Coffee-Table Notes

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars An unreconstructed Liverpool skyline may hang over the action throughout the latest tour of Willy Russell's working class tragedy, but what follows could have happened in any post-industrial UK city that has had its heart ripped out of it over the last thirty years or so. That Russell's musical fable concerning the very different fortunes of two Scouse brothers separated at birth remains both phenomenally popular and damningly relevant after almost thirty years since its premiere speaks volumes about the state we're in. Much of the show's appeal comes from the sheer heart of Bob Tomson and Bill Kenwright's production, which heightens the action without ever losing its common touch. The latter comes through in the pop poetry of Kristofer Harding's funeral-suited Narrator as much as in the back-street demotic of Sean Jones' Mickey and Danielle Corlass' Linda. This counterpoints the more educated tones of Joel B

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars There's never any peace in Rona Munro's epic trilogy of imagined Scottish history, revived for a brief Edinburgh run following its 2014 Edinburgh International Festival premiere before embarking on an international tour. This is plain to see on both a sweeping political level as well as something more intimate in all three parts of this co-production between the National Theatre of Scotland, the National Theatre of Great Britain and EIF itself. The fact that the first all-dayer coincided with the kick-off of the Six Nations Rugby Union tournament may have been coincidental, but a similar sense of hand-me-down tribalism was inherent from the off in James I: The Key will Keep the Lock. With a section of the audience seated on a semi-circular platform onstage, a gladiatorial arena flanks a giant sword embedded into a floor on which the pathways of light form a Saltire. With Steven Miller playing a poetry-loving James I, Andrew

At first glance, the regal-looking pink love heart framed around a blue-eyed and smiling princess peering out from the flagship image for British Art Show 8, which arrives in Edinburgh this month, looks every inch the child-friendly image of a Disney princess to die for. Only the fact that the cartoon creation appears to have a bag over their head while wielding a frowning bauble and miming shooting itself in the head jars somewhat. The image is from Feed Me, the new hour-long film by Rachel Maclean, which was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Hayward Touring, and is is being screened as part of BAS8 at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Like the film, and indeed much of Maclean's back-catalogue, the image takes familiar pop cultural tropes and subverts them with a cut-up narrative in which an unrecognisable Maclean usually plays all the parts against a candy-coated green screen backdrop. From the Lady Gaga and Katy Perry coloured fantasias of LolCats and Ov

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars On a table-top size desert landscape, a solitary egg sits in the spotlight as the sound of the tide ebbs and flows around it. By the end of Julian Crouch and Saskia Lane's thirty-five minute epic that formed part of the Manipulate visual theatre festival's Wednesday night programme, all life will have stemmed from it. As the egg bursts open as operated by Crouch and Lane with concentrated diffidence, a brown bag blows in, unfurls itself and puts flesh and bones on an ever morphing creation that slowly finds its uneasy feet. From a stumblebum gangle to an imperious stride, this ever-expanding new-born sheds skins and grows stronger with every wobbly step. At first glance this all seems a far cry from Crouch's large-scale spectacles as a designer and director with Improbable Theatre on the likes of Shockheaded Peter and the company's collaboration with the National Theatre of Scotland on a staging of Neil Gaiman's The Wol

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars Newspaper advertising may be down these days, but without it, Agatha Christie's thriller as brought to life in Middle Ground Theatre Company's production couldn't exist. The small ad in question appears in the local rag that serves the sleepy English hamlet of Chipping Cleghorn, where a Friday night murder mystery is promised in Little Paddocks, the country pile occupied by sixty-something village matriarch, Letitia Blacklock. With the house brim-full with former school chums, extended family members and an east European refugee servant, it's all a bit of a wheeze until the Swiss assassin himself comes a cropper. Enter Miss Marple, who, as played by Judy Cornwell, is happy to sit knitting in the background as she nudges Tom Butcher's Inspector Craddock towards solving what turns out to be a case of international intrigue. Despite confining the action to one room rather than the more scenic locales of Christie'

When John Dove talks about his forthcoming production of The Crucible at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, he doesn't talk about Arthur Miller's twentieth century masterpiece in terms of its plot. This is despite Miller's ever-pertinent post-McCarthyite fable of seventeenth century witch trials in the American backwater of Puritan-led Salem. Nor does he mention the forbidden dalliance between John Proctor and Abigail Williams that drives the play. Or how that opens up things previously left unspoken in a repressed community that is eventually torn apart by prejudice and a fear of the unknown encouraged by the equally terrified authorities. Rather, Dove talks about the attempted destruction of the NHS and the welfare state by those in office. He talks about how people today need to look after each other more, and to question those in power more than once every four years when an election is pending. And he talks about the sheer human heart behind the play, just as he

Edinburgh Playhouse Three stars The great big number 25 emblazoned in white on a Milk Tray coloured backdrop scales the full height of the Playhouse stage at the opening of this greatest hits tour by any other name by the most singular of comedy double acts. The charity-shop lounge-core pre-show soundtrack too is as showbiz as it gets. Sired on a mix of punk and working men's club cabaret, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer have always played with such iconography, even as they've subverted it with absurdist abandon. True to form, catchphrases of the “You Wouldn't let it lie” and “Look at the size of that sausage” variety are cheered to the rafters on the second night of a tour that almost never was after Bob Mortimer's triple heart bypass operation necessitated its first leg to be cancelled last autumn. Old friends such as The Man With The Stick, Donald and Davey Stott and Mulligan and O'Hare too are greeted like conquering heroes. All of which makes for what i