Stage Archive

When, in the late 16th century, Christopher Marlowe penned his great Gothic Renaissance play Doctor Faustus, he may not have imagined that it would resurface more than 400 years later as a contemporary morality tale.

There's something joyful about this double bill of Moliere comic miniatures, adapted here for Lung Ha's Theatre Company in typically scurrilous fashion by Morna Pearson.

Two years after the last appearance by the trio Oblivia at the CCA and just a month on from Glasgow-based member Anna Krystek's presentation of what she has said will be the last of her series of solo works, this group, in which she works with Timo Fredriksson and Anika Tudeer from Finland, has the look of a very established partnership.

l WADADA LEO SMITH, left: Trumpeter and multi-instrumentalist Smith has been a key figure in the musician-led AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative musicians), and has recorded with the likes of composer Anthony Braxton and guitarist Derek Bailey's group, Company.

WHEN Marlowe's Faustus initially turns to conjuring, he has subservient demons in mind, not card tricks.

There's little in the way of sentimentality in much of the Original Theatre Company's new take on Sebastian Faulks's First World War novel by writer Rachel Wagstaff.

It is a touch ironic that those emerging from the basement of Oran Mor after this week's A Play, A Pie, And A Pint should all be talking about the breaking news of Baroness Thatcher's death.

IN 1951, Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with a cancer that would kill her shortly after.

'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread" the adage goes.

So, how to avoid the spoiler effect of giving away the punchline – that's to say the twist in the tale that Gary McNair spins in the opening piece of this year's Behaviour season?

When it comes, the ending of Rob Drummond's latest dissection of popular culture is as devastatingly unexpected as it is prescient.

From the lotus-eating, hookah-smoking courtiers who loll around in Leontes's opulently pre-Raphaelite-styled Sicilia to the 1880s workers in Bohemia's dark Satanic mills, swilling beer and joshing about in a rare day's freedom at the beach, there's always plenty to look at in this touring production by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

When Sebastian Faulks's fourth novel was published in 1993, he probably couldn't have anticipated its enduring popularity.

Dementia is an illness that affects 86,000 Scots.