Coffee-Table Notes

Shakespeare is very much on Ferdy Roberts' mind just now. Last week saw the actor and director complete a West End run of Shakespeare in Love, Lee Hall's adaptation of the 1998 film co-scripted by Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman. At the same time, Roberts had just begun rehearsals in the title role of Macbeth, in a radical new production by Filter, the company which Roberts co-founded and is one of its three co-directors. Where Shakespeare in Love is shot through with glossy West End values, Filter's Macbeth is a looser-knit and infinitely more playful affair, which exploits the play's frequent references to sound by allowing proceedings to be led by music in a way the company have previously done on Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream. In Macbeth, the action is led by the three Weird Sisters, who operate a series of home-made electronic instruments, effectively conducting the action as they invite Macbeth to join them, thus sealing his fate. “W

Royal Conservatoire Scotland Three stars Opening a New Year production of Shakespeare's sunniest rom-com during a weekend of stormy weather more appropriate to The Tempest is a gloriously contrary gesture. There was much warmth on offer, however, in Ali de Souza's 1920s take on the play performed in the RCS' Chandler Studio space by young acting students. The romantic merry-go-round builds up an impressive head of dry ice later on, but it's a rag-time soundtrack that ushers in the assorted cross-class shenanigans that follows. Even the Mechanicals – here the Royal Artisans of Athens Alliance Amateur Drama, or RAAAADA, if you please – enter with a soft-shoe chorus line. Lysander and Demetrius are a pair of horny lads in stripey blazers, and the objects of their assorted affections, Hermia and Helena, a couple of society flappers who've just discovered boys. Only once things move underground, however, and Puck applies his chemical charms in all the wrong places, does

13 / 1 / 15 Dear Councillor, I am writing once again regarding the issue of the venue previously known as The Picture House, and which is due to be discussed by the Development Planning Sub-Committee on Wed January 14 th 2015, presented as ' Application for Planning Permission 14/02936/FUL At 31 Lothian Road, Edinburgh, EH1 2DJ, Change of use from Class 11 (Assembly and Leisure) to Sui Generis (Public House) including external alterations.' It is noted that the Development Management Sub-Committee, of which you are a member, has been recommended to support the application, submitted by Wetherspoons, a pub chain based in Watford. I would urge the Sub-Commitee to reject those recommendations, as have more than 13,000 of City of Edinburgh Council's constituents in a petition which I trust is being taken into account by members of the Committee alongside all other objections to the application. Councillors may like to take the following points into consideration

The pantomime fairy-dust may have barely been swept away, but already Scotland's theatres are gearing up for a busy year ahead. There is much anticipation for the Gorbals theatre's forthcoming revival of John Byrne's play, The Slab Boys (February 12-March 7). This main-stage production will be directed by David Hayman, who oversaw the original production of Byrne's tragi-comedy set in a Paisley carpet factory when it first appeared at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in the late 1970s. By that time Hayman had already blazed a trail as an actor at the  Citiz, and The Slab Boys continues a relationship re-established when he played the title role in King Lear. There's a double whammy from playwright Douglas Maxwell this year, with two plays making their way around the country. The first, at the Citz, is Fever Dream: Southside (April 23-May 9), a surreal comic thriller set in Govanhill during a heatwave. The second, a collaboration with the National Theatre of Scotlan

Sean O'Callaghan couldn't sleep the night before he was due to meet director John Dove about the possibility of appearing in the title role of Brian Friel's play, Faith Healer, at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. O'Callaghan was in the thick of playing Friar Laurence in a production of Romeo and Juliet at the Sherman Cymru theatre in Cardiff, where Perth Theatre's former artistic director Rachel O'Riordan is now in charge, and his attention should have been firmly fixed on that. As it was, there was something about the role of Frank, the alcoholic faith healer on a never-ending tour of Welsh and Scottish villages where he would attempt to work miracles that wouldn't leave him alone. “There were so many resonances in the play that it was hard to stop thinking about it,” O'Callaghan says of the play, made up of a quartet of monologues spoken by Frank, his wife Gracie and his stage manager Teddy, as each give different versions of a crucial incident w

Edinburgh's Hogmanay Four stars Imagine putting bite-size chunks of a country's culture within walking distance of each other to create a psycho-geographic map of a nation steeped in history but embracing the future even as it parties through its present. So it was with Scot:Lands, a ten-stop New Year's Day tour of Edinburgh city centre, where a compendium of music, performance and film were brought together from assorted outlying areas. Having spun the compass at the National Museum of Scotland, aka Home:Land, it was possible to be directed to Barn:Land, where Alasdair Roberts was being sampled live by Ross Whyte at Greyfriars Kirk in a way that fused traditional singing with electronic experimentation.  In Blether:Land, based in the Scottish Story Centre, you could sample a half-hour of dark tales of old Edinburgh from Fiona Herbert. Her yarns about the Jekyll and Hyde-like duality of auld Reekie involved Deacon Brodie, the Darien disaster and the lengths sixteenth centur

Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh Four stars Lily Allen wasn't the obvious choice to headline this year's Edinburgh's Hogmanay, even with her third album, Sheezuz, coming after five years out of the musical loop. From the moment this most gloriously contrary pop star bounds onstage sporting a sparkly hooded baseball top with a giant A on the back on a stage set of oversize illuminated babies bottles against a pink and purple backdrop, however, Edinburgh is hers. Prior to that, on the Waverley Stage, Scottish Album of the Year and Mercury Music Prize winners Young Fathers kick the night off with a manifesto-like cacophony of synthesised sirens, projected slogans and martial drums that ushers in a darkly intense set of righteously angry twenty-first century hip hop. Joined by chanteuse and kindred spirit Law, the band's frontline trio of Kayus Bankole, 'G' Hastings and Alloysious Massaquoi let loose a fitting antidote to the City's archaic rules on live music