Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Lyceum Theatre Four stars Watching Samuel Beckett is a bit like listening to Country and Western music. The older you get, it seems, the more you understand where they're coming from. This is likely to have been the case for many who saw all five productions of the Edinburgh International Festival's season of Beckett's non-stage works. This final piece, produced by Dublin's Gate Theatre, finds actor Peter Egan transforming Beckett's brief and at times brutal novella into an extended solo routine to die for. It begins beside a grave and ends with a baby's cry, as Egan's lone figure regales the audience with a life and death yarn that begins with him telling how he associates his brief 'marriage' to a woman he meets on a bench with his father's death. Used to keeping both himself and others at an emotional distance, the affection he feels for the woman he first calls Lulu and later Anna catches him by surprise. Even as he mov...

Royal Lyceum Theatre Five stars A spotlight shines on a bowler-hatted man stood in the corner of the stage. He speaks to the audience directly, peels a banana and watches another spotlight beside him, waiting for the show to begin. Barry McGovern's opening gambit in his solo stage adaptation of Samuel Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable, is pure vaudeville. When the curtain rises, McGovern is tucked into a gravestone grey room before launching into what are revealed as a series of profoundly funny comic routines that lifts Beckett's prose off the page for a deeply entertaining eighty-five minute tour de force. The comedy is most evident in Molloy, as the ageing some-time vagrant now living with his mother regales us through the incident and colour of his day with deadpan guilelessness. So obsessive is Molly's description of how to cope with juggling stones between pockets that it appears borderline OCD before he realises t...

The Hub four stars On the face of it, Samuel Beckett's 1957 radio play is the most straightforward of all his works. Over the course of seventy-five minutes we follow an old woman's journey to the railway station to meet her husband off what turns out to be a delayed train. On his belated arrival, we follow their journey home, eventually discovering the reason for the delay. In Pan Pan's hand, however, such a simple yarn becomes a full-on immersive experience, with the audience sat on rocking chairs in a dimly-lit room resembling a chill-out zone opposite a wall of floodlights. With no actors in sight, a recording of the play is broadcast through surround-sound speakers, giving every nuanced exchange and train rattle a thundering weight. The play itself, with Aine Ni Mhuiri leading a cast of ten as old Mrs Rooney, is a darkly comic affair, rich in pathos and deadly one-liners. Gavin Quinn's high-concept production, with set and lighting by Aedin Cosgr...

Kings Theatre four stars When Samuel Beckett's second radio play was aired in 1959, notions of conceptual art and installations were in their relative infancy. Yet, as Pan Pan Theatre's sonic and visual interpretation makes clear, this is exactly what Beckett was doing in a work which literally gets inside a man's mind. Onstage, strings of little speakers hang down, surrounding a shrouded structure which looks not unlike a giant bird-cage after dark. Once unveiled, this is revealed as a giant skull, from inside which two actors rake over the ashes of one man's past. As an opening piano overture melds into the sounds of the sea and the dense interior monologue which emerges from it, Gavin Quinn's production presents theatre as art installation. At its centre is Andrew Clancy's skull sculpture, across which Aedin Cosgrove's complex lighting patterns rise and fall, offering tantalising glimpses of actors Andrew Bennett and Aine Ni Mhuiri inside...

Royal Lyceum Theatre four stars It may last no longer than your average TV sit-com, but Samuel Beckett's close-up miniature remains as remarkable in Atom Egoyan's production for Dublin's Gate Theatre as it did when first broadcast on the small screen back in 1966. Michael Gambon's old man stands alone in his bedroom, methodically drawing the curtains across windows and doors, as if cocooning himself from the world outside. Then, sitting on the bed, his face projected onto the gauze curtain that frames the stage, the voices start. Or rather, just the one, that of a disembodied woman from his past who calmly torments him with prodding little litanies of mistreatment of other women that has led to his solitary state. As the words, dreamily intoned by Penelope Wilton, sink in, their full effect looms large on Gambon's face, heavy-lidded, moist-eyed and haunted by regret, self-loathing and lovelessness. Egoyan's cinematic approach lends the play al...

It may have something to do with the economies of scale, but spoken-word and performance poetry is becoming increasingly prevalent on the Fringe, and Kate Tempest's Brand New Ancients, which takes up the Traverse's late-night slot until this weekend, is a perfect example of an old oral tradition van be reinvented for the twenty-first century. In a South London patois, Tempest's epic seventy-minute verse takes Greek mythology by the scruff of the neck and relocates it to the spit and sawdust streets, where everyday tragedies happen in pubs and houses where the new gods dwell. Initially seen as a scratch performance at Summerhall on last year's Fringe, and now co-produced with Battersea Arts Centre, Brand New Ancients is performed by Tempest with a four-piece band who add a jittering urban back-beat to a story already full of life and soul. Tempest's delivery of a work that resembles a hipper, estuarised take on Tony Harrison's V is beguiling. As her...

Edinburgh Playhouse four stars If ever there was a sound more perfectly suited to Shakespeare's high-ranking tragedy of power and glory involving a Roman warlord who can't accept the will of the common people, it is the pomp and little circumstance of heavy metal. Such potential for a bombastic borderline fascist rally is something which iconoclastic Chinese director Lin Zhaohua clearly recognised for this epic reading of Coriolanus for the Beijing People's Art Theatre, which puts Chinese rock bands Miserable Faith and Suffocated either side of a stage that houses a multitude of bamboo spear wielding extras who make up the Roman hordes. Chinese superstar Pu Cunxin struts the stage in a flowing cape and chest-plate as Martius, who is granted the title of Coriolanus after waging war successfully on the Volsces, led by the scheming Aufidius. This makes for a stunning series of set-pieces, which finds assorted noblemen picking up microphones and raging at the world...