Latest news with #OranMor
Glasgow Times
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Glasgow Times
True crime tale of Glasgow poisoning turned into city play
The Glasgow Poisoner is one of 12 new works to take centre stage at Oran Mor's lunchtime theatre series, A Play A Pie and A Pint, in the autumn. Written by Tom Cooper and Jen McGregor, the musical is inspired by the scandalous tale of 19th century femme fatale Madeleine Smith, who was accused of poisoning her lover but given a rare Not Proven verdict. The truth as to what happened is still questioned to this day. Also this season at the West End venue, award-winning poet and playwright Kevin P Gilday makes his PPP debut with Gravity, a drama about a man who refuses to vacate his flat in a condemned Glasgow high-rise, and the unconventional social worker determined to help him before tragedy unfolds. Brian James O'Sullivan (Image: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan) Katy Nixon, writer of the David MacLennan Award-winning Jellyfish, returns with new drama Cheapo about two teenagers who play chess in their local KFC, while a fading starlet holding onto the hope of playing the role of a lifetime is the subject of Maybe Tomorrow by PPP favourite Brian James O'Sullivan and performer Hannah Jarrett-Scott in her playwriting debut. The season also includes two spooky productions - Righ Isagair: The Fisher King, a folk thriller from writer and performer Kenny Boyle, about two best friends who discover they are not alone on the dark Outer Hebridean moors; and Hauns Aff Ma Haunted Bin! by Éimi Quinn, about an auntie and niece attempting to hide a murder. Éimi Quinn (Image: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan) The autumn line-up, which runs from September 1 to November 22, also includes a contemporary hip hop musical exploring the legend of William Wallace. Co-produced with Raw Material, Wallace is an exciting collaboration between playwright Rob Drummond and acclaimed rapper-songwriter Dave Hook, that explores Wallace's contested place on the spectrum between myth and history. Brian Logan (Image: Calum O'Brien) Brian Logan, PPP's artistic director, said: 'The nights may be drawing in but the lunchtimes will be brighter than ever at Òran Mór this autumn, with a scintillating line-up of pastry-assisted theatre. 'As usual at PPP, this season balances broad comedy with big-hitting drama, rookies with well-loved talents, shows about the past with shows thrillingly about the here and now. 'We couldn't be more excited to kick off with Wallace, the hip hop musical they're already calling (well, I am…) Scotland's Hamilton. 'Throw in some spine-chilling Gaelic folklore, a cracking Glasgow drama in a doomed high-rise, and a generational set-to between TikTok and the stage, and you've got twelve weeks of brand new theatre that you really wouldn't want to miss.' Tickets are on sale now for all performances.
Glasgow Times
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Glasgow Times
Italian-Irish comedian Vittorio Angelone coming to Glasgow
An Italian-Irish comedian from Belfast, Vittorio Angelone, will perform at Glasgow's Theatre Royal on Sunday, March 29, 2026, as part of his new UK tour, You Can't Say Nothing Any More. The 24-date tour follows his sold-out 2023 and 2024 tours, which saw the comedian play more than 100 packed-out shows across the country. Read more: 'Incredible' American band announces Glasgow gig - alongside special guests His 2023 show, Who Do You Think You Are? I Am! sold out before the Edinburgh Fringe even began and went on to become a 138-date international tour, selling 30,000 tickets across the UK, Ireland, Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and Canada. During that tour, one of his shows was cancelled after counter-terrorism police were contacted about one of his Instagram posts, an event the comedian is set to explore in his new Edinburgh Fringe show this year. Angelone also recently filmed his second stand-up special at Glasgow's Oran Mor, which is set for release soon. He has previously supported comedians such as Russell Howard, Michael Che, Ivo Graham, and Adam Rowe, and co-hosts the podcast Mike & Vittorio's Guide to Parenting with fellow comedian Mike Rice. He is also the co-creator of the YouTube series Fin vs The Internet, featuring guests like Jamie Laing and JaackMaate. Read more: Coronation Street star to star in stage adaptation of iconic 90s thriller During his new tour, Angelone will explore his Northern Irish upbringing, the legacy of The Troubles, and the pressures facing comedians in an era of intense debate about offence and activism in comedy. Angelone's next run at the Edinburgh Fringe is already sold out, with additional late-night shows added at Underbelly's McEwan Hall on August 8 and 22, 2025, due to high demand. Tickets for the Glasgow date and the rest of the UK tour are on sale now via Vittorio Angelone's official website.
