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Futureproof 2017

Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow until February 4 th 2018 Four stars Now in its ninth year, Futureproof's showcase of recent graduate photographers from seven Scottish art schools and universities returns to its spiritual home at Street Level, with n ineteen artists embracing photo essays, abstraction and constructed narratives. It is Karlyn Marshall's Willies, Beuys and Me that grabs you first. Tucked in a corner, this depiction of a woman impersonating iconic artist Joseph Beuys says much about gender stereotyping, and recalls Manfred Karge's play, Man to Man, in which a German woman took on her dead husband's identity. The personal and the political converge throughout. Ben Soedera's Foreign Sands contrasts natural resources and the constructed world. Gareth and Gavin Bragdon's The Bragdon Brothers moves onto the carnivalesque streets of Edinburgh . Kieran Delaney's Moments also looks at the apparently ordinary. Matthew Buick goes further afield, as

A Christmas Carol

Dundee Rep Four stars “Let them die,” says Scrooge about the beggars proffering their hands outside his well-insulated front door at the start of Dundee Rep's Christmas show. “Decrease the excess population.” Charles Dickens' emotionally stunted miser hates the poor and the disabled, and imposes working conditions that would give latter day sweat-shop owners a run for their very dirty money. With a CV that resembles that of any latter-day fat cat you'd care to name, one could be forgiven for thinking the setting of Andrew Panton's seasonal production might have been updated in Neil Duffield's stage adaptation. As it is, there's very little need in a production which casts Scrooge as a woman, played with a magnificent sense of self-loathing by Ann Louise Ross. Before that, we're ushered into designer Richard Evans' multiple layered Dickensian terrain by the nine-strong cast singing and playing a series of Christmas carols. They begin by paradin

Caitlin Skinner - The Sunnyside Centre and Village Pub Theatre

If a zombie apocalypse runs riot on the streets of Edinburgh, where do you go for sanctuary? This was one of the starting points for The Sunnyside Centre, the first full stage production by the Leith based Village Pub Theatre. The answer for the company's artistic director Caitlin Skinner and the five writers who have collaborated on bringing their own visions to the table is the Hibs Supporters Club, the window-less function room down an alleyway off Easter Road. More known for post match socials, the club has become the host venue for the company's compendium of linked plays, as well as a key part of the production's over-riding concept. This stems too from VPT's DIY ethos, which has grown out of regular monthly nights of scratch performances seen in the bijou confines of the Village pub in South Forth Street, off Leith Walk. “We've been interested for a while in how to turn what we do in the pub on a regular basis in an informal, social, fun, seat-of-your-p

Bdy_Prts

Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh Saturday December 2nd It should probably come as no surprise that professional dancers are in the audience for the Edinburgh leg of this mini tour by spectral performance art/pop auteurs Bdy_Prts on the back of the release of their sublime debut album, The Invisible Hero. Beyond the music, the raison d’etre of Bdy_Prts’ dynamic duo of Jill O'Sullivan and Jenny Reeve, after all, is a flamboyantly costumed display of kinetic physical jerks and modernist shape-throwing to illustrate a set of fizzing machine-age chorales. In this sense, the Bdy_Prts live experience is several works of art for the price of one that's a long way from the pair's formative work fronting Sparrow and the Workshop (O'Sullivan) and Strike the Colours (Reeve). Part living sculptures, part Bloomsbury Group super-heroines, part widescreen pop fabulists, O'Sullivan and Reeve paint their faces with ancient symbols and sport customised shoulder pads that look both seasona

Garry Robson, Birds of Paradise and The Tin Soldier

Garry Robson was in Russia when the idea for a production of Hans Christian Andersen's The Tin Soldier first took root. The actor and artistic director of leading disabled theatre company Birds of Paradise was in St Petersburg to do some work with young people, and was taken into an orphanage. “Disabled kids in Russia by and large aren't brought up in the community,” says Robson, “and tend to stay in orphanages which are housed in old gulags called internats, where the kids stay for life. I was asked to do a workshop in one which was liberal arts based. I did the workshop, and while I was there I realised that most of the kids were never going to leave here. That's the fate of most disabled kids in these places, and who, left ton their own devices, form family groupings with each other, and develop a rich imagination. That struck me as something very powerful, and I wanted to do something with it in a way that would be right for Birds of Paradise.” The result of this

Cinderella

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars The giant circular clock mechanism that frames the stage for the Citz's very twenty-first century take on Cinderella suggests that time is moving on for stories like this. As the moon looks down as part of Gabriella Slade's steam-punk style design, it too marks the changes going on below. Here, young Isabella mourns her mother, even as her father weds Irene Allan's ghastly Lady Claudia, inheriting her hideous daughters Claudine and Claudette as part of the deal. As the trio conspire against Isabella, banishing her to the kitchen and christening her Cinderella, they inadvertently secure her destiny by default. Sinead Sharkey's Cinderella is a heroine full of attitude from the off as she swishes her way incognito through various royal balls inbetween slaving over a hot stove. As her nemeses, Hannah Howie and Caroline Deyga's Claudine and Claudette resemble a spoilt brat mash-up of Strawberry Switchblade and long lost nine

The Arabian Nights

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Down at the very common market the dogs are howling in Suhayla El-Bushra's new family friendly take on the classic Middle Eastern story-book. As brought to life by Ross MacKay's puppets in Joe Douglas' handsomely realised production, the two dogs become a framing device for a Russian doll of a show, in which stories within stories lead to ongoing enlightenment. Stories, alas, are banned by rule of the Sultan, a bureaucratic NIMBY, who has young Scheherazade's yarn-spinning mum and her fellow stall-holders locked up. Scheherazade proves herself a chip off the old block by blagging her way into the palace, where she regales the Sultan with some shaggy dog stories of her own. Out of Scheherazade's fantastical imagination pop up a series of universally familiar figures, from Aladdin to Sinbad and a story-book of fellow travellers made flesh in a series of comic turns from Douglas' energetic ten-strong cast. As Re