Caledonia gives reviewers a 'hard left'

Caledonia, the NTS's latest large-scale production for the Edinburgh international festival, is no Black Watch: it has disappointed most of the critics. Alistair Beaton's play, about Scotland's ill-fated colony in Panama, "leaves the heart untouched", said the Guardian, more in sorrow than anger; Charles Spencer of the Telegraph went full-throttle, calling it "a dreary piece of political agit-prop ... a punishing night of Brechtian parable theatre with a hard-left agenda". He concluded that it was "an evening whose mixture of sanctimony and incompetence proves well-nigh unendurable". Don't give yourself a hernia, Charlie!