Latest news with #DundeeRep
The Courier
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Courier
Overgate busker swaps street for stage as he lands Dundee Rep role
Dundee busker Spencer Shek is known for his soulful covers of classic ballads outside the city's Overgate. Shoppers and city centre residents may be familiar with Spencer's crowd-pleasing renditions of everything My Way by Frank Sinatra to Perfect by Ed Sheeran. But this week, the velvet-voiced singer will swap his streetside serenades for a stint on the stage at Dundee Rep in an upcoming Dundee Youth Music Theatre production. 'Chess' is a Cold War musical with music written by Abba's own Benny Anderson and Björn Ulvaeus. Spencer is set to star as Freddie Trumper, a cocky chess grandmaster from the United States whose takes on his Soviet rival in a battle of wills, values and politics. For Dundee University law student Spencer, singing on stage is the dream. But he credits his busking days with giving him the confidence to pursue it. 'I originally started busking in Glasgow when I was 18 and fell in love with it,' says Spencer, 26, who is originally from Kilwinning. 'I was unsure of what busking would be like in Dundee after I moved here for university, but the public here are so lovely and welcoming of me and my music.' The popularity of his city centre performances has secured Spencer several wedding singer gigs, as well as performances at community events and special birthdays. 'My favourite moments are when I get to sing someone down the aisle,' smiles Spencer. 'I'm just in disbelief that someone would want me to sing them down on such as special occasion. I get emotional.' He recently joined the Dundee Youth Music Theatre and has thrown himself into the group. 'I've quickly bonded with everyone,' he says. 'We have such a talented cast and I'm incredibly privileged to be working with everyone there.' Spencer's big plan after university is to make it in the music industry as a singer-songwriter, or perform on the West End or Broadway. But the shrewd soon-to-be graduate is well aware of 'just how hard it is to make it in the music industry', which is why he's been working towards his law diploma since moving to Dundee. 'If it wasn't to work out, at least I still have my degree that I can use for a job that I very much take an interest in,' he says. 'But hopefully the music works out. Fingers crossed – that's the absolute dream for me.'
The National
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
REVIEW: An electric drama of doubt and dilemma at Dundee Rep
A brilliantly structured drama of suspicion, conflict and soul-searching within a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, the play contains moral complexities and an underlying political charge that are akin to David Mamet's 1992 opus Oleanna. The play pits Sister Aloysius (the austere, conservative principal of the fictional St Nicholas Church School, played by Ann Louise Ross) against Michael Dylan's seemingly liberal and compassionate priest Father Flynn. Add to this Sister James (a young and idealistic teacher who is caught between her own instincts and the influence of Sister Aloysius) and Mrs Muller (the mother of the sole Black child in his class, whom Sister Aloysius suspects is being sexually abused by Father Flynn). The tensions and conflicting motivations build powerfully in Shanley's script. Designer Jessica Worrall's set – an apparent concrete monolith which represents Sister Aloysius's office, but opens out, with unexpected versatility, to become the school's garden – becomes a charismatic fifth character. This production captures brilliantly the sense of uncertainty that runs like an erratically woven thread through the play. The principal – a Second World War widow who turned to Holy orders – embarks on a campaign to bring down the suspected priest armed with nothing more than circumstantial evidence (the child, Donald Muller, returned to Sister James's class following a one-to-one meeting with Father Flynn with the smell of alcohol on his breath). We, the audience, like Sister James, are pulled in various ethical directions as Flynn's plausible explanation and moral indignation clash with Aloysius's seeming certainty. READ MORE: A ballet full of audacious dances of death and defiance The testimony of Mrs Muller – regarding Donald's home life and his need of both the school and Flynn's support – introduces another level of ethical, social and racial complexity to an already electric narrative. The doubt of the play's title belongs to us, the audience, as much as it does to the characters themselves. All of which demands acting performances of great nuance and depth. Ross's Aloysius has granite hardness and a line in brook-no-argument sarcasm that is often bleakly comic. Coupled with her underlying decency and moral bravery, the character manages – in Ross's canny characterisation – to split one's sympathies in two. The excellent Dylan impresses similarly in the role of Flynn, who the actor plays – as if on a theatrical high-wire – balanced precariously between persecuted innocence and perilously concealed guilt. The anguished equivocations of Sister James and the painfully acquired pragmatism of Mrs Muller (whose soul is caught in a vice constructed of racism, poverty, domestic abuse and a burning desire to save her son from all three) are depicted excellently by Emma Tracey and Mercy Ojelade respectively. Shanley's play is a resonating and delicately balanced thing of beauty. Thankfully, this excellent Dundee Rep production tackles it with all of the necessary subtlety and confidence. Until May 10:
