“On a wind lashed coast in the far north a group of men assemble on a construction site. The Ness and Struie Drainage Project will dominate their lives for the next few months as they toil through the daylight hours and into the night, endure hardship and conflict and –mostly- survive.” So begins the blurb Read More
Written by Mike Kenny for the Dundee Rep Ensemble, The Snow Queen is a family pantomime with a lovely balance of sing-a-long songs, audience interaction, warm humour, compelling plot and clever stage design. This original and distinctly Scottish take on the classic Hans Christian Anderson’s tale makes jokes about the Scottish weather, comments on the Read More
Following the success of his first full length feature, 2008’s In Bruges, playwright-turned-director Martin McDonagh returns with Seven Psychopaths, a fiercely droll and self-referential comedy centred around alcoholic Marty’s (Colin Farrell) futile attempts to write a screenplay, for which he has little more than “a great title” – The Seven Psychopaths. Marty’s wish is to Read More
William Wall’s new collection, Ghost Estate, takes its title from lonely places: the large, half-finished ‘ghost estate’ housing schemes of Ireland. First started during the height of the Celtic Tiger Boom, the economic collapse left them as unfinished and largely uninhabited chilling and empty spaces. Wall mirrors these qualities here. His sentences are carefully minimalist; Read More
With violence, romance, awkwardness and black humour aplenty, Ben Wheatley’s latest film appears almost elegiac in its portrayal of a Britain now overrun with upper-middle class snobbery, desperately depressing heritage locations and wearers of sensible shoes. The movie is essentially a road movie but one which takes an agonising turn for the worse even before Read More
Cop-thrillers have become a bit of a dead horse. Buddy cops in which one is a straight-laced stickler for protocol and the other an unpredictable loose cannon? Four shoot-outs happening before their lunchtime? Walking away from explosions without blinking? And all this while saving and/or seducing a few gorgeous (and/or naked) fashion models? They have Read More
The title of Tom Wright’s debut novel What Dies in Summer suggests that it is a bog-standard contemporary crime thriller. It is a long-standing cliché, for instance, for crime novels to use the word “death” or one of its derivatives in their titles. With its depiction of a young female with her back to the Read More
Alan Warner’s first novel, Morvern Callar, was a critical success, hailed as “haunting and brilliantly original”, with a character that is “impossible to forget”. It claimed the Somerset Maughum award in 1996; since then, Warner has won many prizes including the Saltire Book of the Year award (twice). He was also long-listed for the Man Booker Read More
I first came across Petrucci’s work after meeting his co-founder of Perdika Press, Peter Brennan, who recommended Petrucci’s poetry to me. Petrucci is a notable polymath, having trained in physics and environmental science, though more recently working in literary education and in a large number of poetry residencies. The i tulips sequence, of which this volume Read More
In “Tamagotchi”, one of the short stories in Adam Marek’s second collection, The Stone Thrower, the narrator wonders “what kind of demented mind would create a child’s toy” that was capable of catching AIDS. Reading through whole collection, it is at times difficult not to wonder about the state of mind of the author himself. Read More