This Dundee Rep and Poorboy co-production has genuine ambition that is apparent from the moment you first read the advertising for the play to the final bow of the necessarily extensive cast. That is not stated in a way that is intended to condescend. It is meant as a compliment in that they are trying Read More
(This is a lightly edited transcript of the interview; to view the whole interview, please click image above) Stephen Carruthers: Good Afternoon. I’m Stephen Carruthers from the Dundee University Review of the Arts and I’m here with Joe Douglas, the Associate Artistic Director of Dundee Rep Theatre. Joe Douglas: Hello. SC: Joe, you joined the Read More
(This is a lightly edited transcript of a filmed interview that can be watched by clicking on the image above.) Vivien Williams: Hello, I’m Vivien Williams and I am a research assistant at the University of Glasgow where I also completed recently a Ph.D on the cultural history of the bagpipe in Britain. The bagpipe Read More
Deadlier than the Male, the tabloids said. They didn’t know the half of it. When reviewing Russel McLean’s previous novel Cry Uncle, I used the following sentence, “The gritty and honest narration has a truly Scottish attitude.” This is also true, perhaps even more so, of his newest book Ed’s Dead. McLean has already established Read More
I sit in the hidden café of Bonar Hall (as a four-year undergrad student I had no idea it existed) waiting for Sandra Ireland. I hold her book in my hands and wonder what she’ll be like. The book is macabre and unsettling, dead gerbils as hand puppets and warm mugs of coffee in an Read More
“The poetic moans of this century have been, for the most part, a banal patina of snobbery, vanity and sophistry: we’re in need of a new prosody[…]” (“Letter on Riots and Doubt”) If, like me, you spend too much of your free time skulking around the darker, meme-ier corners of YouTube, you may have encountered Read More
Sandra Ireland’s debut novel Beneath the Skin haunts you from the moment you first turn the opening pages. Echoes of former traumas are deeply embedded in the lives of fully realised, broken characters and ring in the reader’s ears from the first moments. In a time of clichéd explosions in soda adverts, or brutal, overt Read More
(USA, 2017) 31 March- 13 April 2017, DCA Having directed Maleficent, The Jungle Book and Cinderella with relative success in recent years, Bill Condon is well practiced at the adaptation of popular literature. Now, with a star-studded cast and a lavish budget, he turns his attention to a Disney fan-favourite, Beauty and the Beast. Though Read More
(Brazil, 2016) 31st March – 6th April 2017, DCA I went to see Aquarius feeling, at the last minute, a twinge of trepidation. Merely because I, like the protagonist, am a woman named Clara who writes, has been accused of stubbornness, and could definitely see myself being embroiled in some standoff with a construction Read More