Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars Faith, hope and not so much charity as big business sponsorship are at the heart of Abi Morgan’s heartfelt new play for the National Theatre of Scotland. Inspired by Dr David Snowdon’s book, Aging With Grace, based on his scientific study of nuns and the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, Morgan sets up a text-book culture clash between two very different orthodoxies trying to find meaning and enlightenment in a fast food, hi-tech, wonder drug world which cares for neither. In one corner is Nicholas Le Prevost’s shy but driven American, Dr Richard Garfield, in the other the force of nature that is Maureen Beattie’s Sister Ursula Mary. Orbiting around them in the west of Scotland nunnery over half a decade are infinitely more realistic elements from both younger and older generations, who map out their own destinies while Richard and Ursula remain in very different forms of limbo. There are times in Vicky Featherstone’s monumental-l...

Kings Theatre, Edinburgh 5 stars James Corden isn’t an obvious matinee idol. Such is his wide-eyed control over the audience in Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre production of Richard Bean’s audacious reinvention of Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters, however, that it’s impossible not to warm to his barn-stormingly full-on performance. Corden’s TV-friendly features help, of course, in what, in Bean, Hytner and especially physical comedy director Cal McCrystal’s hands is transformed into a riotous end-of- the-pier seaside postcard sit-com. Bean sets things in Brighton during 1963, that crucial year, as poet Philip Larkin put it, when sexual intercourse began ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and The Beatles first LP’. It was also the year the skiffle boom was stamped on by rock and roll, as Corden’s estuarised harlequin Francis Henshall finds to his cost when he and his washboard are chucked out of his band. Out of such adversity, Francis blags his way into t...

James Corden bounds into the boardroom of the National Theatre on London's South Bank at full pelt, like an overgrown puppy whose master has just come home. Fifteen minutes earlier he'd had a packed matinee crowd at the National's Lyttleton Theatre in the palm of his hand in One Man Two Guvnors, Richard Bean's saucy seaside postcard style adaptation of Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters. Nicholas Hytner's production, which opens in Edinburgh tonight, gives vent to a rollickingly relentless performance by Corden as an on-the-make chancer who, fired from his skiffle band, wheedles his way in and out of trouble in 1960s Brighton. Over the course of the afternoon, Corden literally throws himself into every minute of what is a wonderful vehicle for his ongoing if somewhat self-conscious rehabilitation into the nation's comedic heart. In a Mod-era romp that looks like it could have been dreamt up by a Park Life era Damon Albarn in some unholy uni...

Tramway, Glasgow 3 stars There's an uber-cool whiff of Hollywood as well as Samuel Beckett about this new show by Berlin-based Scandinavian art duo Elmgreen & Dragset, which this weekend received two low-key work-in-progress previews en route to a full run at the Performa festival in New York. The first comes in the form of real life movie star Joseph Fiennes onstage. The second, despite the title, looks to Beckett's other existential masterpiece, Waiting For Godot, for guidance. Fiennes plays one of two men who wake up on bunk-beds in a black room, too hungover to remember where they were the night before or why they're all dressed up in identical black suits. The private view babble that sounds as the lights go down gives the game away in spades, however. Fiennes' ID and Charles Edwards' ME are idealised versions of their authors, an art-star double act trapped in a self-reflexive bubble. They're waiting for salvation, not from Godot, but t...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars If Ricky Gervais wants a few tips on what constitutes real artistic taboo-breaking, he should perhaps consider attending Phillip Breen's revival of Peter Nichols' dangerously black comedy. First presented on the same stage forty-four years ago, this tale of a couple whose freefall marriage is defined by their daughter's disability may be a jazz-soundtracked period piece, but it retains more comedic edge than much contemporary fare. It begins with Miles Jupp's frustrated teacher Bri addressing the audience as if we're an unruly end of afternoon classroom. Moving indoors to his seemingly domestic bliss with Sarah Tansey's highly-strung Sheila, it soon becomes clear the pair have constructed an elaborate game centred around wheelchair-bound Joe. With such survival strategies becoming increasingly exhausting, Sheila has taken refuge in amateur dramatics, leaving Bri, hemmed in by his own frustrated intelligence, to ...

Edinburgh Printmakers until October 25th 2011 4 stars When Jeremy Deller put Rupert Murdoch's wrinkled walnut face on a sky-blue 'Vote Conservative' poster to raise funds for the Labour Party, it looked like satire. Given the ongoing phone-hacking saga, it now feels like prophecy. The 'Murdoch Doesn't Give A XXXX' poster opposite from 1986's Fortress Wapping days may be dated in terms of its reference to a then novel Australian fizzy lager, but, seen alongside Deller's piece, it's an important pointer to how history repeats itself. Curated by Rob Tuffnall, this group show aims to reclaim the radical grassroots of print., when a pamphlet, a poster and a button badge were the ideologue's weapons of choice. Such notions date all the way back to James Gillray's early nineteenth century cartoon, awash with pop-eyed society grotesques. Crucial archives from post 1968 Notting Hill provocateurs King Mob include a flyer for the famed de...

Sneaky Pete's Edinburgh Sunday October 9th 4 stars Lewis Roberts may only be just about old enough to attend a club, but judging by this appearance he certainly understands what's required to keep the customers satisfied. Still in his teens, this Glasgow-based Welshman has patented a form of lazy, low-slung electronica on his somewhat obliquely titled twelve inch single, 4D/MTI, awash with stop-start twitchy-fingered glitches and sampled divas that sounds designed for the play-room . Live, Roberts somewhat wisely cranks things up a bit, lest anyone think they're at a groovily soundtracked dinner party where people think its okay to talk over the music. Some still do anyway, but they're twats. The novelty here is having Roberts perform behind his laptop on a stage mounted in the centre of the dancefloor, thus creating an in-the-round experience hitherto unexplored in Sneaky Petes' bijou interior. As Roberts mixes and matches an array of beats and twi...