Coffee-Table Notes

When David MacLennan founded A Play, A Pie and A Pint at Oran Mor in 2004, his first season of lunchtime plays with refreshments included in the ticket price was a modest affair. Eight years on, and having presented some 250 new works, as MacLennan gets set to receive the Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland's inaugural CATS Whiskers award for Outstanding Achievement, A Play, A Pie and A Pint now looks like a genuine theatrical phenomenon that was seriously ahead of the game. With initial seasons seemingly pulled together with the help of MacLennan's extensive address book of Scottish theatre movers and shakers, it was as if those seemingly left in the theatrical wilderness after grants for companies such as the MacLennan-led Wildcat company had been cut had suddenly rediscovered their mojo. With no tradition of lunchtime theatre in Scotland, A Play, A Pie and A Pint served up works from veteran writers such as Peter MacDougall that were more serious than the...

There are surprisingly few signs of starriness attached to Alan Cumming. On the one hand, the Aberfeldy-born actor has recently become a living room regular by way of a recurring role in the Ridley and Tony Scott produced legal drama, The Good Wife. Yet, as he returns to Scotland to play the title role in a very singular version of Macbeth with the National Theatre of Scotland, he prefers to station himself in the darkest, most faraway corner of the city centre bar/ restaurant he's conducting post-rehearsal interviews in. This is a little bit different from when he last appeared onstage on home turf. That was in a flashy version of Euripides' The Bacchae, which, as with Macbeth, was directed by NTS associate John Tiffany. Then, during a day of interviews at the Groucho Club in London, Cumming seemed more ebullient in a way that matched his turn as original party animal, Dionysus. Almost four years on and playing one of the most intense roles ever written, Cumm...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars It is more than 30 years since Willy Russell's Thatcher-era two-hander of working-class aspiration first appeared. But with higher education once again becoming the preserve of a privileged elite, there's a contemporary poignancy to what is essentially a platonic rom-com.   Tamara Harvey's touring production, co-produced by the Menier Chocolate Factory and Theatre Royal Bath, nails its Scouse colours to the mast from the off by using orchestral instrumental versions of Beatles songs as pre-show music. When pop got ideas above its station in this way and went classical, the legion of mop-topped autodidacts that came out of the closet were clearly kin of Russell's Rita. Claire Sweeney is almost too perfectly cast as the gobby hairdresser who breezes into the book-lined study of clapped-out Open University lecturer Frank, played with warm-hearted diffidence by Matthew Kelly. As they move through a succession of 1980s cosy cardies, there...

Gerard Murphy is looking back. As the Irish actor returns to the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow for the first time in fourteen years to appear in Samuel Beckett's solo play, Krapp's Last Tape, it's an all too appropriate thing to be doing. Krapp, after all focuses on an old man rewinding his past via reels of tapes on which he's charted his hopes, ambitions and subsequent disappointments ever since he was a young man. Not that Murphy had much in the way of failure during his time at the Citz, which began an intense three years in 1974, and continued intermittently until 1998, towards the end of what is now regarded as the theatre's golden era under the three-way artistic directorship of Giles Havergal, Robert David MacDonald and Philip Prowse. With Krapp forming part of a double bill with another Beckett miniature, Footfalls, Murphy returns to the Citz at the end of incoming director Dominic Hill's first season, which has tempted other prodigals su...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 4stars Love, death and everything inbetween fire this inspired double bill by director Ramin Gray's invigorated ATC company, who tour Sarah Kane's free-associative meditation on the painful highs and lows of an obsessive and possibly self-destructive amour to the theatre it was first seen in 1998. That was in a production by future National Theatre of Scotland director Vicky Featherstone. Played fourteen years on in tandem with Cazimir Liske's translation of Russian writer Ivan Viripaev's equally serious dissection of how romance can be the greatest of deceivers, the plays are fascinatingly revealed as mutual flipsides of the same coin. The same four actors line up side by side in each to lay bare things that are more often left unsaid. In Crave, they stand on a platform in pyjamas and nighties, as if what comes out of their mouths over the next forty minutes is some kind of bedtime nightmare. In Illusions, they sit on chair...

Pilrig St Paul's Church, Edinburgh Saturday May 19 th 2012 Anyone au fait with Sacred Music, BBC 4's two-series trawl through the history of choral worship, from plainchant to polyphony and beyond, will be as versed in the integral relationship between music and church architecture as they are with presenter Simon Russell-Beale's penchant for gazing earnestly into the middle distance while sporting regulation arts mandarin baggy black suits or else peering longingly at Harry Christophers' media-friendly choir, The Sixteen, perform especially for him. Leith Walk on an all-Edinburgh Scottish Cup Final Day a couple of hours after Hibs are unceremoniously gubbed by Hearts might seem a somewhat apposite locale for such ruminations to be put into spectacular practice. As a curtain-raiser to what is Quebecois electronicist Tim Hecker's second ever Scots date, however, witnessing such radically different brethrens gathered on either side of the street looks ...

Dundee Contemporary Arts April 7th-June 10th 2012 4 stars It makes sense that the site of DCA used to be Scott Myles’ playground. Back then he was a skater-boy and it was a bricks-and-mortar garage reimagined as the sort of makeshift skate-park for local heroes and future high-flyers which under the Scottish Government’s recently imposed changes to public entertainment licensing laws would today be illegal. For his first major UK solo show, the Dundee born and trained artist has reclaimed the building’s interior with an even more playful flourish in DCA’s latest world-turned-upside-down subversions of everyday work, rest and play. Mass production consumables are reinvented for some half-remembered dreamscape as retro Habitat reproductions are painted black and stuck to the first gallery wall, while a swivel-seat skeleton on a chat show platform has a giant prism where its seat should be. ‘ STABILA (Black and Blue)' is a series of twenty-four screen-printed im...