Coffee-Table Notes

On Tuesday I attended a meeting of City of Edinburgh's Culture and Sport Committee. I was there in my capacity as a member of CEC's Music is Audible working group, set-up a year ago following a tsunami of dissent concerning the capital's attitude towards live music during a meeting of the city's musical community at the Usher Hall under the banner Live Music Matters. One of the main issues raised at LMM was that of noise complaints. CEC's current legislation dictates that live amplified music must remain inaudible beyond the four walls of where it is being performed. Many argue that this favours a complainant. While outside of John Cage any notion of music being inaudible is an absurdity, such legislation isn't made any more credible by CEC officers not being trained to measure sound in any meaningful scientific way. This has made for some full, frank and very necessary exchanges between music professionals and CEC officers. The culmination of this proc

Customs House, Edinburgh Four stars The lost-looking sailor who opens the door into one of Leith's most grandiloquent buildings where Grid Iron Theatre Company's tenth anniversary staging of vignettes from Jim Crace's food-absorbed novel awaits may look like he's stepped off a ghost ship, but there's something even more haunting beyond. From Johnny Austin and Charlene Boyd's sexy Addams Family style couple who top and tail the show with some of its more wildly erotic imaginings, to the over-riding and all-pervading sense of melancholy that runs throughout Ben Harrison's production, life, death, sex, loss, mortality and everything inbetween are served up in a way designed to gorge on. Navigating the capacity audience of just forty around the building through a network of rarely occupied rooms prior to a short Scottish tour, the action veers from staircase erotica to an array of settings and situations, with each tale of the unexpected brought vividly

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars When the second Mrs de Winter surges forward onto the beach at the opening of Kneehigh Theatre's radical reworking of Daphne du Maurier's iconic windswept classic, it isn't clear whether it's the storm she's just walked through or the last breath of her predecessor that soundtracks her every triumphant sashay into the night. Either way, when she utters the novel's immortal opening line about how last night she dreamt of Manderley, the seaside house where her widowed older husband Max took her following a whirlwind romance, it gives new resonance to everything that follows. Rather than offer up some slavish sub-Hitchcockian homage, Emma Rice's production of her own adaptation more resembles a late night Freudian explosion in Mrs de Winter's head that gives her a very rude awakening. As she stumbles through designer Leslie Travers' take on Manderley built of higgledy-piggledy staircases that climb to cha

Usher Hall, Edinburgh Four Stars The two laptops that shine in the gloom from one side of the stage flanked by Asian Dub Foundation's live quartet speak volumes about how far we've come since George Lucas's first and best feature film appeared in 1971. Before Lucas veered off into smash hit space operas and pulp adventure yarns, THX 1138's depiction of a medicated dystopian society utilised hi-tech surveillance techniques and computer data to illustrate a form of social control which seemed like so much post-1960s paranoia. Almost half a century on in ADF's mash-up of sound and vision that began a UK tour this weekend it now looks and sounds like prophecy. ADF have previous form in grafting live soundtracks onto the likes of La Haine and Battle of Algiers, and you can see the appeal of Lucas and co-writer Walter Murch's parable about a man who attempts to escape from a psyched-out world of sex crimes and virtual messiahs to such a politically charged band. As a

Singing was a way of life for actor Paul Higgins when he was training to be a priest. Deacon Blue frontman, Ricky Ross, on the other hand, didn't want to sing at all, but just wanted to write songs for others. For one reason or another, things worked out differently for both men, with Higgins becoming a familiar face on stage and screen in the likes of Black Watch, The Thick of It and Utopia, while Ross and band helped defined mainstream popular music throughout the late 1980s and beyond. The results of both men's relationship with song have led to The Choir, a brand new musical play written by the pair which opens in a major production this week at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow in co-production with commercial producers, Ambassadors Theatre Group. As the first fruits of an initiative designed to nurture and develop new musicals by homegrown writers and composers, The Choir somewhat fittingly tells the story of how a community choir in Wishaw gradually comes together, over

It was inevitable that Emma Rice would go to Manderley one day. As both a long time fan of Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier's iconic 1938 novel transposed so memorably to the big screen by Alfred Hitchcock two years later, and as joint artistic director of the Cornwall-based  Kneehigh Theatre, Rice was more than aware of the story's dramatic potential. As her production should prove as it arrives in Edinburgh tonight for a string of dates in Scotland, what might initially appear to be a commercial staple is a Rebecca like no other. Where purists might prefer  a more slavish recreation of Du Maurier's gothic noir concerning the unseen presence of Maxim de Winter's first wife who died at sea in mysterious circumstances, and the influence she has as he brings his new young bride home to his country pile, Rice takes an infinitely more playful approach. It begins with a live chorale of sea shanties performed by a chorus of fishermen who pop up through trap doors in upturned boa

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars There are moments when it feels like Benjamin, the teenage Christian fundamentalist at the heart of Maja Zade's English translation of German playwright Marius von Mayenburg's drama, is bursting, not just out of his school uniform, but out of his very skin in this co-production between Actors Touring Company and Unicorn Theatre. One minute he's quoting the scriptures to justify his refusal to take part in mixed swimming lessons, the next he's thrown into temptation by both his classmate Lydia and his would-be disciple and good cause, George. Growing pains and a bursting sexuality, it seems, are guided by a blind faith that is prepared to sacrifice anything that gets in its way. This is made flesh here by Benjamin's  biology teacher, Erica, who, in between dodging the everyday sexism of her male colleagues becomes an equally obsessed believer. Set on an array of wooden surfaces and platforms which his cast navigate, Ramin Gray&