The Courier
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Courier
Review: Doubt: A Parable at Dundee Rep
John Patrick Shanley's 2004 stage play Doubt: A Parable opened off-Broadway and ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Tony Award for Best Play. It's a play with a big reputation and legacy, from Shanley's own 2008 film adaptation starring Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Viola Davis, to last year's Broadway revival with Live Schreiber and Amy Ryan. Here Joanna Bowman directs Dundee Rep Theatre's version, which keeps the American backdrop of the original – a Bronx religious school in 1964, where the relationship between a young male priest and a boy in his care is called into question. The chance to see a modern classic on a Scottish stage; although if you'd like a recommendation from outside theatre, Shanley also won an Academy Award for writing the 1987 Cher and Nicolas Cage film Moonstruck. You know you're in for a high standard all round at Dundee Rep, and the performances are predictably powerful. Ann Louise Ross is especially commanding in the central role of Sister Aloysius, a character who flips the role of strict and widely-feared religious disciplinarian – all of which she is – to reveal an innate morality which causes her to not let go when she smells wrongdoing. The way the play manages to be a contemplative, ecclesiastical piece about the meaning of faith and a tense and utterly involving thriller all at once. All the time we're given mixed signals about who to root for – Sister Aloysius seems stuffy and inflexible, while the accused priest Father Flynn is played with easy-going, youthful warmth by Michael Dylan. Emma Tracey's apprentice Sister James, meanwhile, represents a more open, less disciplinarian form of teaching, but does seeing the good make her blind and naïve Jessica Worrall's impressive set is also a character in itself, a vaulted, concrete-effect sepulchre with a panel which reveals the changing seasons outside. You don't like hearing fake American accents in the theatre. Although the reason for maintaining time and setting becomes clear when we discover the boy in question, Donald Muller, is the only black child at the school. Mercy Ojelade cameos as his complex mother, who's prepared to turn a blind eye because she believes education is his only escape to a better life, and in an already powerful play her single scene is a tour de force. At Dundee Rep Theatre until Saturday 10th May.
-and-Ann-Louise-Ross-(Sister-Aloysius)-Dundee-Rep-Doubt-A-Parable-by-Mihae.jpeg%3Fwidth%3D1200%26auto%3Dwebp%26quality%3D75%26trim%3D0%2C0%2C0%2C0%26crop%3D&w=3840&q=100)
Scotsman
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Theatre reviews: Doubt: A Parable
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Doubt: A Parable, Dundee Rep ★★★★ Nun Of Your Business, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★ It's a strange week for Scottish theatre to be offering two shows focussed on the Catholic Church, its rights, wrongs and follies. After decades of rowdy and robust criticism of the church - not least for its abject historic failure to deal adequately priests guilty of sexual abuse - the late Pope Francis seemed at last to be a leader who represented the best of the church; and the outpouring of grief at his death makes it difficult, this week, to take a simply dismissive view of one of the world's most venerable institutions. Emma Tracey (Sister James) and Ann Louise Ross (Sister Aloysius) in the Dundee Rep production of Doubt: A Parable | Mihaela Bodlovic The danger of complete certainty, though, is exactly what John Patrick Shanley's powerful 2005 play Doubt is about; and in Joanna Bowman's superb Dundee Rep production, it seems both timely and profound. The story - told in a single sweep of 90 minutes, across half a dozen scenes - involves a charismatic young priest, Father Flynn, working in a working-class New York parish with a school attached. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The principal of the school is Sister Aloysius, a hard-bitten old nun who knows the male-dominated hierarchy of the church all too well; and her character and attitudes are explored in a series of dialogues with a young, idealistic teaching nun, Sister James, who finds it difficult to adopt the suspicious and hyper-vigilant attitudes Sister Aloysius demands. So when Sister Aloysius tells Sister James that she is certain - despite very slender evidence - that Father Flynn is pursuing an improper relationship with the one of the boys at the school, both Sister James and the audience are plunged into doubt. Nor does the play ever bring us any huge, cathartic resolution; at the end, even the rock-hard Sister Aloysius is left uncertain about whether her actions have been for the best. Doubt is a complex, inconclusive and yet satisfying modern drama, in other words; and it receives a flawlessly intense production from Bowman's Dundee Rep company, led by a magnificently flinty Ann Louise Ross as Sister Aloysius, and a wonderfully complicated and convincing Michael Dylan as Father Flynn, with fine support from Emma Tracey as Sister James, and a powerful Mercy Ojelade as the mother of the boy. Jessica Worrall's austere set shifts quietly but powerfully between towering, chapel-like interior and brief interludes in the rectory garden. And like all good drama, Doubt leaves us with few answers; yet brings us together in considering a profound range of questions about how we punish wrongdoing and protect victims, while still leaving space for doubt, for understanding, and even for forgiveness. Laura Lovemore and Lee Harris in Nun of Your Business | Tommy Ga-Ken Wan This week's Play, Pie and Pint drama, Nun Of Your Business, by contrast, is a show that might have been designed to be undermined by the fact that its run coincides with this week of mourning. An unsubtle small-scale farce by James Peake, set in the tatty gift shop of a struggling Glasgow church called Saint Boaby's On The Knob, it had to be stripped at short notice of its ruder jokes about the church hierarchy, leaving an already feeble comic situation more or less hopelessly weakened. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The story involves the church's money-grubbing Mammy Superior, played with a desperate intensity by Pauline Goldsmith, trying to boost the parish fortunes by impressing a visiting prelate from Rome with a new miracle-working relic she claims to have discovered. Add in a handsome local cat-burglar in nun drag, a benign but dim-witted young nun - played in fine comic style by Laura Lovemore - who turns out to have Christ-like qualities, and a dead prelate in the sacristy, and you have a play that could only have survived this week by combining a serious satirical intention with some brilliant comic writing; best, perhaps, just to note that Nun of Your Business had neither of those assets, and to move on.
The Guardian
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Inside Giovanni's Room review – pulsing dance retelling of James Baldwin novel
In the centre of a minimal stage, set designer Jacob Hughes has placed a single room. It's a cube, separated from the outside world; a refuge, an escape, or perhaps a trap. It effectively sucks your attention, just as it sucks in David, the protagonist in James Baldwin's 1956 novel Giovanni's Room, and what happens in here explodes his life. Literary adaptations in dance are fraught with pitfalls, predominantly how to express the intricacy and specificity of thousands of words through movement only. 'There are no mothers-in-law in ballet,' George Balanchine famously said. Here it is aunts: there's no way you'd know the woman in red is David's aunt (unless you read the synopsis, which is recommended) but perhaps it doesn't matter. What dance can do is express Aunt Ellen's disapproval though her superior gait and dismissive flick of the wrists. There is a lot that is said through bodies alone in this new retelling by Phoenix Dance Theatre and the company's artistic director Marcus Jarrell Willis. The way in the opening scene, David (Aaron Chaplin) moves as if his body's not entirely under his control, almost tripping himself up, a shorthand for the physical urges that will drive him off course when he meets handsome bartender Giovanni (Tony Polo). There's the dance between the two men, skirting each other, with nerves and reticence and then the dawning certainty of a connection; with hunger and tenderness. There's an urgency pushing at the movement throughout, the pulse of a city's nightlife, the club scenes cleverly threaded with slivers of styles that look at times like the 1920s, at others the 2020s – Willis brings a currency and vernacular groove to his choreography. There's some nice craft: the opening of Act II – snapshots of David and Giovanni's relationship between blackouts, the tension stretched, especially when life outside Giovanni's room encroaches – is very effective. But it feels as if there are depths and details of Baldwin's text unilluminated, sometimes plot, sometimes the different textures of fear and anxiety, hatred and self-hatred. And there's a claustrophobia in Marc Strobel's layered score that becomes grating, the volume ramped up to create 'atmosphere', as if they don't trust that the dance could speak for itself. At Dundee Rep, 12 March; Northern Stage, Newcastle, 19-20 March; Birmingham REP, 28 May; Liverpool Playhouse, 5 June; and Sadler's Wells East, London, 11-14 June
