Coffee-Table Notes

Bill Drummond is full of surprises. Just ask Johny Brown, poet, playwright and for three decades the soothsaying frontman of Band of Holy Joy, whose state-of-the-nation musical addresses have become increasingly urgent dispatches from austerity Britain. When Drummond handed Brown a set of plays that he'd written and asked him if he thought he might be able to do anything with them, it was a gesture that came out of the blue. The result of this is The Cherry Blossom Quartet , a five-night series of radio broadcasts of the plays, adapted by Brown and performed live with accompanying soundscapes on community-based online art radio station, Resonance FM. With a cast that features the likes of Joe Cushley and Sukie Smith, Drummond will be given voice by actor, activist and long term collaborator of Brown's, Tam Dean Burn. “ Bill's never written a play before,” says Brown, “but he started going to watch all these plays at the Arcola Theatre in London close to where he lives

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars "I never thought I'd have to sing this again," says Elvis Costello before the final song of a two and a half hour set that makes up the very personal rummage through his back pages that is his solo Detour show. By this time he's showed us snaps from a family album that includes footage of his dad, big band crooner Ross McManus, after introducing the evening with videos of his own career on a giant mock-up of a 1960s TV set. He's entered with a shimmy and moved from acoustic guitar to electric with a stint at the piano in between. One minute Costello is a showbiz raconteur cracking jokes, the next he's playing a ferocious version of Watching the Detectives while bathed in a moody green light as retro-styled pulp fiction posters flash up behind him. There is a funereal piano-led version of his Falklands War elegy, Shipbuilding, and an unamplified Alison. Following a blistering take on Oliver's Army against an im

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars There is a moment in-between the second and third acts of Dominic Hill's new production of Noel Coward's 1920s comedy when the flapping stops. That moment belongs to Clara, the life-long dresser and some-time servant to the divine Judith Bliss, actress, matriarch and all-round self-styled legend. As played by Myra McFadyen with a beetling dolefulness, Clara's red-draped routine both confirms and subverts the heightened artifice of everything she is otherwise sidelined from. In this way, she also becomes the melancholy conscience of a play in which the bohemian Bliss family are so desperate to have a good time that even pleasure becomes a struggle. Coward's conceit of having the Bliss clan so individually self-absorbed that they each invite a weekend guest allows them to be adored by those who become both spectators and bit players in Judith and co's never-ending soap opera. It isn't just Susan Wooldridge's

Just before Christmas, Rufus Norris spent a week in Fife listening to the 300 hours of interviews that had been recorded for My Country: A Work in Progress, the post-Brexit state of the nations verbatim show he was developing with the National Theatre of Great Britain. It was during this seasonal sabbatical that the enormity of the show, which arrives at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow next week, hit home. As artistic director of the NToGB, Norris is the head of an institution housed on London's South Bank, and which arguably goes some way to defining the public face of a liberal middle-class elite. Now here he was, listening intently to the voices of those across the length and breadth of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales who may not have ever graced that institution's brutalist portals. Hearing these people's words while holed up in a place where some of the interviewees aged between nine and ninety-seven might well reside, and with a rather quainter kind of metropol

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Two kids fall-out because one won't let the other be in their gang. The gang-leader ends up with their two front teeth being knocked out for his pains. By rights, that should be the end of such rough and tumble. In Christopher Hampton's English language translation of French writer Yasmina Reza's play, however, it prompts a meeting of the two boys' parents to act as mediators of some kind of unspoken settlement. As with that other most painful of plays, Abigail's Party, the incident that kick-starts Reza's play happens off-stage, as an eruption of social savagery destroys any pretence at politesse. Only Erik Satie's quietest of revolutions playing on the stereo keeps calm. Gareth Nicholls' production starts off well-behaved enough, as Annette and her lawyer husband Alain endure the niceties of the more seemingly liberal Veronique and Michel in their too-perfect white home. The soft play area is a dead giveaway of

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Three stars If Shakespeare's plays were the blockbusters of their day, the bard wasn't shy of churning out a sequel if the mood took him. So it goes with the middle two plays of his Tudor tetralogy, which focus on the eventual succession of young Prince Hal, who'd rather slum it having bantz with Falstaff and the boys down at their local than get involved with the assorted power plays going on at his dad's court. Gordon Barr's adaptation of both plays enables audiences to digest his production in one sitting. Performed by students of the RCS' MA Classical and Contemporary Text course in partnership with Barr's Bard in the Botanics operation, the weight of Shakespeare's text is retained without losing any of the story's alternating light and shade. So while King Henry sits regally at one end of the Chandler Studio's performing area at the play's start, the bare floor before him becomes an entire

When Martin Bramah left The Fall in 1979 to form Blue Orchids, it set in motion a musical lineage that has run parallel with fellow Fall co-founder Mark E Smith's bloody-minded forty-year assault on culture. History will decide whether the latter is either a masterpiece of social engineering or else the extended public self-destruction of a terminal drunk. While ex Fall guitarist Marc Riley and now Brix Smith-Start have come to renewed prominence playing records on the radio, the off-shoot acts spawned by Smith's army have received less attention than they deserve. Now that Smith-Start has attempted to reclaim her past with early eighties Fall rhythm section Steve and Paul Hanley and push it towards a future with less baggage as Brix and The Extricated, all that might be about to change. This is good news for Bramah, whose current incarnation of Blue Orchids is having something of a renaissance, as this new four-track EP confirms. Partly recorded at the same time as 2016