Theatre reviews: Rollers Forever | Othello

Rollers Forever, King’s Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★

Othello, Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow ★★★

It’s Halloween weekend; and if you’re stumped for a fancy dress idea, you could do a lot worse than to get into full Bay City Rollers 1970s fan gear, and cut along to the Edinburgh King’s to catch the Rollers Forever tribute show on tour.

Founded in Edinburgh around 1970, the Bay City Rollers made their big breakthrough in 1974 and rapidly leapt from the UK album charts to international fame, with a playlist consisting mainly of sharp, upbeat cover versions of great 1960s rock-and-roll hits, including Bye Bye Baby, Keep on Dancing and the iconic Shang-A-Lang.

Beyond the music, they were adored in Scotland for their cheeky tartan glam-rock style, featuring big hair, bell-bottom jeans and denim shirts with large tartan patches; so when Danny McCahon’s 2025 tribute show takes to the theatre trail, it’s hardly surprising that the audience includes its fair share of women of a certain age with tartan patches on their shirts, as well as the odd man sporting a wee tartan scarf.

Beginning and ending at Croy station, McCahon’s likeable and affectionate show tells the flashback story of two ardent teenage Rollers fans, Jenny and Susan, and how they scream, swoon, scheme and patch their way through the peak Rollers summer of 1975, when news of the band’s imminent departure for a US tour sets the girls panicking that they may never meet their heroes before they leave Scotland forever.

Cue a train trip to Edinburgh in pursuit of their favourite Rollers, assorted shenanigans in Princes Street Gardens, and an eventual return - of course - to Croy, and real life. And if the drama sometimes seems slightly too self-contained to engage fully with the eager audience, there’s no doubting the sheer good-hearted energy of director Liz Carruthers’ production, the youthful vividness and flair of Chris Stuart Wilson’s choreography, and the sterling efforts of the 12-strong cast - led by a deliciously daft Chiara Sparkes and Fiona Wood as Susan and Jenny - to do justice to this extraordinary slice of Scottish pop-culture history.

The Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow, meanwhile, plays host to a production of Shakespeare’s Othello - co-produced with Northern Stage in Newcastle and Home, Manchester - that almost drowns in the sheer sorrow of the play itself.

Set - at least visually - during the Falklands War of the early 1980s, Anthony Almeida’s production certainly succeeds, with great and depressing force, in making the point that the rank sexism which kills Desdemona and her sole defender Emilia is still as present and instantly recognisable in the macho culture of recent decades as it was when Othello first appeared, 420 years ago.

The story essentially tells how a great black commander of the Venetian army, Othello, chooses to believe his junior officer Iago, who plots to destroy Othello and his beautiful young aristocratic wife Desdemona by suggesting that she is a faithless whore.

The idea that Desdemona’s testimony of her own innocence - or Emillia’s, in support - could ever outweigh this man-to-man smear campaign never occurs to Othello, as the plot spirals towards tragedy; and the problem with Antony Almeida’s production is that it often fails to foreground the qualities that make the play compelling and illuminating, despite this grim tragic momentum.

Far too much of Shakespeare’s beautiful text is therefore rushed or thrown away, as the eight strong company try to race through it, rather than working with its intense theatrical energy; the drama also plays out on a boot-camp set that is misconceived at best - a high tilting platform that needlessly distances the actors from the audience, compounded at the play’s climax by a stage-high wire cage that muffles both voices and emotions.

And only the best dramatic efforts of a hard-working cast - led by Dwane Walcott as Othello, with Phoebe Smyth as Desdemona — succeed in salvaging the basic elements of Shakespeare’s drama, and holding them together, to an exceptionally bitter end.

Rollers Forever is at the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh until 31 October; Othello is at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, until 7 November.

The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today

Enjoying the Arts & Culture journalism on scotsman.com? Make it easier to find by selecting us as a preferred Google source

Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here