Coffee-Table Notes

On December 21 st 1988, Pan Am flight 103, a Boeing 747 named Clipper Maid of the Seas, which was making a regular trip from Frankfurt to Detroit via London, fell from the air over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie, in Dumfries and Galloway. The aeroplane's 243 passengers and sixteen crew members were killed by a bomb placed inside a suitcase stored onboard the aircraft. As the plane careered into residential areas of Lockerbie, eleven people on the ground were also killed. Passengers on the flight included Paul Jeffreys, onetime bass player with Steve Harley's Cockney Rebel, and poet Joanna Walton, a former girlfriend of Robert Fripp who had written lyrics for Fripp's 1979 album, Exposure, and who had coined the term Frippertronics to define Fripp's tape-looping techniques. The subsequent arrest and imprisonment of Libyan national Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, followed by his release from Greenock Prison by the Scottish Government in 2009 on compassionate

When Elliot Roberts saw writer and performer Rob Drummond's show, Bullet Catch, at the Arches in Glasgow, he never thought he would end up working as assistant director on a new play by the prolific writer and performer presented on the main-stage of the Traverse, the world-renowned Edinburgh-based new writing theatre. Three years on, however, and Roberts has been installed for the last few weeks on Traverse artistic director Orla O'Loughlin's production of Drummond's play, Grain in the Blood. This co-production with the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, where it opens this week, finds Drummond putting a noirish thriller into a rural landscape where a prodigal's return home to an isolated community steeped in local folklore raises moral dilemmas about personal sacrifices made for a greater good. For Roberts, his tenure on Grain in the Blood also marks a breakthrough for the young director and former dramaturgy student at the University of Glasgow enabled by a bursary i

Kirkton Community Centre, Dundee Three stars Things have changed since John McCann's pre-independence referendum fantasia first appeared in Edinburgh during the summer of 2014. Then, with the actual vote looming, McCann imagined newly appointed SNP Foreign Minister Fiona preparing to square up to her Westminster counterpart as the world's press watched sovereignty being handed over. Somewhat symbolically pregnant, Fiona also looked set to have her wings and her upstart tendencies clipped by Mark, a junior bureaucrat with a nice line in managerialist gobbledegook who had been sent to make sure she didn't go off message. Now, in this updated version rewritten by McCann for Dundee Rep Ensemble's latest community tour, the 2014 No vote a bittersweet memory for both parties. Set in 2020, a second indy referendum may have finally got a result, but there is the lingering mess of the post-Brexit fall-out to deal with as well. As the play opens, Fiona rises from a smal

Dario Fo Comedian, Playwright, Director, Performer, Activist, Painter, Designer, Theatre-maker Born March 24 1926 ; died October 13 2016 Dario Fo, who has died aged ninety following a lung-based illness that saw him hospitalised two weeks ago, was a radical maestro who understood the power of laughter beyond polemic. The news of his passing comes in the midst of Dancing With Colours, Whipping With Words, a month-long celebration of the Nobel Prize winning author of now classic works such as Accidental Death of An Anarchist and Mistero Buffo, which is currently ongoing in Edinburgh. Fo himself, whose works have been heard in more than thirty languages, was due to travel to Scotland to take part in an onstage conversation at the Royal Lyceum Theatre with his biographer, translator and greatest champion, Joe Farrell. It was Farrell's rollicking versions of Fo's key works that brought them to Scots audiences in a series of productions produced by Borderline Theatre Comp

Shed 36, Port of Dundee Four stars It's like Christmas and a trip to Blackpool at once as the audience for Grid Iron theatre company's latest site-specific extravaganza are bussed out from Dundee city centre to one of several massive sheds used by the city's Port Authority, transformed here into a theatre space. As it is, the array of lights that flank the shed belong to three stationary exploration rigs that tower over the company's exploration of the oil industry. Inside the shed, video projections at the back of Becky Minto's tiered steel set beam out statistics of how many barrels of oil are drilled during the course of the ninety minute show as several stories play out between a barrage of historical information. Much of the latter in director Ben Harrison's script is provided by Texas Jim, a big-talking cipher of how oil has made a few people like him rich, while the people and places exploited along the way are mere collateral damage. In the Nig

In an upstairs room in Leith, Grid Iron theatre company are going for gold. The prize is the Edinburgh-based company's latest site-specific extravaganza, Crude, a dramatic study of oil, the slippery substance that powers the world, making some people very rich. For those on the frontline, the human cost sometimes proves even greater. This is easy to see in the mock up of a hotel bar and bedroom where a one-night tryst between characters played by Phil McKee and Kirsty Stuart takes place. There are brief monologues from survivors of oil rig disasters such as the one that happened in 1988 when an explosion happened on the North Sea based Piper Alpha rig, which was destroyed in a blast that killed 167 people, including two rescue workers. A memorial to those who died sits in Hazelhead Park in Aberdeen. In another scene, McKee's character is tied to a chair and tortured. Inbetween all this, a man in a stetson called Texas Jim swaggers about like J.R. Ewing, the slickly deviou

Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh Four stars “Please,” says Italian actor Mario Pirovano after a lengthy introduction to his interpretation of his long-time collaborator Dario Fo's solo study of Saint Francis of Assisi. “Relax. It's only theatre.” Given what happens over the four 'episodes' that follow, such a pre-cursor to the main event is self-deprecation as arform. The first two pieces find Francis dealing with a possibly symbolic wolf before being forced to make a speech to war-torn Bologna. So powerful is his stand-up satire, it seems, that peace breaks out three days later. Both are sublime, but it is the second half's extended riff on Francis' attempts to tell the gospel in a more down-to-earth lingo than Latin where Pirovano really flies, before things finish up with the saint's final transcendent hours. Inbetween playing assorted popes, cardinals and other animals, Pirovano presents Francis, not as the beatific Dr Doolittle figur

SCHOOL'S out in downtown Colombo, Sri Lanka. It is a few days before the Sri Lankan new year in April, and, at the gates of Bishop's College, a few students are hoisting a banner for Exstastics, a Sunday night extravaganza that's a hipper version of a gang show. All 650 seats at the theatre are sold out, and there is an endof-term frisson in the air. Outside the theatre itself a beggar lies prostrate as the Tuk Tuks - the barely-legal three-wheeler taxi cabs - buzz by. Inside, a culture shock from the mysterious west is taking shape. The Glasgow-based Vanishing Point theatre company is preparing for the opening night of their Edinburgh Fringe hit, Lost Ones. This dark slice of gothic fantasy has arrived in town following stints in Kosovo and Macedonia, having first impressed the talent scouts in Edinburgh last August at the biennial British Council showcase. "Everything I bring here, " British Council Sri Lanka's arts manager, Ranmali Mirchan

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars When Jason Manford's down-at-heel inventor Caractacus Potts rebuilds a rusted old banger in this new touring revival of Jeremy Sams' stage adaptation of the Roald Dahl scripted 1968 musical film, he gets a lot more than he bargained for with the flying machine that results from his tampering. Inspired by Ian Fleming's short story awash with a trademark Bondesque array of customised cars, cartoon villains and exotic locales, the film's Bank holiday friendly songbook by Richard and Robert Sherman remains intact. James Brining's co-production between West Yorkshire Playhouse and former Festival Theatre boss John Stalker's Music and Lyrics company uses all the resources at his disposal to hone a facility for musical theatre developed while running Dundee Rep. With Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's adventures on land, sea and air brought to life by a mix of hi-tech back projections and old-school engineering, Manford h

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Samuel Beckett's old man Krapp is already sitting there at his wooden table piled with his personal detritus as the audience file in to the Tron's tiny Changing House attic space that lends itself so atmospherically to Beckett's portrait of a lonely soul rummaging through his back pages. Gerry Mulgrew's Krapp peers out, pasty-faced and seemingly already dress-rehearsing the lie of an after-life that can't come too soon. There's a low electric hum in the air, the sound of amplified breathing into a microphone, and is that a disembodied voice keening in the ether? For the first ten minutes of Paul Brotherston's production, Krapp wordlessly strains himself through the basics of getting by, almost coming a comic cropper as he goes. As he rewinds his collected tape-spools that immortalise his younger self, innocence and experience seem to spar with each other as Krapp attempts to recapture the essence of his old loves.

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars “How did it work, this thing called democracy?” one of the multitude of young women onstage asks their old father Danaus as he returns from arguing the case for this swathe of Egyptian asylum seekers in search of sanctuary in Argos. Given that the first part of Aeschylus' now largely lost Danaid trilogy is two and a half thousand years old, this is quite a question in David Greig's new version, brought to the stage for this flagship production of Greig's new tenure as the Lyceum's artistic director by Ramin Gray. It begins with the performers running through the auditorium before lining up onstage as actor Omar Ebrahim introduces a knowing lesson in theatrical economics delivered by real live MSP Willie Rennie. As an opening gambit drawn from ancient Greek civic ritual it is as inspired and as relevant as everything that follows in this co-production between the Lyceum and Actors Touring Company. In the women we can

Somewhere in Italy, Dario Fo is talking about his relationship with Scotland, a country where actors and theatre-makers have adopted the plays of the veteran director, actor and political provocateur like few others and made them their own. As the author of modern classics such as Accidental Death of An Anarchist, Cant Pay? Won't Pay! and Trumpets and Raspberries prepares to return to Edinburgh like an adopted prodigal to take part in Dancing With Colours, Whipping With Words, a month-long festival of his work and influence on contemporary political theatre, the now ninety year old Nobel Prize winner sounds in remarkably rude health. At the other end of the line, two translators from the Edinburgh Italian Cultural Institute hang on to Fo's every word, chuckling occasionally at something he says. They refer to Fo as Maestro, a suitably grandiloquent word for an artist who, along with his artistic and life partner Franca Rame, changed the face of theatre, but whose craft is ro

