Barrie Hunter
The Grand Old Opera House Hotel
★★★★☆ Marvellous mayhem
Isobel McArthur strikes again with The Grand Old Opera House Hotel, a wonderfully written fusion of farce and opera running the full length of the fringe.
The Stamping Ground
★★★★☆ Vibrant
The Stamping Ground at the Festival Theatre is unabashedly emotional and visually enthralling. Raw Material and Eden Court’s Runrig musical – which played successfully in Inverness in 2022 – is touring Scotland and will surely find appreciative audiences.
Smile
★★★☆☆ Sympathetic
Smile, Dundee Rep’s football-themed online offering, transfers to the screen to provide a satisfactory record of 2020’s successful play about the legendary Jim McLean.
The Sunshine Ghost
★★★☆☆ Reassuring:
Spirited and melodic, the first small-scale run of The Sunshine Ghost is not yet the finished article but shows signs of developing into something popular.
Sunshine Daydream
World premiere for new musical:
A new musical by Edinburgh-based pairing of storyteller Andy Cannon and composer Richard Ferguson had its world premiere in The Studio this weekend before setting off on a Scottish tour.
The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black, Black Oil
★★★★★ Serious fun:
Tuneful, hilarious and deeply moving, Dundee Rep’s revival of The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black, Black Oil, on tour at the Lyceum, is a triumph.
Descent
★★★★☆ Passionate:
Powerful and shocking, Linda Duncan McLaughlin’s Descent at the Traverse’s lunchtime theatre season from A Play, A Pie and A Pint, grabs you with an intense passion that doesn’t ever hold back.
Review – The Government Inspector
✭✭✭✭✩ Hilarious and vicious:
Timeless and timeous comedy from the redoubtable Communicado in this latest version of Nikolai Gogol’s classic tale of corruption, produced in collaboration with Aberystwyth Arts Centre.
