Coffee-Table Notes

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars “ We are sleepwalking to oblivion,” says would-be literary iconoclast Konstantin in John Donnelly's audacious new version of Chekhov's look at life, art and the imitations of both. It's not the most un-Chekhovian line Donnelly tosses into his knowingly modern mix, but it's not a bad start. Here, Alexander Cobb's Konstantin is a theatrical brat intent on breaking the mould via the sort of site-specific performance that's all the rage these days. The fact that his old-school actress mother Irina is doing the dirty with tortured artist Boris, and that his play, performed half naked by Pearl Chanda's star-struck Nina, is the sort of pretentious tosh that gives experimental theatre a bad name, doesn't help his cause any. With all about him pumped up on prescription drugs and booze, amidst his bluster and grand poetic gestures, Konstantin can't even get it together to shoot himself. While Donnelly reta...

The Bongo Club, Edinburgh 4 stars Do you remember the first time? The first time you played mass games of statues, perhaps, a first kiss, or the growing pains of impending adulthood that will leave all that innocent stuff behind for more serious life and death affairs? Young experimental theatre company Creative Electric do, and even though the three performers onstage in this devised interactive miniature look barely out of therir teens, their wisdom goes before them in spades. After being given headphones at the door, an audience of fifteen is ushered into one of the Bongo's dark club spaces as a sonic collage of babbling voices invades our ears and minds. As they guide us round the space, performers Michael Collins, Laura Fisher and Robbie Gordon share a series of personal epiphanies inbetween explaining how the brain deals with memories. Sometimes these are accompanied by little dance moves. Other moments are soundtracked by melancholy electronic melodies as unknown ...

Truth and lies are at the heart of this year's Mayfesto season, which runs throughout May at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow. While this annual boutique festival moulded in the image of the long lost Mayfest strand retains its politic heart in these austere times, very intimate explorations of identity in all its myriad forms focuses a more skewed eye on things. There are plays such as Seamus Keenan's Over The Wire, which, in film director Kenny Glenaan's return to the stage, looks at the effects of riots in the notorious Irish prison in Long Kesh in 1974, at the height of the Irish Troubles. Ankur Productions, meanwhile, present Jukebox, which looks at oral histories of the Glasgow Asian community. Writer/performer Daniel Bye presents The Price of Everything, a performance lecture on value which Westminster's Conservative Culture Minister Maria Miller might well learn something from. Throughout all of these, the politics of this year's Mayfesto remains deeply pers...

Adam Smith Centre, Kirkcaldy 3 stars When Hector MacMillan's play about religious bigotry in a Glasgow tenement first appeared in 1973, hand-me-down sectarianism was rife. Forty years on, that same bigotry still blights the west coast of Scotland, and Bill MacWilliam, the staunchest of unreconstructed Orange-men who the play pivots around, is as recognisable as ever in Michael Emans' Rapture Theatre production. Set on the morning of the annual July 12th parade, widowed Bill and his grown-up son Cameron are suffering. Cameron has looked beyond the blinkers of what he's been taught, and is refusing to march, even if his girlfriend Georgina sides with his father. With Bill at war with Catholic downstairs neighbour Bridget and her pregnant daughter Una, it takes a drink-fuelled accident for anything like reconciliation to take place. While MacMillan's play starts off comic, it's saying some deeply serious things, not just about bigotry, but about how beli...

Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh 3 stars At first glance, Perth-born writer Ben Tagoe's new play for Leeds-based veterans Red Ladder looks like the sort of timely dissection of financial corruption that fuelled the likes of Lucy Prebble's hit, Enron. Rod Dixon's production opens with naïve computer whiz-kid Noel being courted by wheeler-dealer Ray to make some easy cash by investing other people's money in illegal ventures without them knowing. When he's found out, Noel takes the rap while Ray slithers his way towards the next fall guy. We next see Noel in a prison cell, forced to share with bully boy Michael and father figure Emmanuel. Noel may be incarcerated, but he finds himself caught up in the same cycle as before, co-opted into a black economy not of his making until he finally sells his soul in order to survive. While there are shades here of David Mamet's early play, Edmond, which also ends in a prison cell, it's not difficult to see Tag...

One night Hector MacMillan was sitting backstage in the old Pool theatre in Edinburgh with the actors who'd just performed in his play, The Sash. MacMillan was told there were two men in the auditorium who wished to see him. On making his way out front, MacMillan was greeted by what he describes as “two very polite Orange men from Leith, who took issue with the content of the play.” Given that The Sash looked at inter-familial conflicts on the day of the Orange Order's annual parade in Glasgow, this came as no surprise. The pair had to admit that, while they'd thoroughly enjoyed the play, you would never find anybody like Bill MacWilliam, the monstrous loyalist patriarch at its heart, in the Order itself. MacMillan hadn't noticed that there were other people lingering in the Pool's tiny shop-front auditorium as well as the two Leithers. Only when a dissenting voice boomed out “like the Reverend Iain Paisley,” according to MacMillan, to interject, did he...

When playwright Davey Anderson travelled to Beijing with Scavengers, as short play written for students at the Royal Conservatoire in Glasgow, he was exposed to a world of Chinese theatre that went beyond the Golden Hedgehog festival of student drama which Scavengers was appearing at. Anderson was taken to the Beijing Fringe Festival, where lots of home-grown work made largely by directors was being shown. “I saw very little new work,” Anderson recalls, “and that made me curious about where all the new writers were. I've actually seen very little work by Chinese writers, but I knew there must be some, and that there were great stories out there about China today.” Through the auspices of the National Theatre of China, Anderson put out an open call for writers. This was, he admits, “a mad idea, just inviting all these writers into as room with us to scribble.” After whittling the writers down to a ten-strong group, Anderson put them with three Scottish writers, incl...