Coffee-Table Notes

It's not hard to see why Lemn Sissay was the obvious choice to adapt Benjamin Zephaniah's teenage novel, Refugee Boy, for the stage. Zephaniah's book tells the story of fourteen year old Ethiopian boy who is forced to flee his homeland following a violent civil war in his homeland. As Alem and his father take flight to London, a litany of thwarted attempts at asylum and institutional red tape ensues. While Sissay was born near Wigan in Lancashire, his mother too left Ethiopia for England. That was in 1966, when she was pregnant with Sissay, who, for most of the next two decades, was shunted from foster home to children's home by a care system that was bound by less explicitly hostile but equally bureaucratic measures. By his late teens, Sissay was working with a community publishing company in Manchester, and by twenty-one had published his first book of poems. Tender Fingers in A Clenched Fist was a street-smart collection that could be said to have picked u

Dundee Rep Three stars There's a whiff of anarchy about Agatha Christie's much loved murder mystery yarn, revived here by Kenny Miller, who puts Christie's island-set affair in an impossibly chic drawing room complete with catwalk, bar and a rhinoceros skeleton on top. It's as if by putting ten thoroughly ghastly archetypes of her age in the same room and bumping them off one by one, she's attempting to wipe out an entire society. The fact that the opening scene where the ten strangers meet for the first time resembles something out of Big Brother makes Christie's righteous indignation at such a motley crew of boy racers, corrupt coppers, dried-out doctors, well-heeled fops and career girls on the make even more justified. While none of this is pushed to the fore in an at times unintentionally funny rendition as Dundee Rep's ensemble cast navigate their way through Christie's cut-glass period demotic, it still simmers beneath the play's

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars It's telling that King's panto stalwart Allan Stewart's final solo number of his two-hour top light entertainment extravaganza is accompanied by a series of projected images of his colourful show-business back pages. It's even more so that the images give way to a pictorial roll-call of bygone comedy greats. As Stewart does an impression of each, it's as if he's taking stock, not just of his own successful career that has seen him make the move from club turn to TV star to panto legend, but of a bygone form that refuses to lie down and die. By drafting in his yuletide sparring partners, Andy Gray and Grant Stott, Stewart can play with their comedic chemistry further, while vintage-styled female sextet, The Tootsie Rollers, ventriloquist Paul Zerdin and Britain's Got Talent graduate Edward Reid make up a full and versatile supporting cast. There is also a big-voiced star turn from Kate Stewart, daughter of

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars In the post Sochi Winter Olympics fall-out, it's clear that winning and losing are about a lot more than medals. The Made in China company's hour-long dissection of competition and the need for affirmation by coming out on top may be an infinitely more intimate affair than the circuses and bread of any international sporting event, but the end result is the same hollow victory. Christopher Brett Bailey, Jess Latowicki and Ira Brand already have their names in lights as they warm up with an opening lap of honour while dressed in shorts, vest and dayglo wigs before things get too serious. Over three rounds, the trio try to prove who's best via a series of tests worthy of reality TV. These range from getting the audience to hurl sweets at them so they can try and catch them, to seeing how many marshmallows they can stuff into their mouths. Finally, the audience are asked to vote on the perceived attributes of those onstage, unti

When director and designer Kenny Miller was growing up, mystery was everywhere about the house. This came in the form of a stack of Agatha Christie novels lapped up by his mother. The young Miller had never touched them until one night when the 1945 film adaptation of Christie's 1939 novel, And Then There Were None, was broadcast on television. Originally published under the more contentious title of Ten Little Niggers until it was changed for the US edition, Christie's pot-boiler drew inspiration from a British nursery rhyme, and charted how ten people are lured to an island by persons unknown, whereupon they are picked off one by one in a manner already set down by the rhyme. Miller was smitten, and, with his mother's approval, turned his attention to the mini Agatha Christie library he already had access to. While this may go some way to explaining some of Miller's directorial choices over the years, from a compendium of true life Glasgow murder stories, Blood

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars “Wasps only sting people they love,” observes Andrea, the troubled teen at the centre of Philip Ridley's devastating monologue near the beginning of a production by the Supporting Wall company first seen at the 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. If that is the case, the litany of ills inflicted on her that are gradually laid bare over the next seventy-five minutes would surely fulfil every yearning for love that Andrea has ever felt. As it is, as she's left alone by feckless parents, taken advantage of by men who make her feel grown up and pushed to emotional extremes just to survive, it becomes ever clearer exactly how damaged Andrea is. Gemma Whelan's fearless performance as Andrea initially sucker-punches the audience with what at first appears to be standard teenage tittle-tattle a la Little Britain's Vicky Pollard. Only when she flips into confrontation mode for the first time does it slowly dawn on us that something i

Summerhall, Edinburgh Four stars It's almost a decade since David Harrower's relentless study of psychosexual politics between a fifty something man and the woman he had a sexual relationship fifteen years earlier when she was twelve premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival. Then, it broke taboos, however ambiguous its stance. Now, as the Hawick-based Firebrand company revive it for a mini tour of intimate spaces, in a post Jimmy Savile climate where 'paedo' is a standard playground insult and the vagaries of 1970s liberalism are being thrown back in their apparent advocates faces, Blackbird looks more troublingly relevant than ever. Yet there's nothing exploitative when Romana Abercromby's Una bursts in on Greg Wagland's Ray at his work-place in Richard Baron's unflinchingly intimate production. Rather, there's an underlying sense of unfinished business, even as the mess the pair made of each other's lives seems to be summed u