Coffee-Table Notes

Spiegeltent, St Andrew Square, Edinburgh Three stars What happens in a bar after-hours stays in a bar after-hours. Unless, that is, the late-night action is immortalised and worked up into an hour-long routine by a troupe of alt-circus performers who resemble extras from a Tom Waits song. This is the case here, as Australia's Company 2 transform drinking games into gymnastics in the Underbelly's flagship show for Edinburgh's Christmas 2014 programme. A quintet of acrobats accompanied by the equally five-strong Crusty Suitcase Band introduce the audience into a speak-easy atmosphere with a fanfare that moves between rag-time and bump n' grind. Things start off simple enough with a set of what looks like party tricks, as sole female member of the ensemble Chelsea McGuffin takes a walk across some upright champagne bottles. The elaborately bearded Mozes indulges in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it full-frontal flash before embarking on a far more impressive solo trapeze act....

Ebeneezer Scrooge and composer Harrison Birtwistle may not be the most obvious of artistic bedfellows. Without the latter, however, one suspects Nikola Kodjabashia would not have been able to make the Citizens Theatre's seasonal production of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol as adapted by Neil Bartlett sound like it does when it opens this weekend. It was Birtwistle, after all, who effectively taught Kodjabashia his musical chops when the Macedonian composer studied under the former musical director of the National Theatre in London before giving  him his first theatre gig on Sir Peter Hall's production of The Bacchai. Since then, Kodjabashia has worked all over the world, and has forged a particularly fruitful working relationship with the Citz's artistic director, Doninic Hill, who will oversee A Christmas Carol. This follows on from Hill's acclaimed productions of Crime and Punishment, which saw Chris Hannan adapt Dostoyevsky's epic novel for the stage, as ...

Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh Four stars “Ma body may be broken,” drawls Pere Ubu's vocalist and de facto director David Thomas to explain why he won't be getting up from his chair so the people at the back of the room can see him, “but ma miiiiiind is more dangerous than ever.” It may sound like a line from a Tennessee Williams play, but having already thrown his walking stick to the ground en route to an explanation of Random-access memory, Thomas' seated presence as he slugs a bottle of red wine inbetween reading lyrics from a music stand is clearly a bodily necessity.  Mercurial belligerence may have always been Thomas' thing, but his uncompromising stance is also a knowing piece of self-reflection as the current Ubu line up play two sets culled largely from the band's recent Carnival of Souls album. With no mention of Ubu's recent appearance on the soundtrack of the latest series of American Horror Story, the first half hour is a loose-fit allia...

When the Traverse Theatre's artistic director Orla O'Loughlin touched down in Montreal in September of this year to take part in an international exchange between Scots and Quebecois playwrights, one of the first things she saw was a Saltire hanging from a city centre balcony. A week after the referendum on Scottish independence, feelings were still raw. Edinburgh's new writing theatre had spent referendum night itself presenting their production of John McCann's play, Spoiling, which imagined the Realpolitik behind an independence win as Scotland's first minister of international affair prepared her maiden speech. The Traverse also hosted an informal presentation of David Greig's independence-themed Twitter plays. As the referendum result became clear, however, the next night of Spoiling was by all accounts an even more emotional affair. It was against this backdrop that O'Loughlin arrived in Montreal with Scottish writers Rob Drummond, Dou...

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...