Overly reverent, underpowered productions can make Pinter seem horribly portentous, but his pauses are there for solid, dramatic reasons. We should be glued to the dialogue’s power of suggestion in the poetically constructed rhythms, but with Harmston’s fleet-but-flat approach this three-act play whistles along without an interval in 100 minutes. The surface text is played so literally, so fast, that the actors race through the interrogation scenes as if doing a memory-testing speed-run.Consequently, the all-important subtext remains dormant and we remain fatally disengaged. Scales manages a nice line in comic non-sequiturs but the humour should leaven the play’s potentially thrilling undercurrents, which are rarely disturbed by Harmston’s less than commanding grip.A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday’s newspaper. IVO POGORELICH has always been a controversial pianist but, to judge from his latest CD of Chopin’s four Scherzos and the benefit recital he gave in aid of the historic sites of Vukovar, his eccentricity follows a certain pattern. His all-Chopin programme on Monday looked, on paper, your average two hours, without encores It lasted at least 20 minutes longer. One of Pogorelich’s several gifts is a wonderfully focused sound.

Launching the C minor Polonaise – if launching is the right word for the leisurely, wayward tempo he adopted – his left hand octaves sounded huge, as if he were pushing open the great bronze gates of a structure too immense to size up. Never mind that Chopin’s score suggests something initially more understated – yet with more impetus, this was a strong, strange alternative view. The F sharp minor Polonaise, Op 44, began more conventionally, proud and pompous, though with the left hand overbalancing the right, until in the delicate contrasting section, Pogorelich’s relish for the most refined and delicate sonorities threatened to bring progress to a halt. The piece seemed to drag on for ever.
What might he do with the Funeral March Sonata? The opening motto was, again, enormously enlarged, though Pogorelich didn’t include it in the repeat. The second subject was slowed down a lot, too, and rather heavy- handed, while the central development was distorted by having some bars virtually doubled in length No wonder the whole movement seemed disjointed. The Scherzo – a real killer – went well, though again Pogorelich’s left hand was too loud for his right.

In the Trio section he made some ravishing sounds, while lingering on certain notes in a rather mysterious way.And he took the Funeral March itself at a sensible tempo, though it got a bit slower as it wore on, and the central tune settled down at a slower pace that, unfortunately, suggested a rather boring walk. The celebrated fourth movement was a mysterious blur – most people would probably agree that it is a mysterious movement – without any accents added (which pianists often apply) but continuous rumble from the right pedal.After the interval, in the three Op 59 Mazurkas, Pogorelich took every opportunity to show off his beautifully varied touch and feeling for independent strands within textures. But it was very hard to follow a line through these pieces, or even make sense of their rhythms. The effect was distinctly quizzical.By now the pattern of Pogorelich’s pendulum-like nature was clear. And so it was in the Third Sonata, with the more relaxed passages of the opening movement bell-like and lingering, the middle section of the Scherzo so stretched out one sometimes wondered when the next note was coming, and the third movement excruciatingly slow. And yet the main part of the Scherzo was deliciously fluent and light and, in the finale, Pogorelich at last found the sense of continuity and purpose which had eluded him for most of the evening.. Sean Connery has touched down north of the Border and so have I.

Global screen superstar, Scotland’s biggest export next to whisky, and her most prominent tax exile, ranged on one side of the case; a humble English theatre critic on the other Surely no connection Ah, but wait a moment. Connery is here – using up a few of the precious days allowed him per year by the Inland Revenue – to deliver what turns out to be an emotional, self-scripted election rally speech in support of the Scottish National Party. I, meanwhile, am here to talk about the cultural Zeitgeist with David Greig, the playwright who is, by general consent, the most gifted and prolific of the vibrant new wave of Scottish dramatists that includes David Knives in Hens Harrower and Stephen Passing Places Greenhorn. Now it just so happens that Connery was the comically dominating offstage presence in Greig’s Caledonia Dreaming, a 1997 play that put pre-devolutionary Scotland on the psychiatrist’s couch by following a collection of characters as they chased around the place on a summer night when Connery is rumoured to be in residence at Edinburgh’s top hotel. Cut to April 1999, and an amused Greig admits that Connery could no longer function in that play as a unifying, fantasy-figured icon of Scottish success.
The local press have turned hostile towards him (sniping at such anomalies as a great Patriot accepting an officer to promote Suntory Crest, a Japanese blended whisky), and the Kosovo crisis could not have come at a worse time, electorally speaking, for a Nationalist party. So who would he replace him with, if the play were given a revival? Greig thinks for a moment and replies, with typically playful humour, “Irvine Welsh”.Chatting to this softly-spoken young playwright, in the lounge bar of an anonymous hotel in a Glasgow railway complex, is a bit like conducting an interview with Samuel Beckett in a row of dustbins.

Transit areas, borders, stop-off points that are neither one place nor the other, and cultural no-mans-lands, are Greig’s principal imaginative terrain. This is the case in a text-based play like Europe (1994), which projects his preoccupation with Scottishness on to a redundant railway station in a decaying, unnamed central European town that has, historically, suffered all the indignities and identity crises of being a mere border between rival powers.It’s also true of the pieces he makes using the collaborative working methods of his own company, Suspect Culture, where text tends to be the last element added to an experience that lays as much emphasis on the eloquence of stylised gesture and musical form. Airport for example, was a droll and touching search for the “Real Scotland or the real anywhere” in the vast, limbo-like transit lounge that is the modern airport and employed a mixed nationality cast. Cultural cusps are to Greig what thistles were to Hugh MacDiarmid, so, at this watershed in Scotland’s identity, he’s just the right man to quiz about how his generation of Scottish dramatists relate to their country’s dramatic heritage, respond to the present and view their future.One of the seven new pieces by Greig that will be premiered in 1999 is the haunting and snappily titled The Cosmonaut’s last message to the woman he once loved in the former Soviet Union, which is just about to open in a Paines Plough touring production directed by Vicky Featherstone. Taking place both in outer space and in various European locations, it contains a scene in which a woman fantasises about retreating to the Isle of Skye and learning Gaelic: “The children can go to school on the Internet,” she remarks, blissfully unaware of any contradiction.