PHILIP Prowse's reputation travels well before him - exactly what you'd expect from a designer/director of such sumptuous visual finesse, who's pretty much defined the look of Glasgow's Citizens Theatre over the past 34 years as one-third of the outgoing directorial triumvirate alongside Giles Havergal and Robert David MacDonald. His final production, of Thomas Otway's little-known seventeenth century, Venice Preserved, which closes this weekend, effectively ending an era, is as fitting a swansong as long-time Citz aficionados could hope or imagine. A big, brutalist epic of political conspiracy in high and low places, so rich is Venice Preserved in painterly intent, it almost bursts out of the proscenium and spills over into the auditorium. It is a play Prowse has worked on twice now. In the early-1970s, he designed a production by Robert David MacDonald, since when ''I've always wanted to do it, and I figured,'' he says, resignedly, '

Only an actress of magnitude could get away with wearing specs to match her outfit, but, elegantly clad in various shades of red, Georgina Hale carries it off with surprisingly understated aplomb. With such a display of well-coordinated show-stopping flamboyance in mind, you might expect such a veteran of stage and screen, including a Bafta winning-turn in Ken Russell's musical biopic, Mahler, to come on strong with a winning set of well-worn anecdotes and name-dropping bons mots, all ready-made for the prime-time chat-show circuit. Expectations, however, are decidedly confounded. Because, as Hale trawls through her back pages, as she knows she must, during a break from rehearsals for the Citizens' Theatre's production of The Cherry Orchard, in which she's playing Madame Ranevsky, there's a world-weary languor about her. It is as though she's just come across something in her bottom drawer she'd long-since put out of her mind, or given up for dead in a

Perth Concert Hall Three stars The Broons annual isn't just for Christmas, it seems, in this bumper-sized staging of Dudley D Watkins' eighty-year old comic strip family, brought to life by writer Rob Drummond and director Andrew Panton for the Sell A Door company in association with Perth Theatre. It begins with Maw Broon attempting to round up her brood for a family snapshot on a stage already framed by cartoon portraits of the clan set against a jumbo-sized logo. As resident glamour-puss Maggie announces her impending wedding, Drummond put flesh and blood on the characters in a topsy-turvy mix of knowingness and nostalgia. The dramatic portrait that follows lays bare a matriarchal microcosm of working class family life stuck in a Sisyphean limbo of everyday adventures where nothing ever changes. While there is much fun to be had from the eleven-strong ensemble's studies of all that is braw with Maw, Pa, Grandpa and co, Drummond paints them as a not always happy

In the Royal Lyceum Theatre's Edinburgh rehearsal room, twelve women are gathered around the piano, singing the praises of the goddess Aphrodite. Vocal Leader Stephen Deazley is putting the women, who will be playing the wise women of Argos in the Lyceum's forthcoming production of The Suppliant Women, through their paces. It's only their second rehearsal, but already they sound in fine voice for playwright and new Lyceum artistic director David Greig's new version of Aeschylus' rarely performed Greek tragedy. Half an hour later, another twenty-odd women troop into the room, and gather on chairs beside the wise women. These are a younger generation, who have been rehearsing every Wednesday night and Saturday afternoon for a month now, and whose collective voice as brought to life by Deazley is steelier and more defiant in tone as they spar with their elders. As the young women shriek in rhythmic unison, one of them punches the air like a warrior princess in waiti

When the announcement came that a National Theatre of Scotland was to be formed, it ended decades and possibly centuries of wrangling over a desire for artistic self-determination in the country's thriving theatre scene on a par with opera, ballet and classical music. When this new body announced in 2004 that the company's inaugural artistic director would be Vicky Featherstone, with John Tiffany as associate director for new writing and Neil Murray as executive producer, it seemed to some who had championed long-serving directors from major building-based institutions as a leftfield choice. As it turned out, with an unexpected major international hit on their hands in the company's first year after it was launched in 2006 in the form of Black Watch, Gregory Burke's bombastic theatrical collage on life in the military frontline post Iraq War, it was an inspired one. Featherstone had come from new writing company, Paines Plough, and had strong ties with theatre

It's after midnight on Saturday night in a gloriously anachronistic North Wales holiday camp, and the atmosphere is electric. Over the previous two days, revellers gathered for the Stewart Lee curated All Tomorrow's Parties festival have moved between alt.rock, free jazz and John Cage inspired experiments. Now, however, a packed audience gazes on a scarlet-swathed stage, having even less of a clue what to expect. When a band clad in golden robes enters, it is not the surviving members of Sun Ra's Arkestra, who will close the festival the next night wearing similarly sparkly apparel. Sporting a shimmering gold lame leotard, the young woman at the centre of the spectacle looks as showbiz as it gets. As she and her entourage open with a version of Laura Palmer's Theme from David Lynch's cult TV show, Twin Peaks, one could be forgiven for presuming that Club Silencio, the mysterious nightclub in Lynch's film, Mulholland Drive, had set up shop in Pontin's