Coffee-Table Notes

Summerhall Three stars An open door and an East European chorale that tugs five ways but remains emotively harmonious is the scene-setter for the Glasgow-based but Polish-inspired Company of Wolves ensemble's fifty minute meditation on conformity, resistance and community. Involving music from four countries, a frantic physicality and a fractured text drawn from the writings of incarcerated Red Army Faction co-founder, Ulrike Meinhof, Ewan Downie's production begins with the quintet acting in near robotic unison before rising up one by one to rebel against, well, anything that's going, really. This may be just a passing phase of restless youth, however, even as the sound of metal chairs scraped slowly across the floor becomes a little atonal symphony. Later, the same chairs are beaten with uniform ferocity. Only when a man possessed has his demons sucked out of him with a prolonged kiss do things change into something both more individual and more accepting of others. It...

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh Four stars One of the most refreshing things about the second part of the National Theatre of Scotland's compendium of mini monologues by contemporary writers inspired by one of the SNPG's magnificently multi-faceted archive is, as with its predecessor, co-directors Joe Douglas and Catrin Evans' refusal to cast to type. So while Janice Galloway's take on Muriel Spark is performed by Anneika Rose with a vivaciousness that suggests a nation in its prime, Johnny McKnight's version of the Queen finds Colin McCredie playing a woman hurt both by neglect and the fact that she's been portrayed on-screen by Helen Mirren. Linda McLean's Clementina Stirling Graham is a shrewd operator, Liz Lochhead's Robert Burns a partisan firebrand, while Rona Munro's tribute to Dear Scotland contributor Jackie Kay is the warmest of homages. Rob Drummond's Three Oncologists look at some very real matters of life and death, Nic...

When John Byrne decided to do a version of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, it   was a perfect match. While a century or so apart, both writers were   masters of dissecting human foibles in a way that lent a pathos to   their characters even as some of them looked increasingly ridiculous.   The result of Byrne's interest in Chekhov was Uncle Varick, which   relocates Chekhov's nineteenth century tale of love and life to the   rural heart of north-east Scotland in the thick of the 1960s which was   alleged in far off London to be swinging. Uncle Varick was first seen ten years ago at the Royal Lyceum Theatre   in Edinburgh in a towering production that featured Brian Cox in the   title role in an all too rare stage role on home turf. A decade on, and   the assistant director of that production, Michael Emans, is taking the   helm for a major touring revival of the play produced by his   increasingly ambitious Rapture Theatre. “I was very ...

If it wasn't for a plumber's son from Dalkeith, the result of the Second World War may have turned out very differently indeed. British air-force meteorologist Group Captain James Stagg may not be as widely known as many war heroes, but without his advice to then supreme commander of allied forces in Europe, General Dwight D Eisenhower, on what date to strike, the D Day landings in Normandy could have been a disaster. The story of Stagg, Eisenhower and how Stagg's forecast helped carve out history form the backbone of Pressure, a brand new play by actor and writer David Haig, which receives its world premiere at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh this week before transferring to Chichester. With Haig also taking on the lead role of Stagg, the little-known story has clearly become a labour of love for its author and star. “It's a story that is very seldom told,” says Haig, “but about a subject that everybody knows quite a lot about. James Stagg is an ...

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh Four stars Imagine a gallery after dark, when all the silent subjects immortalised on canvas break free from the frame like some live art happening and give vent to their spleen having watched the world  for centuries. That's pretty much what the twenty writers who have penned a series of miniature monologues inspired by a particular exhibit have done for this first of the National Theatre of Scotland's two dramatic guided tours through the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, which give voice to some iconic old masters and mistresses as well as some peripheral figures usually left on the sidelines, AL Kennedy's opening take on Robert Louis Stevenson suggests what might be, before David Greig's The Cromartie Fool raspberries his own brand of wisdom. Dancer/choreographer Michael Clark's own recorded voice delivers Ali Smith's piece written from the point of view of Clark's knee, which peers from a photograph throug...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars At first glance, you could be forgiven for thinking Ben Harrison's production of Hamish MacDonald's new play to be  some dark piece of science-fiction future-shock. The fact that this tale of how haemophiliacs in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s were treated with contaminated and often fatal blood products is culled from the real life testimonies of two of its victims on our own doorstep makes it all the more shocking. It is Bruce Norval and Robert Mackie's stories of being used as what one of them angrily describes at one point as 'human lab rats' that forms the human heart of MacDonald's tale of institutional abuse,or Dogstar Theatre Company in association with Profilteatern, Sweden and UMEA 2014 European Capital of Culture. It is the play's barrage of statistics that dominate, however, whether flashed up on the LED counter at the top of Emily Reid's set, on which assorted images are projected, or through speec...

Sex and drugs and rock and roll may have been a phrase introduced into the world by the late Ian Dury in the post-punk 1970s, but such hedonistic excesses have been around for centuries. Back in the 1600s, for instance, Restoration poet and one of King Charles 11's court, John Wilmot, aka the second Earl of Rochester, took full advantage of the era's post puritan anything goes aesthetic to become the ultimate libertine. Rochester's penchant for self-destructive behaviour, alas, saw him dead at thirty-three of venereal disease. All of this features in The Libertine, Stephen Jeffreys' flamboyant drama made famous a decade ago in a film starring Johnny Depp, and which receives its first UK production in two decades at the Citzens Theatre in Glasgow next week. Given the Citz's own colourful history with decadent period romps, this seems an all too fitting liaison. “Rochester was a celebrity of the day,” says Jeffreys. “He was like a rock star, and because London at the ...