Coffee-Table Notes

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh November 7th-February 15th When Stan Douglas' play, Helen Lawrence, played as part of this year's Edinburgh International Festival, its live depiction of a post World War Two film noir beamed against a a 3D photographic backdrop looked at the class and racial divides of Vancouver's run-down Hogan's Alley district, later cleaned up then razed in the name of urban renewal. Hogan's Alley's 3D remains can be seen in Douglas' remarkable large-scale image that forms part of his new show at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery. Also on show will be Video, which recasts Orson Welles' film of Kafka's The Trial with a Senegalese woman in the Parisian suburb of La Courneuve, where some of the worst violence of 2005's Paris riots took place. “Sarkozy was still Minister of the Interior when we shot the piece,” says Douglas, “and his office tried to shut our production down, even though we had made deals with the local mayor and l...

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars A lone tabla player ushers in Giles Croft's formidable production of Matthew Spangler's adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel with a frantic overture that points up the turmoil of the story's Afghan origins. If the images of big city skyscrapers that loom behind offer up some kind of salvation, the opening speech by the play's narrator Amir is poetic enough to resemble a Tennessee Williams monologue. Worlds collide and cultures clash in far crueller ways over the next two and a half hours, from the moment Amir plays cowboys with his father's servant's son and best friend Hassan after watching John Wayne films in the Iranian cinema in mid-1970s Kabul. Separated by class and ethnicity, Amir and Hassan's fates are marked by a shocking childhood event that sees Hassan brutalised, while Amir's shameful acquiescence leaves him hard to sympathise with, let alone like. What follows, as the Russian invasio...

When Untitled Projects' production of Slope opens this week at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow as part of this year's Glasgay! festival, both the writer and director of this sex and drug fuelled study of the love affair between nineteenth century poets, Verlaine and Rimbaud, will be absent from the auditorium. Instead, director Stewart Laing and playwright Pamela Carter will be watching a live online feed of a show first seen at Tramway in 2006 in a production which put the audience above the stage peering down into the poets' bathroom as if spying on some of the lovers' most intimate moments. Slope's new hi-tech approach will further the play's underlying theme of voyeurism. This originally developed, not out of the script, but from the starting point of Laing's design. “All those years ago,” Carter recalls, “Stewart had this design, and wanted to develop a piece of work using it. It struck me that having an audience peering down into a bathroom is as voyeu...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars There's a slick but laid-back rapport between the overall-clad four-piece band playing a punky overture at the top of this ménage a trois of lo-fi mini musicals from the nabokov company and Soho Theatre. They address the audience as they enter the theatre, setting a casual tone to what follows as they step into character and costume for each playlet. Proceedings open with Jonesy, Tom Wells' tale of a sports mad asthmatic boy who can't finish a netball match without a brush with death, but still finds music in his heart. Ella Hickson's A Love Song For The People of London finds two solitary travellers adrift in the big city catch each others eye with tragi-comic results, while My Thoughts On Leaving You is a quick-fire run through a relationship, as boy meets girl in a nightclub toilet before playing out their everyday urban melodrama in song. While the first piece is essentially a fleshed-out monologue, the following two are old-s...

Salutation Hotel, Perth Four stars In the banqueting hall of the oldest hotel in Scotland, a very special event is about to take place. The party tunes are playing, and the stage is swathed in sparkly scarlet tinsel designed to match the oh-so OTT outfits of our glamorous auctioneers, Tina and Rachel. They are here to raise money, spirits and a smile for Tina's heroic cross-channel swim following a near brush with death after an asthma attack. Once the audience have been escorted to their tables with bidding cards and raffle tickets in hand, what follows in Robert Jack's production of Lesley Hart's new play at first looks like a kitsch and slightly camp dissection of the toe-curling spectacle which a well-meaning but misguided fund-raising event can easily end up as. The bad gags, rictus grins and awkwardly staged amateur hour routines are all grotesque enough in the hands of the double act of Sally Reid as Tina and Claire Knight as Rachel in something which initially resem...

If the 90s were just the 60s turned upside-down, as some wag once suggested, then such a notion  confirmed what cultural commentator Michael Bracewell described in his book on the era as an age 'when surface was depth'. What this appeared to mean by the time Stephen Greenhorn's play, Passing Places, appeared in 1997, was a definition of a decade that had already spawned Brit Pop, Girl Power, New Laddism and Cool Britannia. Here, then, was a shallow pool of pop without politics, Barbie Doll feminism in a Union Jack mini dress and sexism with an apparently ironic twist. The Berlin Wall had come down in 1989, and, after a decade of class and civil war by way of the Miners Strike and the Poll Tax, Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had been forced to resign from office after an eleven year reign of terror. Tony Blair's landslide New Labour victory in 1997 suggested  that things could only get better, but suddenly, with no pricks to kick against, it...

Royal Conservatoire Scotland, Glasgow Three stars As openings go, when the cast of Ali de Souza's production of Hector MacMillan's ribald Scots version of Moliere's seventeenth century comedy, La Malade Imaginaire, come burling through the New Athenaeum auditorium led by a bagpiper before launching into an onstage ceilidh, it's a pretty strong statement of intent. What follows is an accomplished and suitably larger than life study of how an old man called Argan can take near masochistic pleasure in his imaginary ailments. He is cured, not by quackery and a fondness for enemas, but by waking up to his own gullibility as he's taken in by his gold-digging wife Beline inbetween attempting to marry off his daughter Angelique into the medical classes. MacMillan's pithy and richly evocative dialogue is captured impeccably by a young cast of final year acting students from the RCS, led by Philip Laing's physically dextrous turn as Argan, who has some fine comic inte...