Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars Faith, hope and not so much charity as big business sponsorship are at the heart of Abi Morgan’s heartfelt new play for the National Theatre of Scotland. Inspired by Dr David Snowdon’s book, Aging With Grace, based on his scientific study of nuns and the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, Morgan sets up a text-book culture clash between two very different orthodoxies trying to find meaning and enlightenment in a fast food, hi-tech, wonder drug world which cares for neither. In one corner is Nicholas Le Prevost’s shy but driven American, Dr Richard Garfield, in the other the force of nature that is Maureen Beattie’s Sister Ursula Mary. Orbiting around them in the west of Scotland nunnery over half a decade are infinitely more realistic elements from both younger and older generations, who map out their own destinies while Richard and Ursula remain in very different forms of limbo. There are times in Vicky Featherstone’s monumental-l...

Kings Theatre, Edinburgh 5 stars James Corden isn’t an obvious matinee idol. Such is his wide-eyed control over the audience in Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre production of Richard Bean’s audacious reinvention of Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters, however, that it’s impossible not to warm to his barn-stormingly full-on performance. Corden’s TV-friendly features help, of course, in what, in Bean, Hytner and especially physical comedy director Cal McCrystal’s hands is transformed into a riotous end-of- the-pier seaside postcard sit-com. Bean sets things in Brighton during 1963, that crucial year, as poet Philip Larkin put it, when sexual intercourse began ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and The Beatles first LP’. It was also the year the skiffle boom was stamped on by rock and roll, as Corden’s estuarised harlequin Francis Henshall finds to his cost when he and his washboard are chucked out of his band. Out of such adversity, Francis blags his way into t...

James Corden bounds into the boardroom of the National Theatre on London's South Bank at full pelt, like an overgrown puppy whose master has just come home. Fifteen minutes earlier he'd had a packed matinee crowd at the National's Lyttleton Theatre in the palm of his hand in One Man Two Guvnors, Richard Bean's saucy seaside postcard style adaptation of Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters. Nicholas Hytner's production, which opens in Edinburgh tonight, gives vent to a rollickingly relentless performance by Corden as an on-the-make chancer who, fired from his skiffle band, wheedles his way in and out of trouble in 1960s Brighton. Over the course of the afternoon, Corden literally throws himself into every minute of what is a wonderful vehicle for his ongoing if somewhat self-conscious rehabilitation into the nation's comedic heart. In a Mod-era romp that looks like it could have been dreamt up by a Park Life era Damon Albarn in some unholy uni...

Tramway, Glasgow 3 stars There's an uber-cool whiff of Hollywood as well as Samuel Beckett about this new show by Berlin-based Scandinavian art duo Elmgreen & Dragset, which this weekend received two low-key work-in-progress previews en route to a full run at the Performa festival in New York. The first comes in the form of real life movie star Joseph Fiennes onstage. The second, despite the title, looks to Beckett's other existential masterpiece, Waiting For Godot, for guidance. Fiennes plays one of two men who wake up on bunk-beds in a black room, too hungover to remember where they were the night before or why they're all dressed up in identical black suits. The private view babble that sounds as the lights go down gives the game away in spades, however. Fiennes' ID and Charles Edwards' ME are idealised versions of their authors, an art-star double act trapped in a self-reflexive bubble. They're waiting for salvation, not from Godot, but t...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars If Ricky Gervais wants a few tips on what constitutes real artistic taboo-breaking, he should perhaps consider attending Phillip Breen's revival of Peter Nichols' dangerously black comedy. First presented on the same stage forty-four years ago, this tale of a couple whose freefall marriage is defined by their daughter's disability may be a jazz-soundtracked period piece, but it retains more comedic edge than much contemporary fare. It begins with Miles Jupp's frustrated teacher Bri addressing the audience as if we're an unruly end of afternoon classroom. Moving indoors to his seemingly domestic bliss with Sarah Tansey's highly-strung Sheila, it soon becomes clear the pair have constructed an elaborate game centred around wheelchair-bound Joe. With such survival strategies becoming increasingly exhausting, Sheila has taken refuge in amateur dramatics, leaving Bri, hemmed in by his own frustrated intelligence, to ...

