Latest news with #TheSheriffOfKalamaki
The National
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Douglas Maxwell's touching dog-walker play fetches more plaudits
The winning plays – The Sheriff Of Kalamaki (2023-24) and So Young (2024-25) – speak to the profound humanism, the insightful humour and the poetic sensibility in his writing. So, too, does Man's Best Friend – a piece originally written for the lunchtime theatre A Play, A Pie And A Pint – which is now being staged in a new, slightly longer version by the Tron. In this cleverly-structured monodrama, the excellent Jordan Young takes on the role of Ronnie, a young man from Edinburgh who resides in Glasgow, but never quite feels that he belongs there. A professional dog walker, he stumbled into his line of work almost accidentally while walking his own dog during the Covid pandemic. READ MORE: 'Completely unprecedented': BBC cuts live feed for Kneecap Glastonbury performance In the play's very funny first half, Ronnie wanders around designer Becky Minto's ingenious, quasi-abstract set (which manages to evoke simultaneously the paths and hills of Ronnie's walks and the solitary domesticity of his home life). As he does so, he regales us with hilarious tales of the trials and tribulations of walking five dogs attached to the 'central belt'; the dog-walking device he created and which he wears around his waist. Ronnie's encounters with a macho dog trainer and a hippy-ish animal lover are a source of tremendous comedy. So, too, are the dog walker's embarrassed recollections of the incident in which one of the pooches in his care managed to ingest a significant quantity of a well-known energy drink (the consequences of which would be best described as scatological). As Ronnie introduces us to his five charges – Albert (his own dog), Coriander, Fury, Carlos and Rex – illustrator Ross Collins offers us charming canine animations which are projected cleverly onto the set. To synopsise the second half of the play in any detail would be to commit a crime of spoiling so grave as to merit one being dragged through park mud by five energetic mutts. Suffice it to say that a dramatic, dog-related discovery takes Ronnie – and us, the theatre audience – into an emotional space that is radically different from the light-heartedness of the play's opening section. As Ronnie recalls two parallel stories of love and loss, the almost forensically empathetic dimension in Maxwell's writing comes to the fore. The turn in the narrative is executed to great dramatic effect, not only in the author's writing and Young's compelling performance, but also in Minto's set, which (with the help of Grant Anderson's superb lighting design) is transformed powerfully. Director Jemima Levick's production is sensitive and precise in equal measure. Patricia Panther's sound and music are appropriately atmospheric. What begins as a humorous monologue about professional dog walking ends as a touching and hopeful play about our collective experience of Covid and the universal experience of grief.
Scotsman
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Playwright Douglas Maxwell on 25 years of hits, from Our Bad Magnet to So Young
With two of his acclaimed plays being restaged this year, Douglas Maxwell reflects on a quarter of a century spent working in and for Scotland. Interview by Joyce McMillan 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... Douglas Maxwell can remember the day – almost 30 years ago now – when he realised that he could become a playwright. He had loved working on theatre shows at school in Girvan, he had played in bands, and as a student at Stirling University in the early 1990s he had co-founded the Stirling University Musical Theatre Society. It was in his final year, though, that he was fiddling around with a script in his room one day when a sudden thought hit him. 'Wait a minute,' he said to himself, 'some people actually do this for a job.' And from that moment, through good times and bad, his fate was sealed; as he launched himself on a career that has seen more than 40 Douglas Maxwell plays and adaptations produced in Scotland since 2000. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad His career has also led, over the last two years, to Maxwell's unique achievement in winning the Best New Play category two years running at the annual Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland. In 2024, Maxwell won for his remarkable double monologue The Sheriff Of Kalamaki, at A Play, A Pie and A Pint; and this month, he took the prize again for his 2024 Fringe hit So Young, a superbly well made four-handed drama, staged at the Traverse Theatre last August, about the reaction of a midlife Glasgow couple when their recently widowed friend suddenly acquires a new girlfriend 25 years his junior. Douglas Maxwell 'I think I graduated into one of the very good times for Scottish playwriting,' says Maxwell, who emerged from university in 1995, and began to follow in the footsteps of the outstanding generations of Scottish playwrights who emerged from the Traverse Theatre, and later the Tron, in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. 'There were so many great role models around,' he says. 'David Greig, Chris Hannan, David Harrower, so many more – wherever I looked, whatever I wanted to do, there was always someone there who could say – yes, I found a way to do that, and so can you.' His first play Our Bad Magnet, about teenage boys growing up in Girvan, premiered at the Tron in 2000; and since then the vast majority of Maxwell's plays have been produced by theatre companies in Scotland. 'Because of all the pressures in theatre today,' says Maxwell, 'most playwrights feel compelled to develop their work in other directions as well. They start to write for television or film, or go into directing, and end up running a theatre for ten years, as David Greig has just done at the Lyceum. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Sign up to our FREE Arts & Culture newsletter at 'But for more than 25 years now, I've just had this one string to my bow, which is writing plays for theatre, mainly here in Scotland. And I don't honestly want to do anything else.' The good news for Maxwell fans is that two of his recent plays are about to reappear on Scotland's stages. His 2024 CATS winner So Young – co-produced by the Citizens' Theatre and Glasgow-based touring company Raw Material – will form part of the Citizens' exciting reopening season this autumn. And this weekend, the Tron Theatre opens a new summer production of his 2022 Play, Pie, and Pint monologue Man's Best Friend, an acclaimed solo drama which notes the extraordinary role pets played in so many lives during lockdown, and revolves around the character of Ronnie, originally played by Jonathan Watson, a recently widowed man in Glasgow who develops a half-hearted career as a dog-walker, after everything else in his life goes wrong. This time around, Ronnie will be played by Jordan Young, much-loved star of River City, Scotsquad and the annual Edinburgh pantomime. 'Jordan's a younger actor,' says Maxwell, 'which brings a slightly different energy to the story. And what I particularly love is that he's an actor who really can shift from comedy to real tragedy in a single sentence. That absolutely suits my work down to the ground, because my plays are always funny, and always tragic.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Maxwell turned 50 last year, and lives in Glasgow's south side with his wife Caroline Newall, artistic development director at the National Theatre of Scotland, and their two daughters. And Maxwell does have one extra string to his professional bow as a teacher of playwriting. His workshops and playwriting courses are legendary, and he loves the work so much that he also reads many scripts sent to him by young writers for free, simply as a way of helping them along. His own playwriting, though, remains his main preoccupation, as he mulls over possible new projects for next year, and nurses Man's Best Friend and So Young towards their new stagings. 'Both of these plays come out of the lockdown experience, really,' says Maxwell. 'And both of them involve characters who are being asked or expected to 'move on', but who can't, because they haven't really had a chance to mourn. I'm asking what happens if you haven't had a chance to mark a death, or to remember a life, in the way that we should remember and mourn, as a social act. I think a lot of people are still carrying those scars from the pandemic; and in theatre, we can at least come together to ask that question, and to recognise that pain, before we try to turn towards the future.'
