In Eve Jo Clifford presents a gentle and touching narrative charting her progress from a boy called John never comfortable in his own skin to her present contented middle-aged woman.  She has the advantage in telling her story of being an accomplished playwright and is supported by an excellent but simple staging.

In Douglas Maxwell's The Whiphand  a fiftieth birthday party disintegrates into a domestic squabble set against the moral case for making reparation for the family's apparent involvement in slave-owning several generations previously. Scars and hidden animosities surface and hypocrisy over modern misdeeds is uncovered as an excellent ensemble cast move surely through Maxwell's closely woven story.  Reparation may be on the cards but simple apologies for lesser evils are not forthcoming.

Not many world champions can have come out of Kirkcaldy and the least likely must surely be Jocky Wilson twice world darts champion.  Jocky Wilson Said has him reminiscing and hallucinating with only a cactus for company in the Nevada desert having lost touch thanks to the demon drink with the party he's travelling with to a tournament in Las Vegas.

Grant O'Rourke plays him as a warm, humorous and likeable man and also creates a wealth of characters from his cronies in the pub darts of Kirkcaldy where Wilson started to his rival and friend the Londoner Eric Bristow.  It's a lovely show full of fun but this is Jocky when he was doing well and says nothing of the downward slide in health and wealth that was to come.  Maybe that's material for a future work.

Though written in 1936 Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony was not performed until 1961 and made its first appearance outside the Soviet Union at the Edinburgh Festival the following year.  I spent that summer working in Edinburgh and remember standing in the Usher Hall (I assume a student concession in those days) listening to Shostakovich under the young Gennadi Rhozhdestvensky and falling in love with the music.  I think that was the Fifth rather than the Fourth however.  It remains one of my favourite pieces and I've heard it often since because it's quite popular.

The Fourth is not heard so often and given that it required the combined forces of the RSNO and the Mariinsky Orchestra of St Petersburg in the Usher Hall last night to provide sufficient players to satisfy the demands of the score I doubt if I will ever hear it again live in my lifetime.

From the opening bars which burst out in wave after wave of shattering sound to the final single note from the celesta with which the symphony ends I was transfixed.  A glorious piece of music.