Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars There are hidden depths to this eight play compendium of unperformed miniatures by established writers alongside new works by younger voices. This is something to do with the way director Andy Arnold's co-production between the Tron and New Inck Theatre weaves the plays together into a fluid whole which actors Keith Fleming, Gavin Wright, Brian Pettifer and Natalie Toyne navigate their way through on Kirsty McCabe's multi-layered junkyard set. It opens with Nimrod, Lynsey Murdoch's blackly comic look at two astronomers waiting for miracles in the frozen north. This is followed by Athol Fugard's A Conversation, in which a man and his daughter attempt to understand each other while out bird-spotting. Lighten Up by Andrew Stott focuses on a young couple attempting to rekindle their relationship on a Sunday night in front of the TV. This is followed by Ron and Julie, in which Alan Ayckbourn puts plenty of light, sound and action into a typi

When Mark Thomas premiered his new show, Bravo Figaro, at the Traverse Theatre as part of the 2012 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, it came as something of a surprise. Not just because this gobbiest of left-wing stand-ups had seemingly body-swerved the grassroots venues he normally plays to do something more theatrically formal. The content of the piece too was something of a curve-ball. Where Thomas' previous visit to Edinburgh had been with Extreme Rambling – Walking The Wall, an account of Thomas' journey to the Middle East to walk the entire length of the Israeli Separation Border, Bravo Figaro was an all too personal story of Thomas' relationship with his opera-loving father. The show was framed around Thomas' reaction to his father contacting degenerative illness, progressive supranuclear palsy, when he persuaded the Royal Opera House company to perform in his parents bungalow in Bournemouth. Bravo Figaro was funny, honest, moving and surprisingly unsentimental

NEIL Cooper  is theatre critic for The Herald, and a freelance writer. When did working in the media first start becoming an ambition? From a very early age, I guess, but I had absolutely no idea how you went about it. I was a print junkie, first with Marvel comics and science fiction fanzines, then later with the music papers, which were at their post-punk peak when I was a teenager. The NME was my 'bible', and I started picking up music fanzines from Probe, which was the hip record shop in Liverpool. My favourite was one from Manchester, called City Fun, which was a deeply pretentious scene gossip-sheet with live reviews and record reviews. It was extremely opinionated and dripped sarcasm from every page. At the time, I didn't realise it was probably produced by a bunch of pseudy students. But I still didn't have a clue about seizing the means of production for oneself. I was also influenced by Tony Wilson on Granada Reports. One minute he'd be reading t

Derek Riddell is probably too tall to be playing JM Barrie, the troubled author of Peter Pan. At five foot three, Barrie's stature is considerably shorter than the 5'11 and a half Glasgow-born actor familiar from his TV turn in American hit, Ugly Betty. As Riddell prepares to play Barrie in Peter and Alice, a new play by John Logan directed by Michael Grandage, the power of imagination will clearly come into play on more than just its subject. Given too that other portrayals of Barrie have been by the likes of the even more unlikely Johnny Depp in Finding Neverland, Riddell shouldn't have too much of a problem. “He was described by most people as this strange little creature,” Riddell explains, “and he had this really strange voice, but we don't want to be too weird about it. He was a very complex character. One minute he could be witty and charming and captivating to the boys, the next he could go into these black silences, and there's a real dark

King's Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars When Alfred Uhry's quietly political play first appeared in 1987, the idea of America voting in a black President at all, let alone for a second term, was a long way off. A quarter of a century on, Uhry's intimate story of the increasingly co-dependent relationship between an elderly Georgian matriarch and her chauffeur during the civil rights years is a necessary reminder of how far things have come. More importantly, perhaps, than the back projections of Martin Luther King and other protesters from the era in director David Esbjornson's touring production, Uhry has sketched a warm and human story about friendship, ageing and mortality. It opens in 1948, with banker Boolie Werthan attempting to hire a chauffeur for his mother, the cantankerous seventy-two year old of the play's title, who has just crashed her own car for the final time. At first resistant to her new employee, Miss Daisy's initial suspicions and in-gr

There's something quietly inscrutable and really rather regal about Don Warrington. This is as apparent in conversation with the actor whose long television career began in iconic 1970s TV sit-com, Rising Damp as it is onstage in the touring production of Driving Miss Daisy, which arrives in Edinburgh this week. It's something to do with the perfectly enunciated and ever so slightly plummy drawl of his voice, but there's a presence there too and a sense of containment that suggests a stillness and an air of authority. Such characteristics make Warrington perfect, then, to play Hoke Colburn, the chauffeur to Daisy Werthan, the deep south matriarch who gives Alfred Uhry's 1987 Broadway hit, filmed by Bruce Beresford two years later, its title. Charting the pair's relationship between 1948 and 1973, Uhry's play sees them move through a changing America, as in-built racism gives way to the civil rights movement while Daisy and Hoke's master-servant status gr

Ferry Road, Edinburgh 4 stars In a secret urban garden in the north of the city by night, the earth is about to erupt into explosive life. The audience for this latest site sensitive work by the Vision Mechanics company have already been promenaded down the quiet street beyond from a local hotel, and are sat around the moodily-lit shrubbery while what sounds like the low rumble of cracking earth churns from the headphones each is given as they pass through the gate. In the crepescular glow, a folk lament is sung as smoke billows, until the singing morphs into an unseen woman's voice calling to her lost love. When the young woman finally enters, great-coated and alive with possibility, it's as if she's risen from the ground itself, so at one with the birds and bees twittering and buzzing in our ears does she seem. For her, sex and love are something primal, obsessive and unfettered, and only when her passions are thwarted and the life that drives her is ripped