Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It's a strange sensation, hearing an actor open Max Stafford-Clark's production of Stella Feehily's impassioned call to arms to save the NHS with Socialist firebrand Aneurin Bevan's speech that launched this most treasured of institutions in 1948. A politician with ideals and integrity is such a rarity these days that it can't help but sound heroic. This is the case too watching a piece of political agit-prop, a form which not that long ago was considered to be passe, but which now appears to have been reborn for the age of austerity with a vigorous sense of righteous urgency. This is with good cause, as Feelihy proves in the play's central tale of one family's travails after their 90 year old mother Iris has a stroke. A sadly familiar story of over-crowded and understaffed hospital wards is punctuated by a series of sketch-like interludes, as Bevan and Winston Churchill step out of the audience to form a d...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars For the last couple of years, an ever expanding group of writers, actors and directors have set up shop in a pub function room in Leith to showcase their work at a series of lo-fi monthly events. Every night last week, Edinburgh's original home of new writing has hosted a set of similar events presented by the team behind the Village Pub Theatre in a way that suggests VPT has quietly become a significant force on the theatre scene. As a grand finale to the week, Saturday night saw script in hand presentations of eight works previously seen at the company's regular home alongside a series of quick-fire Twitter plays, with each one using no more than 160 letters. There was an end of term feel to proceedings as VPT founders, writer James Ley and director Caitlin Skinner, introduced the evening, which began with Morna Pearson's Of The Green Kind, a look at the effect an invading alien has on three very different young women....

The Arches, Glasgow Four stars There must be few things more dispiriting for a band if no-one turns out to see them play. But what if the band themselves don't turn up, leaving just the possibly deluded singer to bare his soul? No, this isn't the latest exercise in social engineering by The Fall's Mark E Smith, but is the premise of Bristol-based performer Sam Halmarack's hour-long dissection of pop mythology in miniature. There is no rise or fall here, only the bitter-sweet taste of never making it to cling to for comfort. Somehow, however, by getting the audience to join in on rudimentary glockenspiel, drums and keyboards as instructed by a home-made rehearsal video, Halmarack snatches triumph from adversity in a way that gives the Arches chair-stripped studio theatre the power of a stadium. On one level, surrounded by an array of space-age silver instruments, Halmarack comes over like an electro-pop John Shuttleworth. Yet, in his gold track-suit top and...

Stuart Paterson never meant to write Cars and Boys, his new play which opens at Dundee Rep next week in a production by the Rep's artistic director, Philip Howard. The prolific playwright and screenwriter whose numerous Christmas plays are a staple of the festive theatre circuit had been working on another piece, which, by his own admission, “was going nowhere, and this one sort of crept up on me. I was going to the theatre a lot, and not really enjoying it. I saw plenty of ideas there, but what I wanted to do was something that was simple and human, and that wasn't just about words and dialogue, but was more about the sound of words as well.” Cars and Boys tells the story of Catherine Miller, the ageing matriarch of a big-time haulage company who has been calling the shots all of her life. Even after she suffers a stroke and is confined to a hospital bed, it seems, Catherine is determined to take charge of everyone and everything around her. “It's about the li...

When theatre director Max Stafford-Clark suffered a massive stroke in 2006, his artistic and personal partner, playwright Stella Feehily, became the theatrical firebrand and former artistic director of the Traverse Theatre's full-time carer. Eight years on, the accidental result of this is This May Hurt A Bit, an angry, funny and utterly humane dissection of the NHS in light of the Westminster coalition government's ongoing attempt to destroy one of the UK's greatest assets. “We used the NHS regularly,” says Feehily, whose play arrives at the Traverse next week in a production by a recovered Stafford-Clark for Out of Joint, the company he co-founded in 1998. “We had the patient experience, the near death experience and the chaos experience. We've seen the food, the bad, and not the ugly, but pretty close, but I would never have thought about writing a play about the NHS without that experience.” This May Hurt A Bit charts the experience of an elderly patient ...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars Now the 1970s have been tarnished forever by the behaviour, alleged or otherwise, of some of the era's biggest show-business stars, it's as hard to satirise its excesses as it is to know how to replace all the endless retro Bank Holiday telly shows it spawned. Yet that's exactly what the Told By An Idiot company attempt to do in a show that reimagines the custard pie throwing anarchy of Saturday morning children's TV as the accident waiting to happen it probably was. It starts with our host Niall Ashdown setting up a student union vibe with the framing device of gathering the surviving presenters of a Tiswas-like show called Shushi, which came to an abrupt end in 1979 when its sole female presenter attempted suicide live on air. As a series of live rewinds reveal a culture of casual misogyny, cultural stereotyping and egomania, Ashdown interviews each of Shushi's alumni in turn, including its female survivor. As ...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It takes a thunder-crash to do away with the giant projected Union Jack that fills the stage at the opening of Tim Barrow's new play concerning the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland. Whether such a powerful symbol is any indicator of how the Act may or may not be similarly washed away following the independence referendum this coming September remains to be seen. Either way, Barrow's ambitious piece of imagined history makes for a rollicking political romp involving poet Allan Ramsay, spy turned novelist Daniel Defoe and a roll-call of low-lifes and high-flyers from Edinburgh and London. It's the way these two worlds rub up against each other sexually and politically that makes Mark Thomson's production so thrilling. With dynamic use of Andrzej Goulding's video design and Philip Pinsky's harpsichord-led underscore, things work best when the exchanges among the ten-strong ensemble are at their most...