Coffee-Table Notes

If Vicky Featherstone hadn't come to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe when a student at Manchester University, it's unlikely that the National Theatre of Scotland would exist as it does. Featherstone, after all, was the company's first artistic director of a company which had already opted for a radical 'theatre without walls' initiative, programming a body of work that drew from all aspects of Scottish theatre. During Featherstone's tenure, the NTS developed more left-field artists alongside big main stage plays, a tradition which Featherstone took over as artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre in London. Despite heading up such august institutions, it feels as though Featherstone has retained a Fringe sensibility sired during the 1980s and  early 1990s era of politically driven grassroots shoestring companies and alternative cabaret. Featherstone's first Edinburgh show in her own right was an adaptation of Gogol's short story, The Nose. “The then li...

When over-anxious actresses get talking, great things can come from it. Take what happened when former star of E4's cult hit, Misfits, Karla Crome, met up with her friend Daniella Isaacs. “We were both feeling depressed about our careers,” Crome says, “because I'm a big worrier, and always think I'm never going to work again. Daniella was feeling the same way, and after we'd been to the theatre, we had a cup of tea, and she said she had this story about her 101 year old Great Aunt Nancy.” Nancy Yetzes grew up Jewish in the East End of London. When she was in her twenties, she fell in love with a non-Jewish man who proposed to her. Yetzes turned him down, worried about what her family and the local community might think. She has remained single ever since. Crome's friend interviewed her Great Aunt Nancy about the experience, which ended up inspiring Mush and Me. “Daniella's from the orthodox Jewish faith as well,” Crome points out, “and we wondered if there wa...

Show 6 Summerhall Three stars In a sun-kissed land dripping with beautiful people in swimming costumes and shades, the lazy calm is about to be shattered by the aftermath of a fatal car crash in which the un-named golden boy who may have killed a chav who told him the truth just found out he's a cuckoo in the nest. What comes out of this mix of oedipal envy and Ballardian future-shock is an urgent three-hander in which revolutionary spirit is reborn in the shadows. This world premiere of an un-named work by Mark Ravenhill is the latest offering from the Lyric Hammersmith's Secret Theatre Company, in which audiences effectively go to see something blind and without any kind of marketing hype to tell them in advance what to think. The fact that the company have let slip that this is a Ravenhill play, however, is probably wise in the hurly-burly of the Fringe. Ravenhill's clipped, pared-down exchanges are invested with a classical weight in  Caroline Steinbe...

How do you tell a real-life story that isn't yours? This question was one of the driving forces behind Lippy, the hit show of the 2013 Dublin Fringe which is currently playing at the Traverse Theatre. Initially inspired by events that took place at the turn of the century in Leixlip, County Kildare fourteen years ago when an aunt and three sisters boarded themselves into their home and entered into a forty-day suicide pact, the Dead Centre company's creation becomes less of a docudrama detective story and more a speculative voyage of discovery for the company's own methodology. “It's one of those stories that is so extraordinary that it reaches out into an entire collective consciousness,” says Bush Moukarzel, who created, co-directs and performs in Lippy. “There are events like 9/11, which change the whole world, and then there are other, more idiosyncratic and private events that gauge the temperature of something else. That's what this story had ab...

James I: The Key Will Keep The Lock Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars The giant sword stabbed into the stage throughout this first part of Rona Munro's trilogy of fifteenth century Scottish history plays looks like a statement of intent, both in the ambition of Laurie Sansom's production, and in the grandiloquent sweep of what follows the rabble-rousing song that opens it. Here we find James I thrust back into his kingdom after eighteen years in the shadow of a bullying Henry V, who taunts and teases his captive, while James would rather defend his note-book full of verse than lead a country into battle. Once a dying Henry marries off James to his cousin Joan, however, he is forced to becomes one of the lads, not just for his country's sake, but to impress his girl the way any boy would. With the stage surrounded by a bank of seats where a section of the audience sit either side of James' throne, Sansom's production for the National Theatre of Scotland, Nationa...

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars The crackle of a wind-up gramophone at the opening of this epic evocation of war's mighty blast can only hint at what follows over the next two and a half hours in this world premiere of Vladimir Pankov's production for his tellingly named SounDrama Studio. In Paris, 1913, a group of poets, painters and free-thinking aesthetes are gathered for Christmas. With storm clouds already gathering, some see the impending conflict as a a disaster, some as a necessary cleansing, others as an inspirational romance. It is English painter George, however, who is killed on the frontline, causing his poet friend Vladimir's intense mourning. In order to heal, a radical psychiatrist has George's friends and family role-play Homer's Iliad in order to get to the root of their own pain. While all this sounds ennui-laden enough, it is in the telling that makes Pankov's co-production with Chekhov International Theatre Festival, based on Richar...

Grid Iron Theatre Company have had the keys for number twenty-three Charlotte Square for a couple of weeks now. Judging by the pile of wires, lights and other technical debris holding the front door of the once plush town-house turned a now deserted private bank open, however, it's not quite home yet. As the Edinburgh-based pioneers of site-specific theatre prepare for their latest show, Letters Home, the presence of assorted production managers liaising with their team, designers sprawled on the floor marking out costume patterns and a technical team holding a quick catch-up meeting in the building's large front room, there's never a dull moment in the company's temporary residence. A collaboration with Edinburgh International Book Festival, who are similarly in the throes of moving into an array of tents in Charlotte Square Gardens, Letters Home moves into three other addresses in the neighbourhood to present a quartet of dramatised short stories by diverse writers un...