Coffee-Table Notes

Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh 4 stars Arthur Miller's little seen Broadway flop might just have found its time in this new touring co-production between the enterprising Sell A Door company and Mull Theatre. When the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh presented it on their main stage in 2009, the ongoing recession was already biting hard. Three years on, Miller's tale of one man finding material and domestic success while all about him flounder feels even fresher and more pertinent than it did then. Miller's play was written in 1940, and first seen in 1944. It focuses on David Beeves, a young mechanic in a small town in middle America. When he attempts to speak to his sweetheart Hester's father about marrying her, the tyrant is hit by a car and killed. When Beeves is flummoxed as to how to fix a particularly flashy vehicle, Austrian whiz-kid Gustav turns up to show him how it's done, this ensuring that Beeves' business thrives. So it goes in a fla...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars The pains of confinement inside women’s prisons have long been a source of dramatic intrigue, sometimes of the exploitative variety. Rona Munro’s play is no Prisoner: Cell Block H, however. Rather, Munro’s exploration of what happens when one inmate’s life sentence is interrupted by visits from the daughter she hasn’t seen for fifteen years is a tense and complex affair. First seen at the Traverse in 2002 and revived here by director Richard Baron for the Borders-based Firebrand company in association with the Heart of Hawick, Iron is a battle of wills between Fay, who stabbed her husband to death, and Josie, the daughter Fay never saw growing up. While Fay has been made brittle and manipulative by institutionalisation, Josie only wants to know what life used to be like, when she still had a dad. Baron’s brooding production is led by Blythe Duff, who plays Fay with a flint-eyed concentration and complete lack of sentimentality. As Josie, ...

King's Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars The wheels of post-war industry were briefly halted on Monday during the opening Edinburgh date of Graham Linehan's new take on William Robinson and Alexander Mackendrick's classic 1954 Ealing comedy. When designer Michael Taylor's elaborate set got stuck on the revolve as Shaun Williamson's crazed Romanian gangster was supposed to be clambering out of the upstairs window of old Mrs Wilberforce's topsy-turvy house, it not only added an accidental comic frisson. It also inadvertently symbolised how an entire country was attempting to push its way towards a new society, but was collectively unable to budge. This is perfect for a play chock-full of little Englander archetypes attempting a King's Cross bank heist planned from the seeming sanctity of Mrs Wilberforce's upstairs room. A cross-dressing major, a pill-popping spiv, a psychopathic immigrant and a lunk-headed ex-boxer are brought together by Professor Marcus...

“Darkness is important,” says theatre designer Kai Fischer as he clicks through a series of images on his laptop for Entartet, his performed installation which arrives at Edinburgh's off-piste Old Ambulance Depot art-space this week. Entartet is the German word for degenerate, and Fischer's stand-alone visual and audio work draws its inspiration from Nazi Germany's notorious Degenerate Art Exhibition that took place in Munich from July to November 1937. Arising from Adolf Hitler's furious stance against what he perceived to be the threat of abstract and modernist art, Die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst was the brain-child of Hitler's right-hand man Joseph Goebbels and favourite painter Adolf Ziegler. The pair confiscated some 650 artworks from German museums for an event designed to run parallel with what was considered to be the far purer Great German Art Exhibition. The Degenerate Art Exhibition featured works by Chagall, Kandinsky and Klee, as well as pieces by...

It's been a long road from Beryl Battersby to Miss Havisham for Paula Wilcox. Yet, as the Manchester-born actress arrives in Aberdeen this week to play the latter in Jo Clifford's stage adaptation of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, both characters seem to be bookends of a sort on a career which has seen Wilcox move from 1970s TV sit-com star and household name to classical stage actress with ease. Not that the still youthful-looking sixty-two year old's career is over yet. Far from it, in fact, if recent stage turns in everything from a musical role in La Cage Aux Folles and playing an ageing rock chick in Stella Feehily's play, Dreams of Violence, for Max Stafford Clark's Out of Joint Company, to a new play by Jonathan Harvey at Liverpool Playhouse, are anything to go by. It's just that, there's something about the hopelessly romantic Beryl in Jack Rosenthal's still fresh sit-com, The Lovers, in which Wilcox led Richard Beckinsale's Ge...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars ` When a group of teenage asylum seekers and their pals took on a system that sanctioned dawn raids that resulted in incarceration and deportation, they not only shamed the politicians who allowed such atrocities to happen. They also united a working class community and changed lives forever. The fact that this true story reimagined here as a large-scale musical happened less than a decade ago on the streets of Glasgow is an even more disgraceful pointer to how human rights are casually breached on our own doorstep. Cora Bissett’s production for the Citizens, National Theatre of Scotland and a host of other partners may sucker-punch the audience with a knowingly schmaltzy if slightly too self-referential feel-good opening. The emotional impact of the show, however, as conceived by director Cora Bissett with writer David Greig and composers Soom T, Patricia Panther and the Kielty Brothers under the musical direction of Hilary Brooks, is...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 5 stars It's been five years since Morna Pearson's last main-stage play, but this new work more than confirms the promise of one of the freshest, most fearless and taboo-bustingly unique voices to be heard anywhere right now. In its depiction of how behind closed doors inter-familial dysfunctions can squeeze the life out of relationships beyond, Pearson's wild and dangerous demotic also manages to be both scabrously funny and damningly bleak. Geoffrey is a thirty-something art teacher who lives with his mother Edie, and is bullied by the kids at school. When he reads that he's in the top ten sexiest professions, Geoffrey takes a notion to start dating after advice from Lynn Kennedy's former pupil turned supermarket check-out girl, Evelyn. After a couple of false starts, Geoffrey meets Clara, who, as played by Molly Innes, awakens something in him on the dance-floor long suppressed. Geoffrey even takes Clara home to meet Edi...