Coffee-Table Notes

Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh Three stars Whether intentional or not, playing former Jimmy Savile's Old Record Club favourite, Young Girl, by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, in the build up to the start of Andy McGregor's production of his own new play for the Sleeping Warrior Theatre Company gives what follows a creepier edge than the play's title suggests. Here, after all, is a full-on twenty-first century romance, in which teenage dreamers Suzie and Gary hook up, not at the youth club disco, but through Facebook, that all pervasive global village where cyber-stalking can lead to all kinds of trouble. Where Suzie's posts gush about sentimental TV shows and the delights of Simply Red, Gary quotes Kerouac, puts up seriously arty selfies and claims to dig Beethoven. The trouble is, in an online world where you can be anyone you want to be, it's hard to spot who's faking it unless 'friends' meet in the flesh. Which, following an excess of ...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars The oh-so-tasteful wine bar jazz guitar version of Making Whoopee that ushers in this touring revival of Phoebe Waller-Bridge's solo play gives nary a hint of the psycho-sexual head-rip that follows over the next sixty-five minutes. Nor indeed does the opening scene, in which our eponymous heroine messes up a job interview with an instinctively inappropriate display. This is just the start, however, of a no-half-measures roller-coaster ride through Fleabag's emotionally scarred world, in which she defines herself through sex, be it through masturbating to online porn or else sleeping with any man that comes her way. Either way, it reminds her she's alive even though she doesn't feel a thing. As things gradually unravel while she either crushes or else pushes away anyone who attempts to get close to her, beyond Maddie Rice's jolly hockey-sticks delivery and the unfettered ridiculousness of Fleabag's guinea pig ...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars What does it mean to be love sick? Lucy Prebble's award-winning play, first seen at the Royal National Theatre in 2012, explores this painful question through two couples confined in very different ways by clinical drug trials in a medical testing centre run by a tellingly named pharmaceutical company. Connie and Tristan arrive as strangers, but within hours find themselves attracted to each other in a way that might just be chemically enhanced. Lorna and Toby, meanwhile, are the doctors overseeing Connie and Tristan's trial, and whose uneasy shared history dictates everything that follows. As Connie and Tristan's terminal flirtation eventually spills over, so Lorna and Toby come to redefine their relationship through a series of double bluffs which have devastating consequences for them all. The inner landscape Prebble explores in this fascinating dramatic analysis of chemistry, biology and sheer physical and mental desire is...

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars The scales of justice hang heavy in stark black and white on the gauze through which the murder jury sit in the shadows at the start of this touring revival of Reginald Rose's post courtroom classic, first seen as a television play before being made iconic in Sidney Lumet's big screen debut in 1957. Christopher Haydon's production, first produced by Birmingham Rep before becoming a West End hit, casts Tom Conti as the anonymous Juror 8, initially the sole dissenter of a pack intent on sending a young boy of colour to his death in what initially seems a cut and dried case. As the facts are gradually revealed over the next two riveting hours, they also lay bare an assortment of everyday prejudices and knee-jerk notions of law and order fuelled by ignorance, fear and self-loathing. It's not hard to recognise contemporary universal parallels in Rose's play, which burns with claustrophobic heat in the shabby room of Mi...

Lust and the Apple, The Old School House, Temple, near Gorebridge until April 19 th Four stars It's all too fitting that the outside lights weren't working on the opening night of this new venture from Paul Robertson, the iconoclastic former curator of Summerhall, whose sudden departure from the former Royal Dick Veterinary School in August 2014 has yet to be explained. Situated in the former primary school of a Midlothian village fourteen miles south of Edinburgh and steeped in Knights Templar folklore, Lust and the Apple's opening triple-headed hydra of shows appears tailor-made to cope with electrical gremlins, and seeing the work in the raw and partly shrouded by the blackest of night skies enhances rather than denudes their sense of public ritual. This is evident from the moment you enter the old school's car park to be greeted by six helium balloons suspended in mid-air, each with a wooden spike pointed firmly downwards. As indicated by the spikes already ...

Dundee Contemporary Arts until March 22 nd Four stars White light, white heat and pop art fun palaces are what initially spring to mind as one enters this biggest UK display to date by the French-born Quistrebert brothers to a mind-bending projection of op-art geometric patterns beamed onto canvas in a pitch-black room. Such black and white counterpoints in what is styled as Stripes 2 (2013) gives off the image of a well turned out chill-out room designed for sensory disorientation and altered states in ways many of DCA's shows have explored over recent years. In the main gallery there is plenty of space left between the paintings that make up the Overlight series (2015), on which are daubed thick-set layers of modelling paste mixed up with coatings of either gold, chrome or gold chrome. Inside these already shiny surfaces are embedded tiny LED lights, both coloured and clear. Parked next to each other, with two next door using a gritty powder used for high visibility r...

In the Sun-filled rehearsal room on the top floor of Dundee Rep, a tender scene is being played out. On the floor, two young lovers are declaring undying devotion to each other. “We'll never ever leave each other,” the young man utters earnestly to his heart's desire as they hold on to each other, albeit somewhat gingerly. “My body is yours. Your body is mine,” he says, with her repeating his words back at him. Watching over the scene alongside assorted stage managers and crew is a woman who appears to be dressed in a pair of checked pyjamas. While choreographer Mark Smith negotiates the couple's movements as actors Miles Mitchell and Amy Conachan repeat the scene several times, the woman eventually can't help herself, and, as the “My body is yours” lines are being spoken, moves into the playing area and puts Mitchell's hands firmly onto Conachan's breasts. “Touch each other,” the woman says out loud. The woman is Jenny Sealey, who since 1997 has been ...