Coffee-Table Notes

Signet Library, Edinburgh until August 27 Four stars Walking the full length of the Signet Library during this show of complementary photo essays by Czech born but French domiciled photographer Josef Koudelka, it initially feels as if you're striding through an airport lounge, that vast and teeming thoroughfare of free movement en route to arrivals and departures. Two rows of glass-topped display cabinets that contain the two displays disrupt the space. Placed there deliberately by human hand, they act as both barrier and gateway, each side in opposition and conjoined defiance. So it goes too for the contents of the cases, two monumental twenty metre long concertina books with their black and white pages laid out to tell a story of landscapes modified, remodelled and ultimately defiled in the name of progress. The first, Black Triangle (1994), charts how the Czech Republic's once heavily populated Ore mountain region was overwhelmed and gradually devastated by the co

In the spotlight, a man in a waistcoat stares the audience in the eye and tells us how lucky we are to be here, watching Thus Spoke... Three others – a man and two women – drape themselves around pillars at the edge of a big square of space as a wall of lights glows behind him. During the first man's reverie, he sprawls himself out on the floor, before a burst of raw blues by Jimi Hendrix punctuates the scene, acting as a bridge before the next person takes the mic to let rip, and on it goes, ad nauseum. Dating from 2014, and originally performed in French by Quebec's Groupe Gravel/Lepage, this ensemble piece of existential psycho-drama that forms part of the Canada Hub season is akin to a grown-up parlour game. Verbal riffs tumble out without any filter, as if senses have been over-stimulated somehow. The physical tics that accompany each amplified speech suggests those onstage are trying to climb out of their own skin. This becomes more like a series of routines from what m

Churchill Theatre Five stars The creaks and strains of the Churchill Theatre's wonderfully traditional interior are all too appropriate an environment to house Samuel Beckett's portrait of the artist as an old man, in which his eponymous hero shuffles through his back pages to unearth a life lost. As played by Barry McGovern in long term collaborator Michael Colgan production for the pair's newly constituted Clare Street theatre company, it is a rare and exceptional masterclass in translating the human condition in all its tragi-comic glory. Arguably the greatest living male performer of Beckett's work, McGovern slopes on, his white hair illuminated by the sole light above him and heightened even more by an otherwise black painted stage. Through the doorway can be glimpsed a brass bed where Krapp lays his head in a terminal state of aloneness. As he goes through his time-honoured set of rituals – a glass of water, a banana, a near fatal fall, another banana – it

Traverse Theatre Four stars “It's a monstrous world, and it's not enough,” howls an agonised Robyn midway through Zinnie Harris' new play, co-produced by the Traverse Theatre with Edinburgh International Festival. It begins on a beach that might be an island, and where Robyn is asking her partner Helen if she's okay. The pair have been washed ashore following a serious boating accident, and are possibly still in shock. This is nothing, however, to what eventually transpires in an isolated landscape where not even destiny-changing moths survive. There is a stillness running through Orla O'Loughlin's elegant production, despite the torrent of words flowing from Robyn's mouth in an attempt to understand what may or may not be happening. What initially starts out looking like an everyday tale of extreme domestic survival takes an emotional and stylistic lurch, so it becomes a pilgrimage of sorts to a painfully recent past in an attempt to rebuild a l

Two versions of Adam Kashmiri stand onstage in Adam , Frances Poet's eponymous biographical play of this young man's remarkable life. One, played by Neshla Caplan, is a version of the girl he used to be back home in Egypt. The other is Adam here, now and living in Scotland as the man he later became. In Poet's script for Cora Bissett's National Theatre of Scotland production, we follow Adam, from his resistance to being forced into girly dresses to first love in the clothes shop he works in, risking everything in the misogynist society he grew up in. All this is played out against a backdrop of Adam's arrival in Glasgow as an asylum seeker, while the failed Egyptian revolution blazes on his TV screen. What becomes clear as Adam discovers an online community just like him is, not only how open he is about everything he's been through, but how remarkably sane he has remained throughout it all. Kashmiry plays himself with a chirpiness that is accentuated even

The Studio, Edinburgh International Festival  Four stars The words 'YES' and 'NO' flash up in turn on a screen at the back of the stage. The array of guitars, speakers and a laptop in front of it suggest an intimate gig of a grassroots persuasion. Whether any of this is still in place by the end of Turner Prize winning polymath Martin Creed's three week late night run remains to be seen. Creed, as he is at pains to point out, doesn't want to repeat himself in any way. In the spirit of such good intentions, no spoiler alerts are required here, for a show which effectively does what it says on the tin, but which finds its eccentric auteur questioning his every action. “I made some notes,” Creed says, after breezing on with two large jotters under his arm. He looks somewhere between a 1970s social studies lecturer and the same era's edition of Donald Sutherland. “But whatever the opposite of taking notes is, I don't want that.” Over the next eight

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh International Festival  Four stars “It's an internal matter,” says a spiv-like local official as his town is over-run by rhinoceroses in Zinnie Harris' reimagining of Eugene Ionesco's 1959 absurdist classic. “It'll blow over.” Such are the famous last words of easily corruptible civic mandarins the world over, as laissez-faire small town ways give way to mob rule by noisy grotesques who only travel in packs. Such a scenario is all too recognisable on our doorsteps in a post Brexit, post Trump age. Imagine, then, how close to home it must be just now in a volatile Turkey, where director Murat Daltaban's DOT Theatre company, who are co-producing the show with the Royal Lyceum, are based. Things begin playfully enough, with Robert Jack's local intellectual waster Berenger hooking up with Steven McNicoll's pompous clever-clogs Jean in the square. As the town-folk go about their business, it is clear that Berenger i