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Kings Theatre four stars When Samuel Beckett's second radio play was aired in 1959, notions of conceptual art and installations were in their relative infancy. Yet, as Pan Pan Theatre's sonic and visual interpretation makes clear, this is exactly what Beckett was doing in a work which literally gets inside a man's mind. Onstage, strings of little speakers hang down, surrounding a shrouded structure which looks not unlike a giant bird-cage after dark. Once unveiled, this is revealed as a giant skull, from inside which two actors rake over the ashes of one man's past. As an opening piano overture melds into the sounds of the sea and the dense interior monologue which emerges from it, Gavin Quinn's production presents theatre as art installation. At its centre is Andrew Clancy's skull sculpture, across which Aedin Cosgrove's complex lighting patterns rise and fall, offering tantalising glimpses of actors Andrew Bennett and Aine Ni Mhuiri inside

Eh Joe

Royal Lyceum Theatre four stars It may last no longer than your average TV sit-com, but Samuel Beckett's close-up miniature remains as remarkable in Atom Egoyan's production for Dublin's Gate Theatre as it did when first broadcast on the small screen back in 1966. Michael Gambon's old man stands alone in his bedroom, methodically drawing the curtains across windows and doors, as if cocooning himself from the world outside. Then, sitting on the bed, his face projected onto the gauze curtain that frames the stage, the voices start. Or rather, just the one, that of a disembodied woman from his past who calmly torments him with prodding little litanies of mistreatment of other women that has led to his solitary state. As the words, dreamily intoned by Penelope Wilton, sink in, their full effect looms large on Gambon's face, heavy-lidded, moist-eyed and haunted by regret, self-loathing and lovelessness. Egoyan's cinematic approach lends the play al

Fringe Theatre 2013 - Brand New Ancients – Traverse Theatre – five stars Our Glass House – Wester Hailes – four stars

It may have something to do with the economies of scale, but spoken-word and performance poetry is becoming increasingly prevalent on the Fringe, and Kate Tempest's Brand New Ancients, which takes up the Traverse's late-night slot until this weekend, is a perfect example of an old oral tradition van be reinvented for the twenty-first century. In a South London patois, Tempest's epic seventy-minute verse takes Greek mythology by the scruff of the neck and relocates it to the spit and sawdust streets, where everyday tragedies happen in pubs and houses where the new gods dwell. Initially seen as a scratch performance at Summerhall on last year's Fringe, and now co-produced with Battersea Arts Centre, Brand New Ancients is performed by Tempest with a four-piece band who add a jittering urban back-beat to a story already full of life and soul. Tempest's delivery of a work that resembles a hipper, estuarised take on Tony Harrison's V is beguiling. As her

The Tragedy of Coriolanus

Edinburgh Playhouse four stars If ever there was a sound more perfectly suited to Shakespeare's high-ranking tragedy of power and glory involving a Roman warlord who can't accept the will of the common people, it is the pomp and little circumstance of heavy metal. Such potential for a bombastic borderline fascist rally is something which iconoclastic Chinese director Lin Zhaohua clearly recognised for this epic reading of Coriolanus for the Beijing People's Art Theatre, which puts Chinese rock bands Miserable Faith and Suffocated either side of a stage that houses a multitude of bamboo spear wielding extras who make up the Roman hordes. Chinese superstar Pu Cunxin struts the stage in a flowing cape and chest-plate as Martius, who is granted the title of Coriolanus after waging war successfully on the Volsces, led by the scheming Aufidius. This makes for a stunning series of set-pieces, which finds assorted noblemen picking up microphones and raging at the world

Samuel Beckett At EIF - Michael Colgan Goes On

The first time producer and director Michael Colgan brought I'll Go On to Edinburgh, he and actor Barry McGovern were chased by police. That was in 1986, when McGovern was performing his solo stage adaptation of Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, at the Assembly Rooms as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Colgan and McGovern had been out with a bucket of paste putting up posters for the production by the Gate Theatre, Dublin, which Colgan had been artistic director of for three years, when the local constabulary intervened. Twenty-seven years on, Colgan is still at the Gate, and the pair are returning to Edinburgh with McGovern revisiting I'll Go On for a season of Beckett works as part of Edinburgh International Festival. Rather than opt for the familiar terrain of Beckett's great stage works such as Waiting For Godot, Endgame and Happy days, however, Colgan and EIF have opted to present stagings of work originally penned for

The Islanders - Amy Mason and Eddie Argos Relive Their Teenage Romance

They don't make bedsit romances like they used to. Once the preserve of kitchen-sink angry young men and bookish young women, both of whom cling onto their squalor and each other for comfort before falling demonstratively apart, these days such fictional scenarios are more likely to be carried out via Facebook updates or Twitter. Cue The Islanders, a reassuringly old-fashioned romance written and performed by Amy Mason alongsideEddie Argos, frontman of arch avant-popsters Art Brut, who provides the live soundtrack for this lo-fi musical alongside award-winning folk singer and musician, Jim Moray. Mason's script tells the story of a couple of teenage lovers who run away from home and shack up in a tatty basement that gradually tears them apart. Only when they flee their grotty one-room existence for a holiday in the Isle of Wight do things start to change, and even though it doesn't last, their love affair binds the pair together forever. The thing is, Mason's p

OMEGA - Michael Begg Meets blackSKYwhite

When composer Michael Begg went to see Bertrand's Toys, a production by Russian physical theatre fabulists, blackSKYwhite, he was smitten. At that time, east Lothian-bsased Begg was about to release Consolation, his first album under the name, Human Greed, named after a theatre production he put on in 1999. The theatre Begg had been involved in up to that point was very much focused on text-based narratives in a more or less linear style. Bertrand's Toys and blackSKYwhite changed everything. “ I was blown away,” says Begg. “They came in and did it, and it was the loudest, scariest thing I'd ever seen. It touched me in a deep way, sand completely exploded what I thought was possible in a theatrical space. I made a note then that this was a company I'd very much like to work with.” Begg tracked down an address for the company, and eventually met blackSKYwhite's director and visionary, Dimitri Aryupin, when the company played in London. A decade on, and Begg