Coffee-Table Notes

“Darkness is important,” says theatre designer Kai Fischer as he clicks through a series of images on his laptop for Entartet, his performed installation which arrives at Edinburgh's off-piste Old Ambulance Depot art-space this week. Entartet is the German word for degenerate, and Fischer's stand-alone visual and audio work draws its inspiration from Nazi Germany's notorious Degenerate Art Exhibition that took place in Munich from July to November 1937. Arising from Adolf Hitler's furious stance against what he perceived to be the threat of abstract and modernist art, Die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst was the brain-child of Hitler's right-hand man Joseph Goebbels and favourite painter Adolf Ziegler. The pair confiscated some 650 artworks from German museums for an event designed to run parallel with what was considered to be the far purer Great German Art Exhibition. The Degenerate Art Exhibition featured works by Chagall, Kandinsky and Klee, as well as pieces by

It's been a long road from Beryl Battersby to Miss Havisham for Paula Wilcox. Yet, as the Manchester-born actress arrives in Aberdeen this week to play the latter in Jo Clifford's stage adaptation of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, both characters seem to be bookends of a sort on a career which has seen Wilcox move from 1970s TV sit-com star and household name to classical stage actress with ease. Not that the still youthful-looking sixty-two year old's career is over yet. Far from it, in fact, if recent stage turns in everything from a musical role in La Cage Aux Folles and playing an ageing rock chick in Stella Feehily's play, Dreams of Violence, for Max Stafford Clark's Out of Joint Company, to a new play by Jonathan Harvey at Liverpool Playhouse, are anything to go by. It's just that, there's something about the hopelessly romantic Beryl in Jack Rosenthal's still fresh sit-com, The Lovers, in which Wilcox led Richard Beckinsale's Ge

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars ` When a group of teenage asylum seekers and their pals took on a system that sanctioned dawn raids that resulted in incarceration and deportation, they not only shamed the politicians who allowed such atrocities to happen. They also united a working class community and changed lives forever. The fact that this true story reimagined here as a large-scale musical happened less than a decade ago on the streets of Glasgow is an even more disgraceful pointer to how human rights are casually breached on our own doorstep. Cora Bissett’s production for the Citizens, National Theatre of Scotland and a host of other partners may sucker-punch the audience with a knowingly schmaltzy if slightly too self-referential feel-good opening. The emotional impact of the show, however, as conceived by director Cora Bissett with writer David Greig and composers Soom T, Patricia Panther and the Kielty Brothers under the musical direction of Hilary Brooks, is

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 5 stars It's been five years since Morna Pearson's last main-stage play, but this new work more than confirms the promise of one of the freshest, most fearless and taboo-bustingly unique voices to be heard anywhere right now. In its depiction of how behind closed doors inter-familial dysfunctions can squeeze the life out of relationships beyond, Pearson's wild and dangerous demotic also manages to be both scabrously funny and damningly bleak. Geoffrey is a thirty-something art teacher who lives with his mother Edie, and is bullied by the kids at school. When he reads that he's in the top ten sexiest professions, Geoffrey takes a notion to start dating after advice from Lynn Kennedy's former pupil turned supermarket check-out girl, Evelyn. After a couple of false starts, Geoffrey meets Clara, who, as played by Molly Innes, awakens something in him on the dance-floor long suppressed. Geoffrey even takes Clara home to meet Edi

Rufus Hound takes his work seriously. Given that the formerly  flamboyantly-moustached comedian best-known until recently as a panellist on Keith Lemon's abrasively smutty ITV2 game-show, Celebrity Juice, has just taken over the exhausting lead role in One Man, Two Guvnors, such dedication to his craft is probably a good thing. Richard Bean's 1960s-set adaptation of Goldoni's eighteenth century comic romp, The Servant of Two Masters, after all, all but reinvented a tireless James Corden when he originated the role of underworld stooge Francis Henshall in National Theatre artistic director Nicholas Hytner's production. With Welsh actor Owain Griffiths having stepped into Corden's sizeable shoes on the West End, Hound's appearance in the touring version of One Man, Two Guvnors, which arrives in Glasgow next week, might potentially open up similar doors for Hound. Especially now he's quit Celebrity Juice to appear in another stage play, Utopia, a

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars There’s something naively life-affirming about Colin Higgins’ love story between well-heeled nihilistic teenager Harold and seventy-nine year old free-spirit, Maude. Higgins’ own stage version of the 1971 cult film he scripted for director Hal Ashby was a commercial flop on Broadway, and it’s not difficult to see why from Theatre Jezebel’s Glasgay! revival. It’s not that it’s bad. It’s just that a black comedy based around a kid who fakes multiple suicides inbetween hanging around funerals makes more sense now than it probably did during that awkward period in American social history when the summer of love had given way to something darker and more cynical. While Kenny Miller’s vivid, scarlet-coloured production taps into the play’s period oddity, it also shines a beacon on how disaffected youth can be woken up to life by their elders in a way that might easily be applied to today. Miller allows his cast to breeze through what becomes an

In the west end of London, a huge old higgledy-piggledy house appears  to have burst through its walls and been tilted to one side by its foundations resting somewhat creakily on a post-war bomb-site. As an image of a dusty old England that looks fit to collapse, it couldn't be more perfect for Graham Linehan's new stage version of classic Ealing comedy, the Ladykillers, which tours to Edinburgh this week prior to dates in Aberdeen and Glasgow. Judging by its spring dates, this darkly comic yarn about a gang of villains who move into rooms in an eccentric old lady's dilapidated house close to the railway station in order to plan a security van heist has more than survived the translation. Much of this is down to Linehan's collaboration with director Sean Foley. Both, as Foley somewhat appropriately puts it, “have previous.” Linehan, of course, is the Dublin-born co-creator and co-writer with Arthur Matthews of seminal clerical comedy, Father Ted. Since t