Coffee-Table Notes

When boys and girls come out to play, chances are at some point end up fighting. Which may have something to do with why the two winners of this year's Platform 18 theatre-making award at the Arches in Glasgow have kept to their own, gender-wise. While Peter McMaster offers up an all-male adaptation of Emily Bronte's windswept romance, Wuthering Heights, Amanda Monfrooe looks to classical Greek forms for POKE in which the last two women in the world explore notions of male violence against women, and how they reached the state they're in. While such exercises in what looks like separatist sexual politics sound like the sort of thing that came out of a 1970s, the-personal-is-political line of inquiry, the younger generation of theatre-makers who McMaster and Monfrooe are part of are tackling their subjects with a refreshingly contemporary seriousness. “We're finding ways to understand modes of expression of men,” says McMaster. “I've fixated on the character o

1 There were two words I thought might come up when I started thinking about what was going on in Scottish playwriting and Scottish theatre throughout the 1990s, and which seemed deeply relevant to its trajectory. I wondered whether to mention them or not, but after events of this week, I can't really avoid them. Those words are Margaret. And Thatcher. Because the 1990s were a curious decade, in that what Margaret Thatcher did in the 1980s seemed to fuel some kind of artistic dissent, yet by the 1990s, it seemed to have disappeared. Whereas in the 1980s, it was obvious who the bad guys were, to the point were anger sometimes got in the way of art, in the 1990s, while things seemed to become cleverer and more expansive, it was also more complex and ambiguous, and less easy to recognise those bad guys. So for much of the 1990s, it felt that things were in a state of flux en route to the end of the century. Many plays – though by no means all - were about trying to

As action heroines go, Amy Manson certainly looks the part. With her leonine mane and athletic physique, the Aberdeenshire-born twenty-seven year old has spent the last few years in a stream of culty small-screen dramas, while her first film role was in indie horror flick, Pumpkinhead: Blood Feud. Since then there have been regular roles in flipped-on-its-head monster series, Being Human and science-fiction drama, Outcasts, as well as guest slots in Torchwood and Misfits. There are even rumours that Manson might soon be playing a very familiar classic comic-book super-heroine. Not that Manson hasn't had a chance to shine in period frockage, as she proved in Pre-Raphaelite romp, Desperate Romantics. All of which should hold her in good stead this week when she opens as Nora in a new version of Ibsen's nineteenth century classic, A Doll's House, at Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum Theatre. Manson plays Nora, the woman at the heart of the play which will be kept in period i

Poetry, jazz and radical politics aren't exactly strangers to counter-cultural activity. As the black civil rights movement grew during the 1960s, so jazz grew ever free-er and subversive as words and music cried out for liberation. One of the pioneering provocateurs of black American poetry is Amiri Baraka, the New Jersey-born poet and playwright who has been agitating, educating and organising ever since he moved into Greenwich Village, where he discovered jazz and Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Since then, the artist formerly known as LeRoi Jones has become one of the most significant writers of his generation, courting controversy with every line that questioned what he saw as an oppressive establishment. This has been the case whether in volumes of jazz criticism, revolutionary inclined poems that were a clear influence on early rap, or as a figurehead of the radical Black Arts Movement. Baraka's poem, Black Art, in which he called for 'poe

Tom Fleming Centre, Stewart's Melville College, Edinburgh 3 stars There's something joyful about this double bill of Moliere comic miniatures, adapted here for Lung Ha's Theatre Company in typically scurrilous fashion by Morna Pearson. This may have something to do with MJ McCarthy and Kim Moore's jaunty accordion-led soundtrack that plays as the audience enter, or it may be the bustle of the cast who welcome them into designer Karen Tennant's beautifully draped world. Either way, there's a sense of period-costumed liberation at play, both in the first piece, The Seductive Countess, and in it's follow-up, The Flying Doctor. The Seductive Countess finds the protege of a vain and selfish lady persuading her Viscount true love to see off her suitors, while The Flying Doctor has a pair of bumbling servants role-play a couple of quacks in order to prevent an unseemly marriage. Pared down to just seventy-five minutes overall, Maria Oller's productio

Kings Theatre, Edinburgh 3 stars It may be fifteen years since Pauline Quirke and Linda Robson last regularly graced the small screen as Essex siblings Sharon and Tracey in the long-running sit-com about a pair of convicts wives, but, judging by this stage play that picks up their story, their common touch is still held looked on with affection. As is too Sharon and Tracey's man-eating neighbour Dorian, played with Medusa-haired abandon by Lesley Joseph. While Sharon and Tracey are still living together in a nouveau-riche fly-by-bight existence, much has changed. Tracey's son is now sixteen, and his serial jailbird dad is seemingly reduced to ashes. When the pair are summonsed to an old people's care home by Dorian, the trio are reunited in an unlikely plot framed around the death of an elderly resident. In the mist of all this come sly contemporary nudges about police corruption, tabloid sensationalism, the riots, references to both Cameron and Blair, as well as

King's Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars There's little in the way of sentimentality in much of the Original Theatre Company's new take on Sebastian Faulks' First World War novel by writer Rachel Wagstaff. Given that it looks at a doomed love affair between English officer Stephen Raysford and Isabelle Azaire, the French woman trapped in a loveless and abusive marriage who captivates him, this is somewhat surprising. But as the frontline troops let off steam with an increasingly desperate-looking sing-song that opens the play before marching to their deaths in the Somme, any ideas of a conventional war-time romance are instantly blasted into the trenches with the emotionally complex grit of what follows. Where Faulks' story was originally told via a linear narrative, Wagstaff's script, revised since Trevor Nunn's original 2010 West End production, weaves her characters through time-frames to create an ambitiously realised memory play which moves seamles