Fri 13 Sept – Sat 5 Oct, Dundee Rep Theatre As theatre sub-editor for DURA, it feels strange to confess that, up until recently, I’d never seen an Ayckbourn production. I’d read his non-fiction book, The Crafty Art of Playmaking, but never watched a single one of his ninety plays. I’m glad my first Ayckbourn Read More
Ella Frears(Rough Trade Books 2024); hbk; £14.99 Ella Frears’ second collection, GOODLORD, is a convention-defying tour-de-force. In a form-flouting, novel-length poem framed as an email from an aggrieved tenant to a letting agent, Frear unpacks notions of ownership and autonomy. In an unrelenting pace, with bitter irony and piercing clarity, Frears lays bare the injustices Read More
SEKXPHRASTICSJane Goldman(Dostoyevsky Wannabe Originals; 2021). £12.00 With SEKXPHRASTIKS, Jane Goldman delivers a poetry collection that is at once a delight and a difficult undertaking. It is a dizzying whirlwind of feminism, of queer solidarity, of love and grief and fury and tongue twisters. This is a profoundly intertextual collection. To try and cross reference every Read More
George Paterson (Into Books, 2023); pbk; £10.99 Westerwick is the second novel from George Paterson, whose sensational 2022 debut The Girl, The Crow, The Writer, The Fighter was always going to be a tough act to follow. Like Paterson’s first novel, Westerwick is a crime thriller, but it diverges sharply from its predecessor with a local Read More
With two novels, four poetry pamphlets and an Eric Gregory Award already under her belt, the stunning quality of Susannah Dickey’s debut poetry collection should come as no surprise. ISDAL starts as a scalpel-sharp critique of the true crime genre and ends unravelling tangled notions of grief, empathy, exploitation and our near-pathological need to narrativize death (and life)….
Starcrossing; Kitchen Madness; Phantasmagoria; A Pangolin’s Tale; Fridge and Chaos are some of the most varied I personally can remember seeing at the Degree Show. No two are alike in style or tone, spanning a refreshing mix of genres from the comedic to the mystical to the horrific. What they do have in common is the fact that they all successfully continue to uphold the high bar of quality that can be expected from the showcase.
Stephanie Sy-Quia (Granta Poetry, 2021); pbk; £10.99 Amnion is the membrane which protects an embryo during pregnancy. Amnion by Stephanie Sy-Quia thrums with potential energy. Although shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Award, it is fluid in form, moving between poetry, essay and autofiction. Biography serves as a throughline, as Sy-Quia traces back her lineage, across Read More
Don Quixote trades in his horse for a mobility scooter in this flamboyant and tender retelling from Dundee Rep Theatre and Perth Theatre written by Ben Lewis and directed by Lu Kemp. With wit, heart and a live musical accompaniment, Cervantes’ metaphysical comedy becomes a thoughtful commentary on modern life, alienation, growing old and also the stories we tell ourselves.
Writer Kieran Hurley and director Finn den Hertog bring Henrik Ibsen into the 21st century with an electric retelling of An Enemy of the People, simply titled The Enemy. The setting is an unnamed Scottish town, but the kind most readers will be familiar with – the ‘once proud’ variety of industrial town now sunken into multi-generational poverty.
