Coffee-Table Notes

Viewless – St Georges West – 3 stars The Dark Philosophers – Traverse – 4 stars Zanzibar Cats – Gilded Balloon – 4 stars Traumatikon – Summerhall – 3 stars Tonight Sandy Grierson Will Lecture, Dance and Box – Assembly – 4 stars In a room in the middle of nowhere, two bespectacled and bearded men wearing overalls are reinventing people's lives. For Cumbernauld Theatre's first ever Fringe visit, director Ed Robson and his cast of three have devised Viewless, a quirky piece of quasi European absurdism that cuts through the lost files of botched bureaucracy in a manner Czech satirist Vaclav Havel might have recognised. This is Britain, however, until recently the cleverest police state on the planet, that looks ridiculous. With only an ancient typewriter, a window that looks out to nowhere and their increasingly cyclic imaginations for company, the uncharted territory these lost coppers occupy is the no-man's-land of the Witness Protection Programme, the polic...

Free Run Udderbelly 3 stars Audience St Georges West 4 stars It was inevitable that the phenomena of inner city free running be turned into a stage show. Like the metal-bashing extravagances of Stomp and other spectacles dragged off the street before it, trying to make sense of such a blink and you'll miss it trend from the safety of a front row seat is a hit and miss affair. As performed by the members of the 3Run crew, an eight-strong ensemble of musclebound twenty-somethings who can't help look like a boy band, Free Run attempts to capture the back-flipping energy of leaping tall buildings with a few bits of gym equipment and a lot of attitude. This isn't always easy, despite the high-energy expertise of a troupe whose only concession to girliness is a young woman expert in martial arts. As each in turn flings themselves across metal bars and assorted obstacles that never quite capture the bricks and mortar on the images that flash onscreen behind t...

National theatres are everywhere in Edinburgh this year. After five years, the National Theatre of Scotland are paying dividends with their none building-based 'theatre without walls', effectively enabling the company to do and be anything it wants to be. This is evident on the Fringe, both in Vicky Featherstone's production of Zinnie Harris' new play, The Wheel, and in David Greig and Wils Wilson's The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart. While The Wheel is housed in the relatively conventional setting of the Traverse Theatre, the size of the play's cast alone sets it apart from much home-grown theatre. Prudencia Hart, on the other hand, may feature similarly in the Traverse programme, but its performances in the bar area of Ghillie Dhu just up the road are a fantastically audacious adventure in style, technique and subject that marries traditional border ballads with twenty-first century post-modern pop. This year, the NTS is joined by not one, bu...

After thirty years of hurt, Paul Simpson's reignited pop classicists are on a mission. Featuring a supergroup of musical crusaders recruited from the ranks of Echo and the Bunnymen, Spiritualised and Brian Jonestown Massacre, this dozen-strong manifesto of epics sounds like a one-man war on the sort of botched urban regeneration that has left Simpson's beloved Liverpool so bereft of character and heart. Amid jangling guitars and piano flourishes, Simpson's brooding baritone train-spots a litany of desecrated pop cultural iconography, from Turner's sunsets in pools of vomit to William Blake in Cash Converters. Mrs Albion, as well as a lovely daughter, you have a brand new champion to call your own. The List, August 2011 ends

It's sometime after 3am on the first Saturday morning, and in a makeshift nursery cum dormitory, a group of pyjama-clad children are being stroked to sleep by hand-maidens after being fed hot chocolate. Through a wall of people mere feet away, an argument is in motion between the childrens' parents. Barely able to keep their eyes open but shaken from their slumber anyway, the children attempt to tune in on snatches of raised voices and grown-up things they can't fully understand anyway. The feuding couple in question are the legendary Jason and Medea, and we, the audience, are their teddy-bear clutching offspring, caught in the crossfire of wars both personal and political. This is Hotel Medea, a six-hour contemporary rendering of the sexiest and most brutal of Greek myths as thrillingly reinvented by the Anglo-Brazilian theatre explorers Zecora Ura, who from midnight till 6am embark on an immersive promenade through emotional and theatrical extremes. As the ...

Futureproof 4 stars Mission Drift 4 stars Ten Plagues 4 stars The Wheel 4 stars The ongoing renewal of old theatrical forms for a new century and a younger audience hungry for fresh kicks beyond the virtual frequently looks to retro-chic cabaret for comfort. Lynda Radley's new play, Futureproof, rewinds back to the sort of travelling roadshow immortalised in Tod Browning's film, Freaks, redrawn for the cyber-punk age by the likes of Jim Rose' Circus and last seen in an episode of karma-based sit-com, My Name Is Earl. Rather than muck about with the actual trappings of such low-rent vaudeville, Radley has penned a relatively conventionally structured peek behind the stage curtain to say something about self-definition, reinvention and the perilous necessities of both. Robert Riley's Odditorium provides sanctuary of sorts for Tiny the fattest man in the world, armless bearded lay Countess Marketa, Siamese twins Lillie and Millie and hermaphrodite George...

Man of Valour - 4 stars The Golden Dragon – 3 stars Wondrous Flitting - 4 stars What Remains - 4 stars The first moments of Man of Valour, Dublin's Corn Exchange Company's near wordless piece of post-modern comic book mime that opens Traverse Two's programme, make its down-at-heel everyman protagonist appear like one more workaday suicide. By the end, however, hangdog office drone Farrell Blinks has moved from Billy Liar-like fantasist trapped in a Kafkaesque hell to become a real life, flesh and blood hero who's conquered his demons beyond the computer games that fill up his solitary leisure time. Wonders will never cease, he looks like he might even get the girl. Or, talk to her, at least. If such a narrative arc sounds straight out of Hollywood, as ever with Corn Exchange, it's the way they tell it that lifts things into the truly extraordinary. As conceived by writer Michael West with director Annie Ryan and performer Paul Reid, this new work t...