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Scotsman
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Theatre reviews: Man's Best Friend The Inquisitor
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Man's Best Friend, Tron Theatre, Glasgow ★★★★ The Inquisitor, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★ The Croft, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★ It's a truth universally acknowledged that during the pandemic, the relationship between people and their pets gained a whole new significance and intensity. I'm not sure, though, that that inflexion-point in human-pet relations had ever been celebrated in theatre, until the moment in 2022 when Douglas Maxwell's monologue Man's Best Friend first appeared at A Play, A Pie, and A Pint. Jordan Young in Man's Best Friend | Mihaela Bodlovic The monologue tells the story of Ronnie, who, after the tragic loss of his wife, and a decision to walk away from his job, finds himself - as the world opens up again - working as a dog-walker to five rowdy canine charges, four of them owned by his Glasgow neighbours. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Now Ronnie reappears - at the Tron and on tour - in an expanded 80 minute version of the play, directed by Jemima Levick, and performed by Scotsquad star Jordan Young; and three years on, Man's Best Friend emerges as an even more powerful response to a moment in history that changed so many lives, and left unresolved pain in so many hearts. In this version, the show receives a slightly more elaborate staging, courtesy of designer Becky Minto and lighting designer Grant Anderson. In truth, though, it hardly needs them, so clearly does the play's strength lie in Douglas Maxwell's writing - often hilariously funny, yet also profound, and sometimes richly poetic - and in the performance at the centre of the show. In this version, Young takes centre stage as a fine tragi-comic actor at the absolute height of his powers; younger than Jonathan Watson's original Ronnie, but all the more poignantly lost for that - until the play's pivotal moment, when his own dog leads him towards s shocking discovery that, at last, begins to awaken him from the long sleep of grief. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad This week's final spring season Play, Pie and Pint show is likewise a profound and thoughtful monologue; but in Peter Arnott's The Inquisitor - a 2007 play restaged to mark Arnott's 40th anniversary as a playwright - the speaker is not alone. He is an investigator conducting a final interview with a man accused of terrorism; but he finds that his interviewee will not speak, and sits in silence throughout the encounter. The effect is to create a monologue in which the speaker - powerfully played by Tom McGovern - spends an all but fruitless hour trying to bring his interviewee (an eloquently silent Michael Guest) back from his exalted commitment to a martyr's death, to the compromised, messy yet magical stuff of ordinary human life. McGovern's style, in making these arguments, is deliberately quixotic, and a shade hyperactive, as if he barely trusts Arnott's powerful words to carry the weight of the play. Carry it they do, though; to a conclusion that has only become more telling, as definitions of terrorism and hate crime grow ever more far-reaching, and the morality of those in power ever more compromised, and contested. The Croft | Contributed There's no such gravitas, alas, about Ali Milles's touring play The Croft, at the Festival Theatre, which takes a potentially powerful drama about love between women across three generations - all connected to a remote seaside croft in the western Highlands - and makes the fundamental mistake of trying to turn it into a horror movie. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad An impressive cast give the show their best shot, with Gracie Follows and Caroline Harker as lovers Laura and Suzanne, and Liza Goddard as 19th century crofter Enid, all turning in bold performances. In the end, through, a dramatic script has to play to its strengths; and here, that strength lies in the portrayal of brave women trying to defy patriarchal thinking down the ages, rather than in the cheap suggestion of some nameless supernatural evil, lurking in the very stones of the place.
