Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars There's a slick but laid-back rapport between the overall-clad four-piece band playing a punky overture at the top of this ménage a trois of lo-fi mini musicals from the nabokov company and Soho Theatre. They address the audience as they enter the theatre, setting a casual tone to what follows as they step into character and costume for each playlet. Proceedings open with Jonesy, Tom Wells' tale of a sports mad asthmatic boy who can't finish a netball match without a brush with death, but still finds music in his heart. Ella Hickson's A Love Song For The People of London finds two solitary travellers adrift in the big city catch each others eye with tragi-comic results, while My Thoughts On Leaving You is a quick-fire run through a relationship, as boy meets girl in a nightclub toilet before playing out their everyday urban melodrama in song. While the first piece is essentially a fleshed-out monologue, the following two are old-s

Salutation Hotel, Perth Four stars In the banqueting hall of the oldest hotel in Scotland, a very special event is about to take place. The party tunes are playing, and the stage is swathed in sparkly scarlet tinsel designed to match the oh-so OTT outfits of our glamorous auctioneers, Tina and Rachel. They are here to raise money, spirits and a smile for Tina's heroic cross-channel swim following a near brush with death after an asthma attack. Once the audience have been escorted to their tables with bidding cards and raffle tickets in hand, what follows in Robert Jack's production of Lesley Hart's new play at first looks like a kitsch and slightly camp dissection of the toe-curling spectacle which a well-meaning but misguided fund-raising event can easily end up as. The bad gags, rictus grins and awkwardly staged amateur hour routines are all grotesque enough in the hands of the double act of Sally Reid as Tina and Claire Knight as Rachel in something which initially resem

If the 90s were just the 60s turned upside-down, as some wag once suggested, then such a notion  confirmed what cultural commentator Michael Bracewell described in his book on the era as an age 'when surface was depth'. What this appeared to mean by the time Stephen Greenhorn's play, Passing Places, appeared in 1997, was a definition of a decade that had already spawned Brit Pop, Girl Power, New Laddism and Cool Britannia. Here, then, was a shallow pool of pop without politics, Barbie Doll feminism in a Union Jack mini dress and sexism with an apparently ironic twist. The Berlin Wall had come down in 1989, and, after a decade of class and civil war by way of the Miners Strike and the Poll Tax, Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had been forced to resign from office after an eleven year reign of terror. Tony Blair's landslide New Labour victory in 1997 suggested  that things could only get better, but suddenly, with no pricks to kick against, it

Royal Conservatoire Scotland, Glasgow Three stars As openings go, when the cast of Ali de Souza's production of Hector MacMillan's ribald Scots version of Moliere's seventeenth century comedy, La Malade Imaginaire, come burling through the New Athenaeum auditorium led by a bagpiper before launching into an onstage ceilidh, it's a pretty strong statement of intent. What follows is an accomplished and suitably larger than life study of how an old man called Argan can take near masochistic pleasure in his imaginary ailments. He is cured, not by quackery and a fondness for enemas, but by waking up to his own gullibility as he's taken in by his gold-digging wife Beline inbetween attempting to marry off his daughter Angelique into the medical classes. MacMillan's pithy and richly evocative dialogue is captured impeccably by a young cast of final year acting students from the RCS, led by Philip Laing's physically dextrous turn as Argan, who has some fine comic inte

It seemed like there weren't many books dealing with a contemporary immigrant's experience before Khaled Hosseini's debut novel, The Kite Runner, was published in 2003. It was this quality that first attracted playwright Matthew Spangler to adapt Hosseini's tale of two boyhood friends – Amir  and Hassan -  growing up in Afghanistan against a backdrop of war for the stage. With both men living in the same Californian neighbourhood, Hosseini and Spangler met up for coffee, with the end result being Spangler's adaptation of The Kite Runner, currently on a UK tour in a co-production by Nottingham Playhouse and Liverpool Playhouse, and which arrives in Edinburgh next week. “I first read the book in 2005,” says Spangler, “and a lot of it is set locally to me, in the area where the family in the novel move to. The first attraction to me was that it was a book about the immigrant's experience, but it's a book about many things. It's a love story, a father-son st

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Long before anyone invented the make-believe Glasgow miracle, Robert Colquhoun and Robert Macbryde were creating a set of artistic mythologies that set the tone for much that followed. Kilmarnock born and Glasgow School of Art trained, as painters and lovers the two Roberts blazed a drink-sodden trail through bohemian London that saw them hailed as boy wonders before being spoilt by bad behaviour and sidelined by the more voguish face of abstract expressionism. Few have identified the talents of Glasgow's original artistic double act more than John Byrne, whose original 1992 romp through their messy lives has here been condensed into a suitably wild two-man version in Andy Arnold's production for the Tron in association with the Glasgay! festival. The bare back-side of a sprawled-out Macbryde being painted by his partner-in-crime at the top of the show sets the tone for the tempestuous and emotionally naked roller-coaster ride that follows. As t

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars The dramatic and musical cacophony that dovetails the two acts of Graham Linehan's audacious adaptation of William Rose's classic Ealing comedy speaks volumes about the post World War Two little Britain occupied by the disparate gang of get-rich-quick villains at the play's heart. By posing as a string quartet, the charming Professor Marcus and his coterie of crooks made up of a cross-dressing major, a pill-popping teddy-boy, a muscle-headed sidekick and a European psychopath may appear respectable in the eyes of Marcus' new land-lady, Mrs Wilberforce. Yet, as with the revolving set that allows the audience in to Mrs Wilberforce's crumbling King's Cross pile in Richard Baron's slickly realised revival, it's easy to see beyond the polite facade towards something messier and more complex. While Mrs Wilberforce is spotting Nazi spies in the newsagent, the dog-eat-dog aspirations of Marcus and co points to a crueller fut