Coffee-Table Notes

NEIL Cooper  is theatre critic for The Herald, and a freelance writer. When did working in the media first start becoming an ambition? From a very early age, I guess, but I had absolutely no idea how you went about it. I was a print junkie, first with Marvel comics and science fiction fanzines, then later with the music papers, which were at their post-punk peak when I was a teenager. The NME was my 'bible', and I started picking up music fanzines from Probe, which was the hip record shop in Liverpool. My favourite was one from Manchester, called City Fun, which was a deeply pretentious scene gossip-sheet with live reviews and record reviews. It was extremely opinionated and dripped sarcasm from every page. At the time, I didn't realise it was probably produced by a bunch of pseudy students. But I still didn't have a clue about seizing the means of production for oneself. I was also influenced by Tony Wilson on Granada Reports. One minute he'd be reading t

Derek Riddell is probably too tall to be playing JM Barrie, the troubled author of Peter Pan. At five foot three, Barrie's stature is considerably shorter than the 5'11 and a half Glasgow-born actor familiar from his TV turn in American hit, Ugly Betty. As Riddell prepares to play Barrie in Peter and Alice, a new play by John Logan directed by Michael Grandage, the power of imagination will clearly come into play on more than just its subject. Given too that other portrayals of Barrie have been by the likes of the even more unlikely Johnny Depp in Finding Neverland, Riddell shouldn't have too much of a problem. “He was described by most people as this strange little creature,” Riddell explains, “and he had this really strange voice, but we don't want to be too weird about it. He was a very complex character. One minute he could be witty and charming and captivating to the boys, the next he could go into these black silences, and there's a real dark

King's Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars When Alfred Uhry's quietly political play first appeared in 1987, the idea of America voting in a black President at all, let alone for a second term, was a long way off. A quarter of a century on, Uhry's intimate story of the increasingly co-dependent relationship between an elderly Georgian matriarch and her chauffeur during the civil rights years is a necessary reminder of how far things have come. More importantly, perhaps, than the back projections of Martin Luther King and other protesters from the era in director David Esbjornson's touring production, Uhry has sketched a warm and human story about friendship, ageing and mortality. It opens in 1948, with banker Boolie Werthan attempting to hire a chauffeur for his mother, the cantankerous seventy-two year old of the play's title, who has just crashed her own car for the final time. At first resistant to her new employee, Miss Daisy's initial suspicions and in-gr

There's something quietly inscrutable and really rather regal about Don Warrington. This is as apparent in conversation with the actor whose long television career began in iconic 1970s TV sit-com, Rising Damp as it is onstage in the touring production of Driving Miss Daisy, which arrives in Edinburgh this week. It's something to do with the perfectly enunciated and ever so slightly plummy drawl of his voice, but there's a presence there too and a sense of containment that suggests a stillness and an air of authority. Such characteristics make Warrington perfect, then, to play Hoke Colburn, the chauffeur to Daisy Werthan, the deep south matriarch who gives Alfred Uhry's 1987 Broadway hit, filmed by Bruce Beresford two years later, its title. Charting the pair's relationship between 1948 and 1973, Uhry's play sees them move through a changing America, as in-built racism gives way to the civil rights movement while Daisy and Hoke's master-servant status gr

Ferry Road, Edinburgh 4 stars In a secret urban garden in the north of the city by night, the earth is about to erupt into explosive life. The audience for this latest site sensitive work by the Vision Mechanics company have already been promenaded down the quiet street beyond from a local hotel, and are sat around the moodily-lit shrubbery while what sounds like the low rumble of cracking earth churns from the headphones each is given as they pass through the gate. In the crepescular glow, a folk lament is sung as smoke billows, until the singing morphs into an unseen woman's voice calling to her lost love. When the young woman finally enters, great-coated and alive with possibility, it's as if she's risen from the ground itself, so at one with the birds and bees twittering and buzzing in our ears does she seem. For her, sex and love are something primal, obsessive and unfettered, and only when her passions are thwarted and the life that drives her is ripped

1. If seeing is believing, what, then, is hearing? Are those sounds – things that go bump in the night, which cut through the air, either of their own volition, or else manipulated and fine-tuned into a shape that some might call music – figments of the imagination? As for watching and listening, those more concentrated, more focused applications of the visual and sonic senses, how do they work? Are perceptions of what we watch or listen to not identical? If so, how can one be moved to tears by a particular sight or sound, while another is left cold by the same experience? On a train that no longer chugs or click-clacks like they used to, but which propels itself with a low rumble, I think of a trip to North Berwick made with David Attenburgh’s favourite sound recordist and former member of Cabaret Voltaire, Chris Watson. Watson was doing a residency at Edinburgh University, and was taking a group of would-be sound recordists on a field-trip to North Berwick. I was writing a piece on W

Dundee Rep 3 stars As the global village gets smaller, so the comedic appeal of Moliere grows more universal. We've known this in Scotland for years, ever since Liz Lochhead ripped into Tartuffe in the 1980s. More recently, poet Roger McGough put a Scouse spin on the same. Now Scots-Asian comic writer Hardeep Singh Kohl and director Jatinda Verma have transposed Patricia Dreyfuss' translation of the French farceur's study of stinginess to a contemporary cartoon India. This lends a pertinence to the tale of Harjinder's thwarted scheme to buy himself a marriage on the cheap, both in its depiction of austerity culture, and of a society where arranged marriages are still prevalent. This makes for a far brighter affair than such observations might imply, as both Harjinder's son Kishore and daughter Dimple attempt to put love before money. While there are some vivid stylings in Verma's youthful-looking production, particularly in Antony Bunsee's de