Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Take five girls. Put them in the same house together with only one borrowed designer dress to share between them in a world where dreams of poetry, dancing and clothes are on ration, and everyday desires look set to explode. So it goes in Gabriel Quigley’s appealingly breezy new adaptation of Muriel Spark’s 1973 novella, brought to life with a busy flourish in Roxana Silbert’s expansive production. Things begin in the 1960s, when glossy magazine high-flyer Jane Wright discovers the death of posh boy poet Nicholas Farringdon. This provokes Jane to rewind to 1945, when she, Selina, Pauline, Anne and Jo were living in the May of Teck Club. This was a run down Kensington boarding house set up for ‘the social protection of ladies of slender means below the age of thirty years’ who wished to pursue some vaguely defined occupation. Half a century after it was published, Spark’s study of young women on the verge in a world where post World War
The Studio, Edinburgh Four stars Appearances can be deceptive in the latest episode of Rona Munro’s series of history plays, which, over the last decade since the original James Plays trilogy, has begun to resemble a centuries spanning zeitgeist busting soap opera. Take episode five, brought to life in Orla O’Loughlin’s chamber sized co-production between Raw Material and Capital Theatres as a series of intimate exchanges highlighting matters of life and death before our heroines take flight en route to personal and political liberation. The production’s young team of actors line up at the start of the play like some Trainspotting film poster homage set to a techno soundtrack on Becky Minto’s candle lined set. In fact, they are acting out some of the fallout of the execution of Protestant reformer Patrick Hamilton at the hands of Scotland’s sixteenth century religious establishment. As the play’s subtitle hints at, it is left to Hamilton’s rebelliously inclined sister Katherin