Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars Feminism may no longer be the dirty word it became for a while, but it's vital that the movement's foundations are never forgotten. This new play from the boldly named Theatre Revolution probably isn't the most radical vehicle for such a notion, though it's a game enough look back at the 1960s counter-culture as seen from the sofa by three very different women. It's 1969, Vicki is writing for the women's page of a London tabloid, and is lodging with the bohemian Vivien while being courted by Jack. Into their lives breezes Ursula, an Australian actress and Vietnam protestor who buys into hippy ideals more than any of them. Over a series of episodic scenes, we see them fall out, argue ideology, share each other's self-absorbtion and spout naive platitudes as only children of the sixties can. All of which in Iain McAleese's production of Karen Barclay's script developed from a devising process looks and sou...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 5 stars When it comes, the ending of Rob Drummond's latest dissection of popular culture is as devastatingly unexpected as it is prescient. Yet all the pointers have been sign-posted in a series of keywords that now seem as obvious as a catch-phrase in a damningly deceptive indictment of celebrity culture which all telly addicts should tune in to post haste. It begins simply enough, as the audience become voyeuristically complicit with the recording of a typically brash TV game show called False. All the classic hallmarks are there, from the gaudily coloured sets to the sharp-suited host to the fawning contestants grasping on to their fifteen minutes of fame with rictus-grinned abandon. There are no questions here, only statements, which new girl Sandra, Ben and reigning champion Molly must get to the truth of. Gradually, however, the every-day grotesquerie of one of the most formulaic forms of escapism takes an ugly turn, lurching into the sor...

When Sebastian Faulks' fourth novel was published in 1993, he probably couldn't have guessed it would have the longevity it has. Yet, almost two decades on, Faulks' First World War saga about young officer Stephen Wraysford's doomed love for married French woman Isabelle Azaire set against the back-drop of the Somme can be considered to be a modern classic. In 2003, the novel came thirteenth in a BBC survey to find Britain's favourite book, and has been adapted for film, stage, TV and radio. Birdsong's latest incarnation comes courtesy of the Original Theatre Company, who breathe fresh life into Rachel Wagstaff's stage adaptation which arrives in Glasgow next week. Wagstaff's original adaptation of Birdsong was first seen in 2010 in a production by Trevor Nunn that. That version was a straightforward linear account of the book that ran at more than four hours long. Since being picked up by Original, Wagstaff has revised the piece extensively, so...

SECC, Glasgow 5 stars The world has moved on since the National Theatre of Scotland's epoch-making dissection of men at war took Edinburgh by storm in 2006, but still the conflicts continue. Almost seven years later, and this latest tour of duty of Gregory Burke's play culled from interviews with Fife-based Iraq veterans is as thrillingly relevant and theatrically jaw-dropping as ever, and deserved every moment of the standing ovation it received on Saturday night. It opens with all the pomp and circumstance of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, but this is just the sucker punch for the deathly quiet entry of Cammy, the ex squaddie who acts as our narrator and guide. At first we see Cammy and his mates in the pub, shooting pool as they explain life during wartime to a researcher wanting to turn their story into the play Black Watch became. Within minutes, however, we're lurched onto the front-line. In both there is a simmering mix of anger, bucket-mouthed gallows...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars When Mike Cullen's play about a hypnotherapist, the young woman she treats and the young woman's father appeared in 1997, it was devastatingly timely. Sexual abuse of children by their families was being exposed in a way it never had been before, but so was False Memory Syndrome, whereby seemingly long-buried traumas were 'revealed.' Almost sixteen years on, and Cullen's play is no less breath-taking in Rekindle Theatre's intense and up close and personal revival. It begins with Anna and her live-in patient Lynn surrounded by boxes all neatly packed with forgotten memories in a limbo between the past, present and a brand new future. As Lynn frantically rummages around for a long lost photograph, the pair spar with the brutality only co-dependents can muster. Lynn has invited her father who may or may not have abused her to visit in order to confront him. Anna doesn't approve, even less so when David appears. For s...

Kings Theatre, Edinburgh 3 stars When Communicado Theatre Company toured Adrian Mitchell's adaptation of Gogol's satire of small-town corruption in 2011, it's tale of back-handers, bungs and out and out bribes in high places looked all too timely. Two years on, and Gerry Mulgrew's scaled up revival, a co-production between Communicado and Aberystwyth Arts Centre, looks more pertinent than ever. This is the case even as Mulgrew's knockabout ensemble put style above polemic, making the self-serving clique who get wind that their antics are under investigation by a mysterious inspector appear even more ridiculous. Equally ridiculous is Khlestakov, the penniless cad who the long, the short and the tall of the town presume to be the inspector, simply because he has the upper-crust swagger of the St Petersburg set, albeit without the cash to back it up. As played here by Oliver Lavery, Khlestakov is a feckless fop, whose own pomp woos the town-folk into caterin...

Edinburgh Festival Theatre 4 stars When it comes, the climax of Simon Beaufoy's stage adaptation of his 1997 film about a group of unemployed Sheffield steel-workers who find emancipation by becoming strippers is as hen night-tastic as you expect it to be. The wolf whistles began some two and a half hours earlier, from the moment Kenny Doughty stepped onstage as Gaz, the laddish everyman who breaks into the deserted factory where he and his mate Dave used to work to nick girders to flog for scrap. Also left behind is a blue crane named Margaret, after the woman who effectively put a nation of heavy industry workers on the dole. Meanwhile, sisters are doing it for themselves watching The Chippendales, which inspires Gaz to enlist a troupe of his own to make a few bob. What Gaz, Dave and their motley crew of ne'er do wells actually achieve isn't just a rediscovery of their own personal mojos, but a reawakening of a collective spirit through the power of dance, brillia...