Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars You can tell things aren't going to turn out well in Megan Barker's contemporary new take on Henrik Ibsen's nineteenth century treatise on hand-me-down guilt and the long-term consequences of desperate actions. It's something about the way John Hogg's Osvald, the motorbike riding, film-making prodigal returning to his mammy's Highland home, kills a stag en route. For such a symbol of macho pride to be felled so cruelly seems to be a portent of Osvald's emasculation, even as it forms his opening monologue in Barker's richly poetic text. Osvald is greeted, not by his widowed town councillor mother, Helen, as played by Alison Peebles, but by Scarlett Mack's social-climbing young assistant Regina. Her plans are waylaid by her ex policeman father, Jacob, before Helen arrives with her political ally, Martin. With plans afoot to bankroll a care home in honour of Helen's late husband, it's a summit meeting to be rec

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars It's hard to gauge exactly who's turned on the most in Howard Barker's erotically charged reimagining of the Bible's Old Testament myth set in the last days of Sodom. It might well be Daniel Cahill's horny angel, here named Drogheda and sent down by God to save Lot and his wife from the destruction that's about to wipe out the original Sin City. Or it could be Lot's wife Sverdlosk, played by Pauline Knowles as a faithless drop-dead femme fatale resembling the shoe-hoarding wife of a deposed dictator on the run, who gets her kicks by defying Drogheda's celestial intervention. Cliff Burnett's Lot, meanwhile, works himself into a lather over even the idea of Sverdlosk and Drogheda embarking on a last-gasp pre-apocalyptic liaison. It might also be worth keeping an eye on Ewan Somers' silently disdainful waiter who  clearly has ideas above his station. Debbie Hannan's production of Barker's late period cha

Kings Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars While there are plenty of bankers who should be in prison, Andy Dufresne, the banged-up hero of Stephen King's 1982 short story, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, isn't one one of them. It is to King's original story rather than the iconic 1994 big-screen version of it that Owen O'Neill and Dave Johns' stage adaptation looks to. Here, Dufresne's incarceration for allegedly killing his wife and her lover in 1940s America is told through the eyes of Ellis 'Red' Redding, the prison go-to man, who can supply pretty much anything any self-respecting jailbird would need. For Dufresne, this includes a rock hammer and a pin-up poster of Hayworth for reasons which are eventually made clear. Inbetween navigating his way through the institutionalised brutality of the penal system on both sides of the law, Dufresne manages to negotiate a library into being. This becomes a symbol of his quietly unwavering determination to st

It was a strange sensation for Megan Barker when she stepped off the train at Glasgow Central Station en route to the first read-through of her new adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's play, Ghosts, which opens at the city's Tron Theatre this week. Alighting onto Argyle Street from the station's back exit and into the gloom of the station bridge for the first time in several years, Barker was greeted by the sight of the former entrance to The Arches. The understated doorway had once been a portal to one of the most important arts venues in Europe, a place which for twenty-odd years hosted a steady stream of audiences and artists. Now the venue where Barker's first play had been produced while still a student, and which, like so many others of her generation, opened her up to the possibilities of what theatre could be, lay locked up and empty after it was forced to close down earlier this year following Glasgow City Council's decision not to renew its late licence on the

Summerhall, Edinburgh Four stars Disappointment pulses throughout every second of Arthur Miller's late period 1993 play, revived here by Rapture Theatre as the second part of the company's 100 Years of Miller celebrations following their large scale tour of All My Sons last month. It's there on the face of Leroy Hamilton, the wilfully underachieving descendent of one of America's founding fathers, who sits in the waiting room of the state mental hospital where his wife Patricia is spending a third period in an attempt to keep her depression at bay. It's there too in the face of John Frick, who may have embraced the American Dream that Hamilton rejected, but whose own wife Karen is in the same hospital. Most of all, however, it is Patricia's soul itself that is so fatefully marked by failed expectations as she attempts to take control of her life once more. It's key to Miller's chamber piece that we see how men are prior to the doors opening on Patricia

Brian Friel – Playwright Born January 9 1929, Killyclogher, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland; died October 2 2015, Greencastle, County Donegal, Ireland. Brian Friel, who has died aged eighty-six following a long illness, was a quiet giant of modern Irish theatre, whose greatest plays tapped into the beating heart of the human condition through notions of human frailty and community in the face of adversity. If the former was evident in Faith Healer (1979), a quartet of interlinking monologues charting the inconsistent muse of the Fantastic Frank Hardy, the latter pulsed throughout some of Friel's great ensemble works, including Translations (1980), which dealt with cultural colonialism during a volatile period of Ireland's history, and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), in which memory and history becomes an even more personal for of artistic endeavour. Bernard Patrick Friel was born in Killcogher, near Omagh, to a school teacher father and post mistress mother, who moved th

Kings Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars "Forget about the future," says pill-pacified pleasure seeker Lenina at one point in Dawn King's stage adaptation of Aldous Huxley's dystopian 1931 novel en route to an emotion-free liaison with Bernard Marx, the most awkward alpha male in town. "There's nothing we can do about it. Just live for today." Such a self-absorbed lifestyle choice was probably as all the rage in Huxley's between-the-wars world as it is today. All dressed up in space-age wigs, video projections resembling a Brian Eno installation and a stentorian electronic soundscape care of pop panoramicists These New Puritans, however, James Dacre's production for the Royal and Derngate, Northampton and The Touring Consortium renders the story as all too recognisable prophecy. It opens as a lecture, with the audience the new trainees being given a guided tour around a hatchery centre where test tube babies are sired in a social caste system that se