Coffee-Table Notes

Northern Stage at Summerhall until August 30, except Here is the News From Over There (Over There Is The News From Here) until August 29. Mass outbreaks of grieving are nothing new these days, but what if such emotional outbursts are part of a contagious medical condition that cries real tears. So it goes in Going Viral , Daniel Bye's latest performance lecture which forms part of Northern Stage's Edinburgh programme, and which takes an idea and runs with it to a fabulist conclusion. In this case, what starts with Bye sitting in the audience unloading his assorted everyday medication explodes into a blockbuster sized saga worthy of the most paranoid of ecology-inspired science-fiction epics. Bye plays a version of himself, who finds himself on an aeroplane sat next to a woman who starts crying for seemingly no reason. Before he knows where he is the whole world's at it, and he's being pursued by a woman who wants to know why he's remained so dry-eyed with a per...

In the corner of a Leith Walk bar, Lauren Holt is sitting alone reading a book. The fact that the book is a short story collection by American writer Raymond Carver is telling about where this most extraordinary of Edinburgh-based singers comes from artistically. In Carver's short writing life, he produced a body of minimalist short stories that charted crucial everyday moments in small, unromantic lives. Like Carver, the artist until recently known as Law has produced a series of dark, mood-laden vignettes that sound by turns strident and fragile, her vocal both timelessly soulful and other-worldly, wrapped up as it is in a dense mesh of beats and rhythms that fizz into murky life around her. The lo-fi video for her song, Hustle, is set in the sort of hotel room scenario that looks like it could be in the same neighbourhood where many of Carver's characters eke out their lives. With such inherent drama in Holt's work, it's perhaps no surprise that the twenty-seve...

The last time Robert Lepage brought a show to Edinburgh International Festival, things didn't really go according to plan. That was back in 1995, when the Quebecois auteur of hi-tech Zen attempted to open Elsinore, his one-man take on Shakespeare's Hamlet, which had to be cancelled following a series of epic technical difficulties. To add insult to injury, at other venues on its international tour Elsinore went off without a hitch. This included a run at Glasgow's Tramway venue, where Lepage's Tectonic Plates was first shown in Scotland during Glasgow's tenure as European City of Culture in 1990. In terms of scale and ambition, Tectonic Plates was something rarely seen in Glasgow's theatre scene of the time, with Tramway going on to host several more of Lepage's works over the next decade while there was still money and vision enough to do so. During these years Glasgow could be regarded as Lepage's spiritual home in Scotland, where he and other...

Summerhall until August 30 When is a door not a door? In the case of Ndebele Funeral , Zoe Martinson's new play for the New York based Smoke and Mirrors Collaborative company it's when it's a coffin. Set in the Soweto townships which huge swathes of South Africa's black community still call home, a city sickness hangs heavy over Thandi's shack, where she is woken from her slumber, first by a government inspector looking into how she has used the wood allocated to improve her housing situation, then by old college friend Mandisi, whose enthusiasm for twenty-first century pop culture fails to bring Thandi back to being the woman she was before her self-imposed exile. With Martinson herself playing Thandi, Awoye Timpo's production of her play exposes a loss of faith, not just in Mandisi's sullied devotion to something higher, but more devastatingly in Thandi's wilful self-destruction that is her last gasp for autonomy in her poverty-stricken existence...

When the young Israeli theatre company, Incubator Theatre, brought their show, The City, to Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2014, it became the talk of the town for all the wrong reasons. This had little to do with the content of the company's retro-styled rap opera, but was more to do with the fact that a small part of the company's funding came from the Israeli government. Incubator arrived in Edinburgh on the back of a series of ongoing atrocities committed by Israeli forces in occupied Palestine, and calls for sanctions against Israel were at a premium. Incubator managed one show in the face of noisy protests before host venue Underbelly decided to pull the plug on the remainder of the run following advice from Police Scotland. A month later in London, Exhibit B, created by South African artist Brett Bailey as a discomforting series of tableaux vivants depicting historical scenes of racism using real performers in a 'human zoo' setting was pulled from the Barbi...

When Philip Ridley's play, Dark Vanilla Jungle, first appeared in 2013, its unflinching portrait of a vulnerable young girl groomed by gangs for sex accidentally reflected real life events with startling prescience. As a follow-up of sorts, Tonight With Donny Stixx, which arrives in town just weeks after shootings close to a high school in Illinois, appears to have done something similar. Given the prevalence of real life parallels with Ridley's tale of Donny, the teenage gunman who becomes the most hated boy alive even as he craves his own TV chat show, it's perhaps surprising to hear Donny's creator and a man whose creative output has straddled stage, film and the visual art world describe his play as “one of my most autobiographical pieces. It's about someone from a dysfunctional family who is very isolated.” The crucial difference here between Ridley and Donny is that where Donny picks up a gun, Ridley has produced a series of plays and novels that have mi...

There has always been a musical pulse to Enda Walsh's writing, ever since the Dublin-born playwright burst onto the international stage in 1996 with Disco Pigs, his ferocious teenage love story that turned a nineteen-year Cillian Murphy into a star. The rhythmic rush of adolescent slang that fired Walsh's career-making play has led to a prolific canon both on stage and screen. Walsh's script written with Steve McQueen for McQueen's Michael Fassbender-starring film, Hunger, was praised, while a move into musical theatre with Once saw the Broadway production of a show featuring music and lyrics by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova scoop eight Tony Awards, a Grammy and two Olivier Awards. Furthering his relationship with music, Walsh is currently under commission to write Jules in the City, a film based on the life and times of singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright, a man himself no stranger to combining music and theatre. Then there is a mooted collaboration between Wal...