Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh Three stars If you go down to the woods any night this week, you're in for a big-ish surprise with this new show from Vision Mechanics, which promenades its way after dark en route to some ecologically inclined Shangei-la. With the audience gathered in groups of twenty or so, the show's director and creator Kim Bergsagel and her trusty sidekick lead the throng to an Occupy style camp-site where they introduce us to the wisdom of an enlightened fellow traveller before we're encouraged to eavesdrop on the conversations going on inside the tents. Depending on where you're coming from, these sound either like heated debate or out and out bickering in what looks and sounds like a pastiche of grass-roots activism. With a police bust imminent, we're led down assorted paths, where a film by Robbie Thomson uses shadow puppetry and Ewan Macintyre's eastern-tinged backwoods soundtrack to tell the story of the show's inspiration, Amrit

When Paul Bright's Confessions of A Justified Sinner was first presented by Untitled Projects and the National Theatre of Scotland in 2013, the performance and accompanying exhibition were far from straightforward interpretations of James Hogg's novel, which was presented as a possibly unreliable memoir on the alleged crimes of its narrator, Robert Wringham. Rather, in the hands of director Stewart Laing, playwright Pamela Carter and a network of visual artists and researchers from the 85A collective, Paul Bright's Confessions found actor George Anton relate memories of a legendary stage version of Hogg's book presented in the late 1980s by the maverick figure of radical theatre director  Bright. Anton's monologue was accompanied by scrappy film footage of incidents and rehearsals surrounding Bright's production alongside interviews with Bright's fellow travellers. What emerged from the play alongside the exhibition's meticulously observed archive was a

Tramway, Glasgow Four stars The lights are down on the entire auditorium from the start  of Vanishing Point's magical-realist meditation on how age withers us. With only a triangle of light cast between two grey door-frames, it could be a wake. The vague figures handing out what at first appears to be a production line of new-borns suggest something else again culled from the darkest of science-fiction graphic novels. When a young man on the way to the hospital where his wife has just given birth bumps into an old man in the park, a seemingly chance meeting lurches into a troubling dreamscape that sees the young man become a mere memory of the elder. As a possible escapee from an old people's home, he is by turns pettted and patronised by staff too wrapped up in their own lives to do anything other than care by rote. Devised by director Matthew Lenton with dramaturg Pamela Carter and a cast of eight, Tomorrow is as far away from the spate of plays about ageing that have sprung

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When the once idealistic Renee is asked where her joie de vivre has gone in John Byrne's 1960s update of Chekhov's turn of the century play, it's as heart-breaking an observation as the youngest of the flame-haired Penhalligan brood's own gradual withering in the 1ifeless limbo of navy-occupied Dunoon. Renee's eldest sibling Olive has long settled for a hum-drum existence, while Maddy's studied boredom as she sleepwalks through a loveless marriage is a sharp contrast to Renee's youthful vivacity. When the sisters extended family and the similarly exiled navy officers pass each other to a soundtrack of fractured piano chords at the start of Andy Arnold's production, it is as if they are very politely waiting for death while far-off London swings. Hope comes in the shape of a portable record player bought by the family's ageing Doctor for Renee's twentieth birthday along with some already outmoded trad-jazz records.

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars There are moments in David Greig's 2002 play when it looks like it might become a treatise on how a ruling elite can co-opt an entire community for their cause. It is true that the two Cambridge naturalists investigating the bird-life on a remote Scottish island prior to the outbreak of World War Two are agents of the state on unwitting reconnaissance. Once the island's dour custodian Kirk is out of the way, however, the nature-watch conducted by the mercurial Robert and his wet-behind-the-ears sidekick John takes on an altogether more liberating tone. This is particularly the case where Kirk's niece Ellen is concerned. By the second half, the trio are en route to creating a pagan Eden for themselves a million miles from buttoned-up mainland conventions. It is here where things really begin to fly in Richard Baron's up close and personal touring revival for the Borders-based Firebrand company in partnership with Heart of Hawick. On

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars When poet and World War One army officer Siegried Sassoon declares in Nicholas Wright's play taken from Pat Barker's 1991 novel that in a hundred years time he and his peers will still be “ploughing skulls,” recent events make his words sound like prophecy. By the time he says this, Tim Dellap's Sassoon has already made his public declaration condemning the political powers who he sees as prolonging the war for their own ends, a statement which sees him packed off to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where he meets Garmon Rhys' literary groupie Wilfred Owen. Elsewhere, fellow patient Billy Prior, played by Jack Monaghan as an angry young man before his time, is coming to terms with Edinburgh as a place that is “all old ladies and woollen jumpers,” while faced with the innate snobbery of an institution unused to working class officers. Both Prior and Sassoon have nightmares, manifested here in shock visions

Adura Onashile didn't know much about science when she read Rebecca Skloot's book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Despite this, something in this little known story of the black working class woman whose stem cells were taken without her permission in 1951 struck a chord with the actress who first came to prominence when she appeared in Cora Bissett and Stef Smith's multiple award winning sex-trafficking drama, Roadkill. The result was HeLa, Onashile's first solo work, developed with director Graham Eatough. First seen as part of Edinburgh Science Festival in 2013, Iron-Oxide Ltd's production went on to an equally successful Edinburgh Festival Fringe run as part of the Made in Scotland programme. Since then, the show has toured to India, Trinidad, Brazil, Jamaica and South Africa, with several dates in New Zealand forthcoming. Onashile has also managed to slot in some performances closer to home, and this weekend plays two nights at the Traverse Theatre in Ed