Edinburgh Printmakers until October 25th 2011 4 stars When Jeremy Deller put Rupert Murdoch's wrinkled walnut face on a sky-blue 'Vote Conservative' poster to raise funds for the Labour Party, it looked like satire. Given the ongoing phone-hacking saga, it now feels like prophecy. The 'Murdoch Doesn't Give A XXXX' poster opposite from 1986's Fortress Wapping days may be dated in terms of its reference to a then novel Australian fizzy lager, but, seen alongside Deller's piece, it's an important pointer to how history repeats itself. Curated by Rob Tuffnall, this group show aims to reclaim the radical grassroots of print., when a pamphlet, a poster and a button badge were the ideologue's weapons of choice. Such notions date all the way back to James Gillray's early nineteenth century cartoon, awash with pop-eyed society grotesques. Crucial archives from post 1968 Notting Hill provocateurs King Mob include a flyer for the famed de...

Sneaky Pete's Edinburgh Sunday October 9th 4 stars Lewis Roberts may only be just about old enough to attend a club, but judging by this appearance he certainly understands what's required to keep the customers satisfied. Still in his teens, this Glasgow-based Welshman has patented a form of lazy, low-slung electronica on his somewhat obliquely titled twelve inch single, 4D/MTI, awash with stop-start twitchy-fingered glitches and sampled divas that sounds designed for the play-room . Live, Roberts somewhat wisely cranks things up a bit, lest anyone think they're at a groovily soundtracked dinner party where people think its okay to talk over the music. Some still do anyway, but they're twats. The novelty here is having Roberts perform behind his laptop on a stage mounted in the centre of the dancefloor, thus creating an in-the-round experience hitherto unexplored in Sneaky Petes' bijou interior. As Roberts mixes and matches an array of beats and twi...

Tramway, Glasgow, Saturday October 29; Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow, Sunday October 30. How fragile is Glass? And how shattering? Audiences have had plenty of time of late to ponder the cause and effect of veteran New York composer Philip Glass' considerable body of work. Glass himself appeared with his Ensemble to perform the dizzying soundtracks to Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi trilogy of films as part of Edinburgh International Festival. Hot on its heels came a performance of '1000 Airplanes On The Roof,' the Glass-scored 'science-fiction opera', featuring The Red Note Ensemble playing beneath a Concorde in a hangar at the National Museum of Flight. The latter performance is repeated, sans Concorde, as part of the self-explanatory Minimal festival, which this year celebrates Glass' seventy-fifth birthday with a weekend programme split between Glasgow Royal Concert Hall and Tramway. As well as '1000 Airplanes On The Roof,' avant-chamber gr...

4 stars Now a real-life silver Foxx, the pushing-sixty electro-pop/clash pioneer and former vocalist with Ultravox before Midge Ure made them rubbish might just have found his time. Even if, it must be said, this retro-future compendium of detached, dystopian analogue-synth ditties enabled with collaborator Benge was originally released in March this year. While the two extra tracks on this special tour edition don't really constitute a new album, neither do they take away from the ice-cool machine-age sexiness of an appositely warm revisitation to a sound designed for serious young men to suck their cheekbones in to while standing on their own in neon-lit nightclubs watching lip-sticked women dance. The List, October 2011 ends

If Abi Morgan hadn't met a couple of nuns on train, her new play for the National Theatre of Scotland might not have happened. The writer of lauded TV drama The Hour and forthcoming Margaret Thatcher biopic, The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep, was travelling up to the Edinburgh Festival, and fell into conversation with the pair sitting opposite her. “They were in their late seventies or early eighties,” Morgan remembers, “and were very sweet and very inspiring. But during the course of the journey it became apparent that they were being left behind, and that there were no new young women coming up in their order. Suddenly they were looking beneath them at this society they'd lived in all their adult lives, and there was no new blood. These women’s' lives can be traced and mapped out. They don't have children, they don't smoke, they've never married, and there's something anthropological going on there about a way of life which is maybe going ...

Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh 4 stars Everything's Getting Older, an album which paired pianist Bill Wells with former Arab Strap vocalist Aidan Moffat, is a delicate creation of wisdom and beauty. In the flesh, Moffat's evocatively deadpan portraits of middle-aged ennui framed by Wells' equally melancholy tinkles sound even more heartfelt. This could have something to do with Moffat's cold, however, which he announces on the first night of this mini-tour with an unhealthy sounding clearing of the throat following Tasogare, the instrumental that opens both the album and tonight's show. Moffat is surrounded by drums and a music stand, while a pair of dictaphones containing recordings of rain hang on his microphone stand. As the evening progresses, Wells' compositions lend Moffat's words a patina of sophistication that suggests jazz as their perfect backdrop. If that sounds a little bit lounge-core, think again, as Wells throws some left-field ...

Dundee Rep 3 stars It's something of a baptism of fire in Dundee Rep's revival of Vivian French's adaptation of her novel for teenagers, which tours community centres following a short run at the Rep itself. Ostensibly a vehicle for the Ensemble's two new graduate actors, Baby Baby's depiction of teenage mums can't be the easiest of calls. As two young women forced to grow up too soon and with more in common than they think, however, Kirsty Mackay and Natalie Wallace rise to the occasion with an unsentimental steeliness that does the subject proud. April and Pinkie run in different packs. Where April is a parent pleasing little miss perfect, Pinkie is a black-clad rebel. Both, in their own ways, are desperate to impress. Until the inevitable happens and the pair are thrown together in a hostel, only a mutual gal crush brings each to the other's attention. With new sets of responsibilities to get a grip of once their babies are born, the messy...

'Strength. Endurance. Tenderness.' Such a legend is one of half a dozen gracing a series of covers for the 2011 Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival. 'Power. With some twenty-eight productions on show over three weeks, and with sixteen produced by Irish companies, such epithets cover all bases in a festival which, along with the Dublin-based Absolut Fringe festival, which immediately precedes the Theatre Festival, appears to bear little resemblance to its Edinburgh counterpart. Both are smaller for one thing. Despite the 'Dublin Loves Drama' banners posted around town, there's little sense of the city-wide saturation of Edinburgh in August. Unlike the free for all of the Edinburgh Fringe, its Dublin equivalent is curated, and the care taken over both the Absolut Fringe and the Theatre Festival programmes is more akin to Edinburgh International Festival. With Dublin concentrating solely on theatre, however, and with no crossover between the two ev...

“I don't think I've ever seen a farce before,” claims playwright Owen McCafferty. “It was an eye-opener for me, because everyone around me was laughing, and I just didn't get it.” McCafferty is talking about his visit to the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, the night before, when he watched Kenneth Branagh and Rob Bryden mug their way through The Painkiller. Adapted and directed by Sean Foley, one half of The Right Size, The Painkiller is a version of a work by French screen-writer/director Francis Veber, who originally filmed it in1973 as L'emmerdeur, or A Pain in the Ass. Notable for the casting of Belgian torch singer Jacques Brel in the lead role, L'emmerdeur has since been remade twice, once by Billy Wilder. For McCafferty, at least, Foley's version seems to have lost something in translation. “Irish writers don't tend to go down that route,” he says of what now in his eyes look like some very English japes. McCafferty certainly hasn't, as h...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars If you think the modern world is killing the art of conversation, Stewart Laing's exquisitely constructed reimagining of nineteenth century salons for a post-modern age is a perfect night out for closet intellectuals in need of stimulation. By taking over the whole of the Traverse and putting the audience at the heart of the action, Laing and his huge team for Untitled Productions are bringing back social networking in the old-fashioned way. It begins back-stage, with the audience attended to by a coterie of dressers, who kit us out in formal garb that improves the posture and inspires all manner of fancy thoughts. Once we step inside a mocked-up drawing room complete with chandeliers, our own costume drama is enlivened by a rolling programme of entertainments. On the first night, these included blindfolded performance artist Donna Rutherford mashing up some 78RPM vinyl with three wind-up gramophones, a stripped-bare tableau viv...

