Coffee-Table Notes

Imagine tempting eight of the most unpleasant people in the world to an isolated house on uninhabited island. Then imagine wining and dining them into a false sense of security before methodically and mercilessly bumping them off one by rotten one as an act of poetic justice for the crimes they've escaped punishment from. This is effectively what happens in And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie's novel long regarded as her masterpiece since it was first published in 1939. And it is a trademark set-up of her murder-mystery oeuvre, whether putting her characters in a country house drawing room for the big reveal or else decamping them to the middle of nowhere. The allure of taking characters out of their comfort zone and throwing them to the metaphorical lions may be sated these days by the mass appeal of reality TV, but Christie got there first. More significantly, perhaps, the mind games she plays are a whole lot subtler, shot through as they are with a hardcore sens...

As the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow celebrates its seventieth year of theatrical excess with a welter of activity that includes several high-profile shows and a BBC TV documentary, Blood and Glitter, set to be screened this week, a much less lauded but equally key influence on the Citz style and way of doing things is also being celebrated. It was fifty years ago that that The Close, a 150-seat studio space in a former gambling club adjoining the Citz, opened its doors to a new world of experimental theatre. In the club-based theatre's short but colourful life between 1965 and 1973, The Close played host to some of the more outré contributions to the European art house canon in a uniquely underground environment which managed to circumnavigate the censorship imposed on live performance by the Lord Chamberlain up until 1968 when his role was abolished. In its eight year existence, The Close may have began with productions of rarely seen curtain-raisers by Shaw, but there was also a c...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Three stars Why should Alice in Wonderland be forever presented as a white, blonde and very English ingénue? What if she was a little different, and the rabbit hole she fell down not as enticing as her own fantastical uniqueness? These are questions posed by director and performer Josette Bushell-Mingo on the second and final day of Progression 2015, this weekend's international celebration of deaf arts hosted by the pioneering Glasgow-based Solar Bear Theatre Company. The answers come in the show-and-tell finale that follows a day of workshops with some of deaf theatre's leading practitioners, including Bushell-Mingo and her team from the Swedish Tyst Theatre (Silent Theatre), a company which has been developing deaf theatre for forty-five years as an offshoot of the national touring company, Riksteatern. The loose-knit programme begins with some interactive games with the audience before Bushell-Mingo hands over to a mix of hearing and non-hearing t...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Three stars This week's announcement of the establishment of the UK's first deaf performing arts degree course at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland has been pushed hugely by the Glasgow-based Solar Bear Theatre company. The company have been working with deaf artists and performers since its inception, and are quite rightly co-running the course in partnership with RCS. It's timely too that Solar Bear's recent flurry of activity peaked this weekend with their hosting of Progression 2015, a two day international celebration of deaf arts. Thursday night saw a double bill of large ensemble-based works by the Moscow-based Nedoslov company. The first piece, Unlocked Freedom, was based on Maxim Gorky's 1882 short story, Makar Chudra, about a horny young peasant who murders his gypsy bride only to be stabbed to death in turn by her father.  The second, more impressionistic piece, No Rights To Have An Angel, looks at art, life and death through ...

Summerhall, Edinburgh Four stars It's an unintentional piece of synchronicity that Cardiff-sired nouveau-riot grrrl indie-pop noiseniks Joanna Gruesome have broken cover to release their second album, Peanut Butter, the sparky follow-up to their 2013 debut, Weird Sister, just as the other-worldly voice of the chanteuse who inspired their name, Joanna Newsome, has similarly reappeared on the scene. With former front-woman Alanna McArdle departing following the recording of Peanut Butter, twin vocalists Kate Stonestreet of Glasgow fem/queer punks Pennycress and Roxy Brennan of Two White Cranes have stepped into the breach in a way that makes them sound more wilfully disparate than ever. The Edinburgh date of JoGrue's inaugural tour in their new six-piece line-up forms part of Summerhall's ongoing Nothing Ever Happens Here series of shows, and opens with the headliners Fortuna Pop! label-mates and fellow travellers, The Spook School. Like their forbears, the Edinburgh-based q...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars In the middle of nowhere in a barren grey and white world, two old men stay busy doing nothing while putting their increasingly blind faith in someone destined to never arrive. So begins Samuel Beckett's now half a century old piece of bombed-out existential vaudeville, revived here by the Royal Lyceum's artistic director Mark Thomson to open the Lyceum Company's fiftieth anniversary season as well as his own swan song in charge of the Grindlay Street institution. Casting Brian Cox as a bright-eyed Vladimir and Bill Paterson as his more melancholy sparring partner Estragon is an inspired move from the off, as the pair wrestle with ill-fitting boots in Estragon's case or a wet-patch inducing prostate like Vladimir, all with a time-filling determination that borders on OCD. As the pair indulge in terminal small talk and deadpan gallows humour on Michael Taylor's walled-in semi-circular set that lends things a real sense of f...

The spacious bar area of the Royal & Derngate Theatre in Northampton doesn't look much like a teenage wasteland. At the first night post-show party for the theatre's co-production with The Touring Consortium  of Brave New World, Dawn King's adaptation of Aldous Huxley's increasingly recognisable dystopian novel, it's the sounds of Baba O'Riley, The Who's damning statement on a strung-out, acid-fried Woodstock generation that underscores the chit-chat beside the drinks table. It's appearance is probably an accident, but, given Huxley's prophetic study of a society numbed into submission by a pill called Soma, and where sexual promiscuity is encouraged to the point that no one feels a thing, Pete Townshend's counterblast to the summer of love sounds oddly appropriate. The play itself, as directed by Royal & Derngate artistic director James Dacre, is as state of the art as it gets, a fast-moving voyage through a world where a medically bred ...