Don Giovanni Scottish Opera Glasgow – 18 May 2022 Kelvin Holdsworth It is difficult to know why Scottish Opera have revived Thomas Allan’s production of Don Giovanni, which they first presented in 2013. It wasn’t exciting then and isn’t exciting now. The curtain goes up to reveal a gauze that will remain in place to obscure the first scenes. Clouds can be seen scudding across it and eventually we get to glimpse Simon Higlett’s moody design.   The clouds had been going for quite a while though and were the perfect visual metaphor for the intonation problems that the strings were having during the overture. This lack of musical clarity continued throughout the first few scenes too. This was particularly noticeable during the initial trios. Herr Mozart doesn’t give much room for manoeuvre here – the mirroring of Leporello’s vocal part in the woodwind needs to be precise and crisp. In the event, it highlighted the fact that pit and stage were just a little out of kilter. The tro...

  Red Ellen 4 stars Lyceum, Edinburgh 4 May 2022 to 21 May 2022 How do you write a play about someone’s whole life? How do you fit a person’s complete history into a script? And how do you do it if your subject lived so intensely that her life could conceivably fuel a dozen dramatic productions? These were presumably the questions that Caroline Bird—an award-winning poet and playwright—asked herself when she embarked on the writing of Red Ellen, her new play about the firebrand socialist politician Ellen Wilkinson. How well she answered them may be judged by audiences at the Lyceum, where the play runs throughout May. Ellen Wilkinson was a remarkable woman. Born to a working-class family in Manchester in the last years of the 19th century, she went on to become a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, an activist for women’s suffrage, a reporter in the Spanish civil war, the organiser of the Jarrow March, a Labour MP and Minister for Education in the Attlee Governm...