Tramway, Glasgow 4 stars To suggest Vanishing Point's latest peep through the windows of the human soul is a sequel to their international hit, Interiors, is to be lulled into a false sense of security. The stylistic trappings of a glass-fronted house in which people wordlessly interact may be the same. This time out, however, director Matthew Lenton takes his cast of six beyond everyday minutiae to produce something infinitely more troubling. It begins idyllically enough, as a young couple move into an empty living room they'll soon turn into a home. Within seconds, it seems, their space is invaded and their private world turned upside down, be it by cloyingly intrusive neighbours, a sprung leak or faulty electrics. As an old woman rocks in her chair upstairs, doors open of their own volition. The wildlife documentaries and footage of the early Apollo missions to the moon that play on the TV become someone's worst fears made flesh. The astronaut who float...

There's a place just off Edinburgh's Royal Mile which the chances of you or I ever having been invited inside are pretty slim. By all accounts, the select few who have graced the doors of occasional functions at this residential address a stone's throw from Holyrood are shaping future intellectual thought. Inspired by ideas of eighteenth century salons, in which the latest ideas on philosophy, science and art were debated in a lively social environment, this twenty-first century Edinburgh model is the latest example of a new wave of salons. Here, enlightened thinkers can talk freely in a way in which the democratically elected members along the road either can't, won't, or are simply not clever enough to engage in such a discourse. In his glass-windowed office in Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre peering over a scaled-down model of the theatre's main stage, theatre director, designer and current Traverse artist in residence Stewart Laing appears ...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars How would you spend your final hour and fifteen minutes on earth before the world finally ended, with a bang, a whimper or otherwise? One possibility is to idle the time with the black-toothed double-act waiting for rapture in this transatlantic alliance between two ex Benchtours visual theatre types reinvented as The Occasional Cabaret, and the creative couple behind New York-based Edinburgh Festival Fringe stalwarts, Clancy Productions. Combined, these creative couples have put together a politically inclined compendium of monologue and song which, in an ideal world, would soundtrack their way to Heaven. Or Hell. With the audience sat at cabaret tables and a scarlet-draped stage squeezed into the Tron's Changing House space, Lulu and Gdjet are a couple of gold-garbed crones resembling end of the pier fortune-tellers who didn't quite predict what was coming next. As vamped into being by Catherine Gillard and Nancy Clancy, and aid...

Perth Theatre 4 stars A new wind has blown into Perth, just as it does in Shakespeare's Illyria. That's the accidental message anyway during the opening storm scene of the theatre's incoming artistic director Rachel O'Riordan's debut in-house production. Because, in something usually played as a knockabout rom-com, Riordan sets out her store from the start by blowing away such surface froth to reveal near-Chekhovian depths. Much of this stems from an update to a post World War One Scotland in a crumbling petrol-blue house where a baby grand piano sits at the top of an elaborate staircase. Here Conor Mitchell's Curio sips cocktails while whipping up a jaunty Palm Court style soundtrack with violinist and fellow gent Valentine. That's about as fizzy as things get, however, as all involved wander about in a kind of shell-shocked limbo, trying to re-connect with some sense of purpose. Samara MacLaren's brittle, flapper-like Olivia and Martin...

Wednesday September 28th 2011 When Liverpool's most grandiose post-punk Scally-delicists released their fourth album, Ocean Rain, in 1984, it was advertised as the greatest album ever made. Despite the band's then manager Bill Drummond's provocative hyperbole that he would later refine with the KLF and the K Foundation, it wasn't, but it's collection of string-laden epics was the sound of a band at the peak of their powers. It was also the last time the original four members ever sounded so special in a work that was both fragile and heartfelt. To hear Ocean Rain live, then, complete with all-female teenage string sextet The Cairns Strings bolstering original vocalist Ian McCulloch and guitarist Will Sergeant leading a fine young band, should have been an event on a par with The Crystal Day, the original all-day magical mystery tour around the band's home town that preceded a three-hour live spectacular by the band in Liverpool's St George...

Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow 1 star When Liverpool's most grandiose post-punk outfit released their fourth album in 1984, it was advertised as the greatest ever made. It wasn't, although it's collection of string-laden epics was the last time the original four Bunnymen sounded so special. To hear Ocean Rain live, then, complete with an all-female string sextet bolstering original vocalist Ian McCulloch, guitarist Will Sergeant and a fine young band, should have been major. As it was, despite the music's dramatic splendour, an overly-refreshed McCulloch steered us into chaos. During the first 'greatest hits' set, McCulloch apologises for being “a bit shaky...one point off the ten.” Over the next two hours the score gets considerably lower. Like a bad comedian, McCulloch threatens to sing Donald, Where's Your Troosers, and does unlikely impressions of Jim Morisson impersonating Sid James. Ocean Rain is ushered in by Silver's triumphant flou...

By the time you read this, Vanishing Point theatre company will have almost finished the premiere run of their new show, Saturday Night, in three Portuguese cities prior to opening in Glasgow next month. Back in Glasgow rehearsal several weeks beforehand, and what's possibly the biggest touring set in the world is waiting to be dismantled and shipped out to foreign climes. For now, it's two-tiered expanse we're allowed to peek into through full-length perspex windows holds court to a series of private moments performed by half a dozen actors from three different countries. The next day, however, this imitation of a flat-pack ideal home des-res will be demolished, so there's nothing left but a rehearsal room gap-site waiting for something as yet unknown to replace it. Behind the perspex, a pregnant woman attempts to turn a house into a home. Upstairs, another woman moves in hypnotic motion in a rocking chair. Back downstairs, the roof springs a leak, while...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars Drama that deals seriously with prejudice and disease may be all the rage in mainstream American teen TV these days from Glee to True Blood. When Bill Russell and Janet Hood's flesh and blood wake for first generation AIDS victims first appeared at the end of the 1980s, its mix of schmaltz-laden show-tunes and social comment was considered edgy enough to become a cause celebre. More than two decades on, the gospel-tinged ensemble numbers and overwrought ballads belted out by the nineteen performers onstage in Paul Harper-Swan and musical director Michael Webborn's new studio production sound all too X-Factor familiar. The stories they frame, however, told in a series of rhyming monologues, are a heartfelt and timely reminder of a world-changing epidemic that may no longer hit the headlines, but still affects people every day. Set here around the tables of a celestial cabaret club, the gathered angels of the show's title may mo...

Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh 3 stars Strikes, riots and pay-cuts for the lowest earners are all the rage just now, the first two possibly with good reason. None of this is anything new, however, as Hamish MacDonald's new play for Mull Theatre makes clear in a tale of would-be revolutionaries on the streets of Glasgow and aboard a Royal Navy ship in 1931. Inspired by real life events when sailors in Invergordon protested at a twenty-five per cent wage cut while officers continued to lord it over them, MacDonald's script follows the travails of Connal MacNab, who becomes a figurehead for a mutiny that mirrors his journalist brother Finlay's would-be Bolshevik tendencies on terra firma. As an incarcerated Connal looks back on an adventure that led to his downfall forty-odd years earlier along with thrill-seeking actress Erica, what becomes evident in this hitherto buried piece of peoples history is just how much the establishment are prepared to put the boot i...

Eden Court Theatre, Inverness 3 stars Hard hats and fluorescent bibs are de rigeur down at Inverbeg Council Recycling Depot at the opening of John Bett's musical reimagining of some of Neil Munro's boat-bound yarns involving the saltiest of sea-dogs. Bett's rough-hewn co-production between Eden Court and the Open Book company looks to his own theatrical roots with 7:84 and Wildcat as a rudder for this ribald compendium. For those who may not know the legend, Para Handy is captain of pre World War One puffer boat the SS Vital Spark. With first mate Dougie, deckhand Sunny Jim and engineer Macphail in tow, adventures are many as the crew navigate their way through the Clyde's nether-most reaches. Once Bett's modern-day framing device is done away with, a busy melee of song, archive film footage and silent movie style captions are ushered in amidst an array of sketch-like scenes. These feature a role-call of comic grotesques in what looks like an exten...