Coffee-Table Notes

King's Theatre, Glasgow Four stars There are few bands whose back-catalogue more suits the narrative trappings of a jukebox musical than Madness. This was proven in 2002 when writer Tim Firth took the Nutty Boys' canon of post-music hall social-realist vignettes and turned them into a back-street morality play for its time. It's a time that seems to have caught up with James Tobias' touring revival for Immersion Theatre Company and Damien Tracey Productions, as it follows the two paths its teenage hero Joe could take when he tries to impress his new girlfriend Sarah. Joe does this by breaking into one of the new luxury flats being built in his Camden 'hood, where predatory property developers look set to bulldoze away the street he grew up in. What follows on David Shields' red brick and rust-laden set is an infectiously honest yarn, in which Jason Kajdi's Joe is torn between paying his dues or else making a Faustian pact with George Sampson'

There have been many Macbeths who have moved through the portals of the Citizens Theatre. As with other things in the Gorbals based institution which will soon be undergoing a major make-over, if you're not careful they'll end up hanging round like ghosts. The trick, as the Citz's current artistic director Dominic Hill has discovered during his six year tenure, is to keep moving, to respect the past while creating something new for the moment, with one eye always on the future. So it goes with The Macbeths, Hill's stripped down take on Shakespeare's Scottish Play, which will be performed in the Citz's sixty-seater Circle Studio. Hill's new take on the play focuses solely on the play's central couple, and how vaulting ambition whispered in the bedroom ends up being the only thing that keeps them together, before the extreme actions that result from it destroys them both. “It's just about him and her,” says Hill on a break from rehearsing his two

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars The sound of prison doors clanging shut permeates throughout the auditorium from the start of Helena Kaut-Howson's epic stage version of Russian dissident writer Georgi Vladimov's allegorical novel, first translated into English by Michael Glenny. A caption projected high at the back of Pawel Dobrzycki's stark, steel-grey stage sets out the show's store. A thirteen-strong troupe line up in military formation to be put through their well-drilled paces as a fictitious set of modern day prisoners in Siberia who frame the action. This is in preparation to play-act inmates, guards and above all the dogs who roar through Vladimov's story of what happens to the most devoted servants to the cause once the prison camps are liberated following Stalin's death. Kaut-Howson charts Ruslan's story, from being unleashed into the world by his master, to ending up on the scrap-heap. Even when he's taken in by an equally displa

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars Following the cross-dressing high-jinks of Twelfth Night, the gender-blind Merely Theatre's second touring show takes a leap closer to the multi-tasking cast of five's own age range. The result is a very laid-back looking quintet in a dressed-down take on Shakespeare's evergreen tragedy of teenage kicks caught in the crossfire of family feuds and gang warfare. The Montague boys out on the razz are in uniform grey tops and jeans in Scott Ellis' production, while the Capulets sport several shades of discreetly attention-seeking tartan. This gives the visual impression of a bunch of retro indie kids picking a fight with revivalist hipsters. While hardly mods versus rockers class war, the image does help heighten the air of everyone involved being too young and stupid to know better. This in turn gives things a giddy gush of hormone-fired energy that drives the doomed romance between Sarah Peachey's Romeo and Emmy Rose&

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars If William Shakespeare was the original gender bender, the current emancipation of non-binary identity politics suggests the world is slowly catching up with him. Enter Merely Theatre, the young company currently working with an agenda of stripped-down, gender-neutral renditions of the bard's finest works. With male and female performers 'twinned' to play a particular set of roles, the boy/girl permutations in Merely's five actor versions of the plays are seemingly endless. What this means in the first of two productions touring in tandem is a carnivalesque knockabout rom-com, which begins with a sort-of sing-along, as Tamara Astor's Feste takes the opening 'If music be the food of love' line literally. This sets the tone, as Emmy Rose's shipwrecked Viola puts on the mantle of what looks like a sailor on shore leave called Cesario in order to cosy up to Hannah Ellis' local high hid' yin, Duke

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars Robbie Gordon says hello to every single member of the audience as they walk into Traverse Two's already intimate space at the start of his and Jack Nurse's new show for the fiercely curious Glasgow-based Wonder Fools company. This action alone is telling about what follows in a show that seeks to get beyond the computer screen where internet pornography dominates, and to connect with another human being in a real live expression of physical contact. Over the next hour of Nurse's production, Gordon attempts to draw the audience in even more to his meditations on sex, love and how a new kid on the block, on the web or in a laboratory cage can put a spring back in an otherwise jaded sexual step. Taking its title from a 1950s scientific experiment by way of an American president's observations of chickens, Gordon navigates his way through what isn't really a one-man show partly by way of an interactive performance lecture

Lust and the Apple, Temple until December 8 th Four stars The Midlothian former school that houses one of the most adventurous contemporary art-spaces in the country has been quiet of late due to problems with damp. A reconstituted Lust and the Apple is more than worth a pilgrimage to see new work by a cross-generational quartet of international artists spread across the premises in ways that employ the centre's unique environment. In the drive-way, recent Glasgow School of Art graduate Amy Leigh Bird's Topophilia, An Archeology puts locally sourced natural detritus in vitrines full of water marked Kelvin (2016) and Temple (2017). Inside, a customised boiler-suit daubed with gold-painted text becomes the work-clothes of Rotterdam based Bobby Sayers, whose performance-based So What Do You Do? attempts to subvert the daily grind with a mixture of work, rest and play. Out in the garden, Square Metres is an ever expanding carpet of twelve inch vinyl records laid down by G