Coffee-Table Notes

There are many Irelands in this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival. Yet in  a two-week programme that mixes up the international and the experimental with bold approaches to Ireland’s literary and dramatic canon, there are hints of Scotland too. This isn’t just to do with the appearance of Catherine Wheels’ hit show White and puppeteer Shona Reppe’s Potato Needs A Bath in the festival’s family programme. Nor is it solely about the presence of New York’s Elevator Repair Service with their impressionistic Ernest Hemingway adaptation, The Select (The Sun Also Rises), which was a wow at Edinburgh International Festival in 2010. It isn’t even to do with the Tron Theatre, Glasgow’s forthcoming non-festival appearance in Dublin with its co-production of Dermot Bolger’s stage version of James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, with the Project Arts Centre. Rather, there’s a sense of ambition and confidence in new artistic director Willie White’s first – and very good - Dublin programme that...

Kings Theatre, Edinburgh 3 stars Imagine if Amy Winehouse had been a classical music child protege. Imagine then, after this most gifted of musician's all too tragic and premature death by excess, that her doting dad built a shrine to her, in the form of some kind of monument, or museum in the room where she lived and died in order to keep her spirit alive. What then, if the said protege, cut down before her time twelve years earlier, decreed to haunt this monument in some way? This is pretty much the scenario in Alan Ayckbourn's mid 1990s crack at replicating the success of The Woman in Black, the spooky runaway success which first opened in Ayckbourn's theatre in Scarborough. Here, grieving father Joe attempts to purge his little girl's memory with the nearest thing she had to a boyfriend alongside a suburban psychic who turns out to have known Julia better than most. What emerges in Andrew Hall's touring production originated at Colchester Mercury ...

The tin of biscuits is going down a treat during a break in rehearsals for The Authorised Kate Bane, the new play by Ella Hickson which forms the basis for the latest production by site-specific theatre   specialists, Grid Iron. The fact that the biscuits are Family Circle may not be deliberate, but it does provide a wonderful piece of accidental conceptual irony to the events in the play. The young woman played by actress Jenny Hulse who is flitting between her divorced mother and father onstage clearly isn't playing happy families. Coming into the rehearsal room with only a rough idea of what to expect, what exactly   Kate Bane,   Hulse, and indeed Hickson and Grid Iron director Ben Harrison are playing at isn't immediately clear. Bane is a playwright, writing a play about a family who may or may not resemble her own, or indeed how she remembers them from her childhood. The characters Bane is inventing, however, are damaged, with Bane's invented version of hersel...

HMV Picturehouse, Edinburgh 3 stars The five minutes of seemingly orchestrated feedback that acts an overture to the first of three UK dates by the former Velvet Underground co-anchor may be a little symphony in its own right, but over the next two hoursit's also the most avant-garde noises on offer. Where Cale's just-released Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood album serves up a dolefully textured set of playfully hi-tech pop songs, live, he and a three-piece guitar, bass and drums line-up deliver a crunchily old-fashioned rock and roll with a metal edge. Sporting a full-headed Warhol-like silver mane, checked jacket and dryly minimalist   stage patter, the now seventy-year old stands before an electric piano which he proceeds to batter   with a force that belies the fourth world digital funk subtleties of the record. Cale's perfectionist ear is still finely tuned, however, as he demonstrates when he halts the opening of one song to rid the microphone of echo, then re-sta...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars Mike Bartlett’s contemporary version of one of the most unforgiving tragedies of all time is a curious beast. On the one hand, this suburban English redux taps into tragically familiar stories of modern-day infanticide. On the other, there’s a glib gallows humour at play which becomes a form of self-protection, as Rachael Stirling strides through her red-brick des-res with the mono-maniacal fury of the original woman scorned. Stirling’s Medea is a flame-haired posh girl on a new build estate who saved upwardly mobile rough diamond Jason from drowning. Unable to deal with Medea’s bolshie ways any longer, Jason has left her for a younger and, as Jason admits, “nicer” model, while Medea is left with only her traumatised little boy and impending homelessness to deal with. While no-one would blame Medea for what she does after being treated so shabbily, her pair of busy-body gal pals and a a tongue-tied brickie looking on imploringly are o...

Kings Theatre, Edinburgh 3 stars Death clearly becomes Penelope Keith. Onstage, at least, that is. The last time everyone's favourite cut-glass matriarch appeared on the Kings Theatre stage she played a vicar's widow in Richard Everett's play, Entertaining Angels. This time out, Keith plays the widow of Sam, a tabloid newspaper editor in Keith Waterhouse's stage version of his comic novel. Keith first played June in 1998, when Good Grief played the West End a year after the novel was published. Fourteen years on, and three years after his own passing, Waterhouse's play now looks at times like he was penning an elegy for himself. Keith is cast wonderfully against type as June Pepper, a hard-drinking northern lass who we first meet at home following Sam's funeral. Having promised him that she'd keep a diary of her thoughts following his demise, June's scribblings here become upstage asides. These become a form of therapy for June as she navig...

When Louise Quinn found herself in a meeting with twenty people to  discuss what sort of training shoes she should be wearing, she recognised something was amiss. That was when Quinn was fronting the band, Hardbody, the 1990s near misses whose major label masters instigated such a meeting. Such an absurd con-flab may have fed into the narrative for the video that accompanied The Glimmer Song, a single by Quinn’s current combo, the eponymously inclined A Band Called Quinn. In the video, Quinn and the band are brought to life by some evil puppet-master who puts them in a toy theatre where they’re forced to perform as he sees fit. This in turn may have informed BiDiNG TiMe (Remix), Quinn’s version of a play written by Australian auteur Pippa Bailey, which Quinn performs at The Arches in Glasgow this weekend for one night only. BiDiNG TiME charts the rise and fall of Thyme, a young woman chasing love and fame in a man's world. Where Bailey's original version, first p...