Scotsman
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
The Haunting of Alice Gilfrey
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... The Haunting Of Agnes Gilfrey, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★ Youth's a stuff will not endure, says Shakespeare; but in the age of the tribute musical, it can be endlessly recaptured, and made to live again on stage. Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey's 1971 show Grease – later transformed into the 1978 global hit film – is a tribute musical in the true sense. Set in the autumn of 1959, it is one of the original high school musicals, and its much-loved songs – Summer Nights, We Go Together, You're The One That I Want, and many more – are all lovingly crafted in the bubble-gum pop style of the late Fifties. Grease at Pitlochry Festival Theatre PIC: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan To work well, though, a show like Grease needs a company who are themselves full of the rebellious energy and sheer joie de vivre of youth; and that's what the 2025 Pitlochry ensemble provides by the truckload, in the opening production of this year's main stage summer season. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Co-produced with the Grand Theatre, Blackpool, Sam Hardie's Pitlochry-made production has already played a two-week run there; so the version that opened at Pitlochry over the weekend is already warmed up to sizzling-point. Working in the instruments-in-hand style perfected by Pitlochry musical director Richard Reeday, the 17-strong cast offer a sparkling display of quadruple-threat theatrical energy, as they act, sing, dance and play their way through the story of good girl Sandy, her beau Danny Zuko, and the Rydell High School gang who surround them. What makes the show a roaring success, though – despite the occasional rough edge and under-powered moment – is not only that energy, but the sheer underlying professionalism they bring to the task of making the story work, as a fast-moving two hours of theatre, plus interval. Blythe Jandoo is a beautiful, poignant Sandy, and Alexander Service a palpably decent Danny, with Tyler Collins and Fiona Wood fairly knocking the pinball out of the arcade as rough kids Kenickie and Rizzo. In the end, though, it's all about the ensemble, and the terrific collective spirit expressed through the big-number songs, and through Kally Lloyd-Jones's joyful choreography; and when they reach the final triumphant chorus of You're The One That I Want, the Pitlochry audience can hardly wait to leap to their feet and join in the jive, in one of those glorious celebrations of youth that never grows old. Manasa Tagica and Sarah McCardie in The Haunting of Alice Gilfrey at Oran Mor PIC: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan Youth's a stuff that can't be recaptured, though, for the central character in the latest Play, Pie and Pint lunchtime drama, co-produced with Mull Theatre. In The Haunting Of Agnes Gilfrey, by Glasgow based writer-performer Amy Conway, the central character Agnes is an outspoken Glasgow woman in her forties who loves her job in the film industry, but has recently fallen in love with, and married, a slightly younger man, an American actor called Jimmy, who is eager to become a Dad. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The pair are therefore undergoing fertility treatment, so far with no success; and when they arrive for a romantic break at a holiday-let castle on Mull – and encounter the very strange housekeeper, Mrs Carlin – Agnes soon begins to feel haunted by the unhappy spirit of a former lady of the house, whose sombre portrait hangs over the fireplace. The play perhaps spends a little too much time setting up this situation, and referencing various horror-movie tropes, before Agnes's story finally moves towards its crisis. The point it wants to make, though – about patriarchal pressure on women to have children, and on how even the nicest, funniest men can be complicit with it – is a powerful one. And in Katie Slater's production, Mary Gapinski, Manasa Tagica, and a poignant and hilarious Sarah McCardie as Agnes, make a fine job of exploring the tough moment of choice she faces; as she learns to embrace her own inner cailleach, or crone, and her right to grow older, without shame or regret.
The Herald Scotland
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Review: The mystery of the Inquisitor and the Prisoner is compelling
Oran Mor, Glasgow 'You are us,' says the Inquisitor of Peter Arnott's play to his silent Prisoner at one point. This is a telling moment in this unspecified war of attrition that reveals the similarities as much as the differences between those in one conflict or another. Whether political, religious or generational, as the Inquisitor expounds on morality, ethics and all the contradictions at play that give us the excuse to square any circle we like in the name of whatever cause is going, for a veteran like him, this time it seems, it's also personal. Tom McGovern's Inquisitor is every inch the well-heeled establishment mandarin in Liz Carruthers' suitably elliptical production, the final lunchtime offering from A Play, a Pie and a Pint's spring and summer season. Sat in the old school splendour of designer Heather Grace Currie's set, McGovern waxes forth from his desk while his Prisoner, initially bound, but always captive, acts as a human sounding board, never giving anything away in Michael Guest's concentrated portrayal. Read More: A bold concert with a mighty juggernaut 'Charm aplenty' - Review: Goodbye Dreamland Bowlarama, Oran Mor Review: You Won't Break My Soul, Oran Mor, Glasgow Just what alliance the Prisoner appears to have betrayed is never revealed, but both men are facing the consequences of whatever actions got them here. Is the Prisoner a terrorist sympathiser infiltrating the system in order to corrupt it? Or is he merely an angry do-gooder who got in too deep? As for the Inquisitor, how did he end up where he is now? And why does he appear to be as trapped as his captive? Arnott sets up the sort of circular debate we don't see enough of on stage in an expansive probing of belief, faith and how far someone will go to get what they want. Flanked by cosmic film footage, the Inquisitor's speech is part TED talk, part confessional before the two men finally find some kind of accord beyond the silence. Just who is seeking to be released, however, no one is saying in a fascinating and compelling hour.
