loud comedy in the play which makes the tragedy of it seem all the more heartfelt. … Continue reading Theatre Review – The Cherry Orchard
Published: March 22nd, 2010 * * * *
 Kyle McPhail, Jonathan Hackett, Kathryn Howden, Jenny Hulse & Tina Gray. Photo Tim Morozzo Royal Lyceum
By Thom Dibdin
Tough and emotional, Jo Clifford’s new play for the Royal Lyceum takes an unblinking look into the tragedy of a death in the family, in a production which breaks theatrical conventions and crosses social boundaries.
This is genuinely exciting stuff, which is a touch surprising for a subject so morbid and a staging that, at the outset, is so static. But it is that staging which allows director Mark Thomson to do Clifford’s words such justice.
There is no real break between the audience’s arrival and the start of the show. The house lights don’t dim and the only hint that a performance has actually started is when the ushers close the doors and take their places.
The scenery, such as it is, creates a room at the front of the stage, a box that is barely deep enough to accommodate the five performers who will, after a while, appear. It is walled with dirty, concave mirrored tiles.
Into this box which reflects, after a fashion, both them and the audience, walk the five family members to whom the tragedy will occur. They, in a series of dry, sometimes faltering, always completely natural monologues, reveal who they are and how they came upon the fateful day when…
Read the rest of this review in the Edinburgh Evening News here.
Run ends 10 April
Published: February 24th, 2010 * * * *
 Cara Kelly (Maureen), John Kazek (Pato) and Nora Connolly (Mag). Photograph: Alan McCredie Royal Lyceum Theatre
By Thom Dibdin
Hilarious, dark and utterly brutal, playwright Martin McDonagh’s prize-winning look at late 20th century life in rural Ireland is given a most beguiling outing at the Royal Lyceum, under Tony Cownie’s direction.
Here, on one level, are all the clichés of the genre. A lonely house in the back-end of beyond, the spinster Maureen wasting away her life looking after Mag, he curmudgeonly 70 year-old mother; the gentle tongue-tied labourer Pato, who hates his life on the building squads in England, and his feckless brother Ray.
And on this level – in Janet Bird’s mundane kitchen set – a strong and impressive four-strong cast create all the resonance’s of the time while teasing out McDonagh’s wordplay and the Father Ted-level comedy which broadens out the basis beyond mere cliché. … Continue reading Theatre Review – The Beauty Queen of Leenane
Published: January 19th, 2010 * * * * *
Royal Lyceum
Review by Thom Dibdin
Arthur Miller’s late-Sixties hit provides a thoroughly satisfying start to the Royal Lyceum’s year. It’s a piece which, in the right hands, has comedy and depth, as estranged brothers Victor and Walter pick over their dead father’s belongings with furniture dealer Solomon. … Continue reading Review – The Price
Published: October 21st, 2009 October 20th, 2009
There was a real buzz about the Royal Lyceum tonight, as novelist Ian Rankin joined the theatre’s Artistic Director Mark Thomson on the stage for a pre-performance discussion of Justified Sinner.
Thomson, of course, adapted James Hogg’s novel – indeed this production which he also directs is an updated version of the one he did when he was at the Brunton about ten years ago. Rankin was there by dint of his own fascination with the text. He’s written an introduction to a recent edition of the novel and is in the process of writing a film script from it. … Continue reading Sinning with Ian Rankin and Mark Thomson…
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