Coffee-Table Notes

Liquid Room, Edinburgh 4 stars Questions may be asked about who the real head-liners were in this glorious double bill, though in the end it was the songs that mattered. Seeing Green Gartside's revitalised Scritti Politti live at all is a thrill, even if a bottle of cough medicine is on standby to help Gartside's honeyed tones. Opening with the slow skank of The 'Sweetest' Girl's deconstruction of the love song set the bar high, but, coming so soon after providing the live soundtrack to dancer/choreographer Michael Clarke's latest work, Gartside's four-piece band were happy to go through the Scritti back-catalogue without too much analysis. Technology has made it easier to play shiny 1980s hits like The Word Girl and Wood Beez, which sit seamlessly alongside more recent wonders like The Boom Boom Bap. There's one new number, which apparently references Kant's response to cultural relativism, and only Gartside can think his eponymous count

When Birds of Paradise announced their new artistic team in October of this year, it came after a heady year for disability and mixed ability initiatives. The London Paralympics had caught the nation's imagination over the summer more than ever before, while Birds of Paradise's appointment of a three-way team of two joint artistic directors and a creative producer suggested that team-work was even more important in what looks like a major leap forward for the company. The fact that Shona Rattray, Robert Softley Gale and Garry Robson already had a significant track record on projects with Bird of Paradise, as well as the disability arts sector, also meant that they'd effectively come through the company boot room, and were already au fait with what it's about. “One of the nice things is that we already do know each other,” say Rattray, “so we can talk about ideas we've got straight away.” “We worked out last night that it was ten years ago this week tha

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 3 stars There's a moment in Peepolykus' new show when a medium calling on the creator of Sherlock Holmes attempts to enter the room through the window. As the supposed arbiter of the spirit world clambers through the opening, he slips on the ledge, almost coming a cropper on the street below. The fact that the performer playing the spiritual con-man is clearly on his knees hanging on to a window at ground level doesn't prevent at least one first night audience member from gasping audibly at his apparent near miss with gravity. This incident speaks volumes about this comic meditation on truth and artifice in which suspension of disbelief is subject as much as form. It's framed around a faux lecture by PhD candidate Jennifer McGeary, who, along with a couple of actors she's hired to illustrate her spiel, takes a step back in time to meet Dr Doyle himself. The fact that her hired help bear a suspicious resemblance to Peepolyku

Pitlochry Festival Theatre 4 stars In terms of scene-setting, the snow-dappled Perthshire hills beyond the theatre already gave director John Durnin a head start for his production of the classic Irving Berlin-scored musical. While It’s remarkable that David Ives and Paul Blake’s stage version of Michael Curtiz’ 1954 big-screen vehicle for Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye has only been around since 2004, it’s a gift to see a show normally reserved for the commercial circuit in such refreshingly close-up form. Beyond the uber-slick song and dance routines from a twenty-strong cast plus an exuberant ten-piece band, it’s also a fascinatingly telling period piece. Ex GIs turned big-time double act Bob and Phil wind up in an unseasonally sunny Vermont for Christmas with sisters Betty and Judy. With their former general’s hotel in hock, Bob and Phil conspire to put on a benefit gig for the old boy, doing the decent thing with the girls en route. As Bob and Phil, Grant Neal and S

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh 3 stars Before the irresistible rise of the juke-box musical, the rock and roll tribute show was king. Queen too if this warts and all Tina Turner homage is anything to go by, as devisers Pete Brooks and John Miller reclaim the form's simple but effective attributes in Brooks' co-production with Bob Eaton. Eaton is a safe pair of hands, having defined the rock and roll musical while running Liverpool's Everyman Theatre. It is significant there is no writer's credit in what amounts to a strip cartoon summation of church-going teenager Anna Mae Bullock's rise, fall and subsequent reinvention in what's now regarded as Turner's 1980s heyday. This was initially down to Bullock meeting one Ike Turner, a driven musical genius smart enough to see the potential in Bullock's voice enough to put her centre stage. As the pair become entwined personally as well as professionally, Turner's ambition turns to rage, misogyny, drug

How do you go about staging the complete works of Sherlock Holmes? It's a question even Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional pipe-smoking detective hero himself might have trouble with. It's nevertheless one which comically inclined theatre troupe Peepolykus asked themselves when they decided to make a new show. Audiences may or may well find out some kind of answer in The Arthur Conan Doyle Appreciation Society, a new piece scripted by Peepolykus founders Steven Canny and John Nicholson, which opens this week at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre, whose artistic director, Orla O'Loughlin, directs. “We knew that we wanted to write something about Arthur Conan Doyle, and we thought it might be an interesting idea to try and fit every Sherlock Holmes story into one thing,” says Nicholson, who, alongside Peepolykus regular, Javier Marzan and Scottish actress Gabriel Quigley, will be performing in the new show. “We came up with an idea for that, which felt like quite good fun,

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars The guy sitting at the table in the Tron’s Victorian Bar is on his mobile speaking to the wife. He’s on a promise, he reckons, and is about to hit the big time. She’s telling him to go for it, but if he’s on to something, she wants a piece of the action too. So the guy goes back up to the bar, which is when things get really weird for Macbeth. Or that’s the impression you get from Ian Macdonald’s half-hour Gaelic translation of Shakespeare’s Scottish play commissioned by Glasgow Life/Glasch Beo. At the moment, Liz Carruthers’ work-in-progress production (although not advertised as such) is a one-man affair, with Daibhidh Walker playing Macbeth as a leather-jacketed bar-room big man who suddenly finds he’s a contender enough to take on all-comers. While some of the original text’s subtleties may be lost to non-Gaelic speakers, it’s not hard to get the broader gist of things as Walker’s straight out of Shameless Macbeth downs another drink