Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When the once idealistic Renee is asked where her joie de vivre has gone in John Byrne's 1960s update of Chekhov's turn of the century play, it's as heart-breaking an observation as the youngest of the flame-haired Penhalligan brood's own gradual withering in the 1ifeless limbo of navy-occupied Dunoon. Renee's eldest sibling Olive has long settled for a hum-drum existence, while Maddy's studied boredom as she sleepwalks through a loveless marriage is a sharp contrast to Renee's youthful vivacity. When the sisters extended family and the similarly exiled navy officers pass each other to a soundtrack of fractured piano chords at the start of Andy Arnold's production, it is as if they are very politely waiting for death while far-off London swings. Hope comes in the shape of a portable record player bought by the family's ageing Doctor for Renee's twentieth birthday along with some already outmoded trad-jazz records....

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars There are moments in David Greig's 2002 play when it looks like it might become a treatise on how a ruling elite can co-opt an entire community for their cause. It is true that the two Cambridge naturalists investigating the bird-life on a remote Scottish island prior to the outbreak of World War Two are agents of the state on unwitting reconnaissance. Once the island's dour custodian Kirk is out of the way, however, the nature-watch conducted by the mercurial Robert and his wet-behind-the-ears sidekick John takes on an altogether more liberating tone. This is particularly the case where Kirk's niece Ellen is concerned. By the second half, the trio are en route to creating a pagan Eden for themselves a million miles from buttoned-up mainland conventions. It is here where things really begin to fly in Richard Baron's up close and personal touring revival for the Borders-based Firebrand company in partnership with Heart of Hawick. On...

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars When poet and World War One army officer Siegried Sassoon declares in Nicholas Wright's play taken from Pat Barker's 1991 novel that in a hundred years time he and his peers will still be “ploughing skulls,” recent events make his words sound like prophecy. By the time he says this, Tim Dellap's Sassoon has already made his public declaration condemning the political powers who he sees as prolonging the war for their own ends, a statement which sees him packed off to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where he meets Garmon Rhys' literary groupie Wilfred Owen. Elsewhere, fellow patient Billy Prior, played by Jack Monaghan as an angry young man before his time, is coming to terms with Edinburgh as a place that is “all old ladies and woollen jumpers,” while faced with the innate snobbery of an institution unused to working class officers. Both Prior and Sassoon have nightmares, manifested here in shock visions...

Adura Onashile didn't know much about science when she read Rebecca Skloot's book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Despite this, something in this little known story of the black working class woman whose stem cells were taken without her permission in 1951 struck a chord with the actress who first came to prominence when she appeared in Cora Bissett and Stef Smith's multiple award winning sex-trafficking drama, Roadkill. The result was HeLa, Onashile's first solo work, developed with director Graham Eatough. First seen as part of Edinburgh Science Festival in 2013, Iron-Oxide Ltd's production went on to an equally successful Edinburgh Festival Fringe run as part of the Made in Scotland programme. Since then, the show has toured to India, Trinidad, Brazil, Jamaica and South Africa, with several dates in New Zealand forthcoming. Onashile has also managed to slot in some performances closer to home, and this weekend plays two nights at the Traverse Theatre in Ed...

Queens Hall, Edinburgh Five stars Sophie Ellis-Bextor has come a long way since her first Edinburgh appearance fronting short-lived indie band TheAudience at La Belle Angele in 1998. While the intervening years have seen her epitomise T4-friendly disco diva electro-pop, this year's Wanderlust album has found her pretty much coming full circle in an eclectic collaboration with Mercury nominated singer/song-writer Ed Harcourt. Harcourt is at the keyboards as part of the black-clad sextet that accompany Ellis-Bextor on the current leg of the tour to support the album, as they were earlier in the year at Oran Mor in Glasgow. In what is effectively a two-act show, the stage is bathed in red as Ellis-Bextor enters in matching mini-dress to open with the eastern-tinged movie theme melodrama of Birth of An Empire before moving through a conceptual pot-pourri of off-kilter ballads, woozy Cold War waltzes and epic chorales. Some charming between-song banter covers tour bus Conga injuries and...

Things change when you get older. Just look at Tomorrow, the latest theatrical meditation from Vanishing Point, which plays its only Scottish dates at Tramway from this weekend following its premiere in Brighton and follow-up dates in Brazil. In the company's Glasgow rehearsal room, a largely youngish cast from Scotland, England, Russia and Brazil convene under director Matthew Lenton's guidance to go through a scene in what, despite only makeshift scenery, conjures up the slightly derelict feel of an old people's home. As the cast assemble, their natural ebullience seems to slow as they ease into character. When they cover their faces with tight-fitting latex rubber masks, the transformation is complete. Only when one or other of them breaks into their natural stride do things jar. Otherwise, it's as if time itself has caught up with them in an instant. “I was interested in doing something about care,” says Lenton. “I had this image of having a cast in their eighties o...

Cumbernauld Theatre Four stars A sulky teenager dressed in black sprawls aloft the raised platform of his bunk-bed, going through his photo album on his ipad, which projects enlargements onto a big screen on the other side of the room. Everyone's in there; his mum, his best mates, one of his kind-of girlfriend's selfies. Most significantly are the portraits of the boy's dad, who died the week before, and his uncle, who his mum just married. As the boy lays bare his plans to stab his uncle in revenge for the killing of his dad, it becomes clear that he is a contemporary version of Hamlet, and that the pictures projected in his room are of his mum Gertrude, his best pal Horatio and his squeeze Ophelia. Then there's his uncle, Claudius, who he calls Uncle C. This is a neat trick in Iain Heggie's fresh look at the bard, performed with youthful confidence by Sean Purden Brown in Heggie's own production for Subway Theatre Company in association with Sico Productions. ...