Coffee-Table Notes

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh 3 stars Before the irresistible rise of the juke-box musical, the rock and roll tribute show was king. Queen too if this warts and all Tina Turner homage is anything to go by, as devisers Pete Brooks and John Miller reclaim the form's simple but effective attributes in Brooks' co-production with Bob Eaton. Eaton is a safe pair of hands, having defined the rock and roll musical while running Liverpool's Everyman Theatre. It is significant there is no writer's credit in what amounts to a strip cartoon summation of church-going teenager Anna Mae Bullock's rise, fall and subsequent reinvention in what's now regarded as Turner's 1980s heyday. This was initially down to Bullock meeting one Ike Turner, a driven musical genius smart enough to see the potential in Bullock's voice enough to put her centre stage. As the pair become entwined personally as well as professionally, Turner's ambition turns to rage, misogyny, drug

How do you go about staging the complete works of Sherlock Holmes? It's a question even Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional pipe-smoking detective hero himself might have trouble with. It's nevertheless one which comically inclined theatre troupe Peepolykus asked themselves when they decided to make a new show. Audiences may or may well find out some kind of answer in The Arthur Conan Doyle Appreciation Society, a new piece scripted by Peepolykus founders Steven Canny and John Nicholson, which opens this week at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre, whose artistic director, Orla O'Loughlin, directs. “We knew that we wanted to write something about Arthur Conan Doyle, and we thought it might be an interesting idea to try and fit every Sherlock Holmes story into one thing,” says Nicholson, who, alongside Peepolykus regular, Javier Marzan and Scottish actress Gabriel Quigley, will be performing in the new show. “We came up with an idea for that, which felt like quite good fun,

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars The guy sitting at the table in the Tron’s Victorian Bar is on his mobile speaking to the wife. He’s on a promise, he reckons, and is about to hit the big time. She’s telling him to go for it, but if he’s on to something, she wants a piece of the action too. So the guy goes back up to the bar, which is when things get really weird for Macbeth. Or that’s the impression you get from Ian Macdonald’s half-hour Gaelic translation of Shakespeare’s Scottish play commissioned by Glasgow Life/Glasch Beo. At the moment, Liz Carruthers’ work-in-progress production (although not advertised as such) is a one-man affair, with Daibhidh Walker playing Macbeth as a leather-jacketed bar-room big man who suddenly finds he’s a contender enough to take on all-comers. While some of the original text’s subtleties may be lost to non-Gaelic speakers, it’s not hard to get the broader gist of things as Walker’s straight out of Shameless Macbeth downs another drink

Madras College, St Andrews 3 stars The demise of the Byre Theatre as a thriving professional producing house following funding cuts after a major refurbishment was a major loss to St Andrews. With any luck, this new production of a script originally penned by John Ward may help encourage the re-establishment of a permanent artistic team at what is now primarily a receiving house. Ward’s play was a heroic reimagining of the life and death of seventeenth century Scots wanderer, James MacPherson, who created his own mythology via the song he penned while awaiting execution. Kally Lloyd-Jones’ production of Linda Duncan McLaughlin’s adaptation was enabled by the Scottish Government-backed Year of Creative Scotland 2012’s bestowment of the Scotland’s Creative Place Award to St Andrews. Performed by a mixed cast of professionals and community participants, the production is staged in a heated tent in the grounds of Madras College, and is a romantically inclined romp that sugg

Theatre Royal, Glasgow 4 stars When Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe came of big-screen age earlier this year in the cinematic adaptation of Susan Hill’s spookiest of novels, one feared that its gothic gloss might suck the life out of the late Stephen Mallatratt’s stage version. After more than two decades in the west end and ten national tours, judging by this latest encounter, Robin Herford’s still spine-tingling production isn’t ready to lie down just yet. Mallatratt’s play finds lawyer Arthur Kipps hiring an actor to role-play events from years before in an attempt to exorcise ghosts that have haunted him since. These involve a young Kipps being packed off to a desolate country house to oversee a dead woman’s affairs, only to have the eponymous Woman transform his life. As a dense yarn of illigitimacy, accidental death and revenge from the grave is unveiled, the shocks pile on aplenty for Kipps, whether played by Julian Forsyth or by Antony Eden’s Actor. This m

Amateur dramatics may still conjure up images of chintzy middle England matriarchs over-playing Alan Ayckbourn in draughty village halls, but it remains one of Britain's most popular past-times. Some two thousand groups estimated to be producing work, while in Scotland, the Scottish Community Drama Association is a major hub of am dram activity. Some of the best am dram groups are currently on show in Nation's Best Am Dram, a six part TV series on Sky Arts HD, which pits teams against each other in a competition judged and mentored by high-profile theatre professionals. With three very different Scottish groups making it down to the last eight, and with performance in a London West End the prize for the winner, am dram is a very serious business for everyone involved. By way of actor and director Kathy Burke's throaty narration, the first two episodes of Nation's Best Am Dram have introduced viewers to Edinburgh Graduate Theatre Group (EGTG), the Glasgow-based

Tramway, Glasgow 4 stars The week-long residency at Tramway by maverick producers, Fuel, continued in the tone set by David Rosenberg’s opening sonic adventure, Ring, of invading our space and subverting our senses. The rest of the programme was by turns arresting, provocative and, at its best, deeply political, both on a personal and a global level. Nowhere was this mashed up more than in Make Better Please, Unexpected Guests’ latest meditation on how we live now. This began with focus group style round-table discussions on news events of the day, and ended with a collective purging of the mess of twenty-first century secularised culture discussed earlier. Following a succession of quick-fire role-plays, things grew increasingly frantic, as one of our hosts took on the sins of David Cameron, Jimmy Savile, George Osborne and all the rest. Pulsed along by a punk-style din, this was Unexpected Guests getting back to their and our roots, where the primitive power of the