Scotsman
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Playwright Douglas Maxwell on 25 years of hits, from My Bad Magnet to So Young
With two of his acclaimed plays being restaged this year, Douglas Maxwell reflects on a quarter of a century spent working in and for Scotland. Interview by Joyce McMillan 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... Douglas Maxwell can remember the day – almost 30 years ago now – when he realised that he could become a playwright. He had loved working on theatre shows at school in Girvan, he had played in bands, and as a student at Stirling University in the early 1990s he had co-founded the Stirling University Musical Theatre Society. It was in his final year, though, that he was fiddling around with a script in his room one day when a sudden thought hit him. 'Wait a minute,' he said to himself, 'some people actually do this for a job.' And from that moment, through good times and bad, his fate was sealed; as he launched himself on a career that has seen more than 40 Douglas Maxwell plays and adaptations produced in Scotland since 2000. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad His career has also led, over the last two years, to Maxwell's unique achievement in winning the Best New Play category two years running at the annual Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland. In 2024, Maxwell won for his remarkable double monologue The Sheriff Of Kalamaki, at A Play, A Pie and A Pint; and this month, he took the prize again for his 2024 Fringe hit So Young, a superbly well made four-handed drama, staged at the Traverse Theatre last August, about the reaction of a midlife Glasgow couple when their recently widowed friend suddenly acquires a new girlfriend 25 years his junior. Douglas Maxwell 'I think I graduated into one of the very good times for Scottish playwriting,' says Maxwell, who emerged from university in 1995, and began to follow in the footsteps of the outstanding generations of Scottish playwrights who emerged from the Traverse Theatre, and later the Tron, in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. 'There were so many great role models around,' he says. 'David Greig, Chris Hannan, David Harrower, so many more – wherever I looked, whatever I wanted to do, there was always someone there who could say – yes, I found a way to do that, and so can you.' His first play Our Bad Magnet, about teenage boys growing up in Girvan, premiered at the Tron in 2000; and since then the vast majority of Maxwell's plays have been produced by theatre companies in Scotland. 'Because of all the pressures in theatre today,' says Maxwell, 'most playwrights feel compelled to develop their work in other directions as well. They start to write for television or film, or go into directing, and end up running a theatre for ten years, as David Greig has just done at the Lyceum. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Sign up to our FREE Arts & Culture newsletter at 'But for more than 25 years now, I've just had this one string to my bow, which is writing plays for theatre, mainly here in Scotland. And I don't honestly want to do anything else.' The good news for Maxwell fans is that two of his recent plays are about to reappear on Scotland's stages. His 2024 CATS winner So Young – co-produced by the Citizens' Theatre and Glasgow-based touring company Raw Material – will form part of the Citizens' exciting reopening season this autumn. And this weekend, the Tron Theatre opens a new summer production of his 2022 Play, Pie, and Pint monologue Man's Best Friend, an acclaimed solo drama which notes the extraordinary role pets played in so many lives during lockdown, and revolves around the character of Ronnie, originally played by Jonathan Watson, a recently widowed man in Glasgow who develops a half-hearted career as a dog-walker, after everything else in his life goes wrong. This time around, Ronnie will be played by Jordan Young, much-loved star of River City, Scotsquad and the annual Edinburgh pantomime. 'Jordan's a younger actor,' says Maxwell, 'which brings a slightly different energy to the story. And what I particularly love is that he's an actor who really can shift from comedy to real tragedy in a single sentence. That absolutely suits my work down to the ground, because my plays are always funny, and always tragic.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Maxwell turned 50 last year, and lives in Glasgow's south side with his wife Caroline Newall, artistic development director at the National Theatre of Scotland, and their two daughters. And Maxwell does have one extra string to his professional bow as a teacher of playwriting. His workshops and playwriting courses are legendary, and he loves the work so much that he also reads many scripts sent to him by young writers for free, simply as a way of helping them along. His own playwriting, though, remains his main preoccupation, as he mulls over possible new projects for next year, and nurses Man's Best Friend and So Young towards their new stagings. 'Both of these plays come out of the lockdown experience, really,' says Maxwell. 'And both of them involve characters who are being asked or expected to 'move on', but who can't, because they haven't really had a chance to mourn. I'm asking what happens if you haven't had a chance to mark a death, or to remember a life, in the way that we should remember and mourn, as a social act. I think a lot of people are still carrying those scars from the pandemic; and in theatre, we can at least come together to ask that question, and to recognise that pain, before we try to turn towards the future.'
