Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre , Edinburgh Three stars When Charlie met Mari, they could've changed the world. That's not quite the case in Dave Fargnoli's two-handed rom-com presented by the young Urban Fox company, but it would make a great tag-line, worthy of both the movie that's just made Mari a star, and for the high-profile charity that Charlie fronts so successfully. It could only be used, alas, if the former teenage activists who got sucked up in a world of spin, soundbites and hard sell can survive the online meltdown that might just destroy them both. As the first of the Traverse's week-long Hothouse season of work by locally sourced grassroots companies, Fargnoli's hour-long play opens with the couple on the run to an isolated cottage and already at each others throats in Amy Gilmartin's neatly minimalist production. As the pair rewind to their first meeting manning the anti-war barricades and beyond, we see how their mutual idealism became corrupted...

Mike Bartlett may be no monarchist, but he's doing pretty well off the royal family just now. As his Olivier Award winning play, King Charles III, arrives in Edinburgh mext week, Bartlett is in New York with the cast of Rupert Goold's original 2014 Almeida Theatre production overseeing a safe transfer in a country which fawns over the royals possibly more than happens on home turf. What American audiences will make of a play that imagines that Prince Charles takes the throne following the death of the Queen, let alone the five-act Shakespearian-style historical epic in blank verse which Bartlett has written, is anybody's guess. The appearance at one point of the late Princess Diana's ghost might also raise an eyebrow or two, though such seemingly seditious material involving, not just Charles and Di, but William, Kate, Harry and Camilla too hasn't seen Bartlett carted off to the Tower of London just yet. Not that it was his intention to provoke. If anything, rat...

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Three stars It's been quite a week for Robert Louis Stevenson at the RCS. Running alongside a devised post-modern take on Jekyll and Hyde, the rarely explored backstage area of the New Athenaeum Theatre became the venue for a look at his Boys Own style response to the 1745 Jacobite uprising like no other. With the audience herded into a room awash with metal platforms, hanging ropes and stainless steel ladders, Graham McLaren's production rips into Stevenson's yarn with hell-for-leather abandon, as an ensemble of fourteen final year students from the BA Acting course jump into David Balfour and Alan Breck's dissident world. That they do this by way of flying ships, upside-down aerial acrobatics and Vicky Manderson's joyous choreography makes McLaren and co's take on things no ordinary adaptation. The ghosts of both Bill Bryden's post-industrial spectacles and Ken Campbell's lysergically charged epic...

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Three stars A crazed Mr Hyde straddles his bed-bound creator pleading with him not to kill him off because he's the only interesting character who's sprung to life from Robert Louis Stevenson's gothic tale of duality and barely repressed madness. This is a tellingly knowing nod to the twenty-first century's ongoing fascination with horror. It's there too in Lucien MacDougall and Benedicte Seierup's production, devised with nine final year students from the RCS' BA acting course, in some of the jump-cut film footage that cops its moves from the likes of American Horror Story in terms of its power to shock. With Stevenson here cast as plain old Louis, he is woken from his medicated dream in a hospital ward and tended to by a pyjama-clad chorus who watch enraptured from the sidelines as the main action unfolds. What follows is a psycho-active explosion in Louis' head reminiscent at times of the hallucinoge...

Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh Three stars Two nights before Remembrance Sunday, and a woman is onstage surrounded by a hotch-potch of cardboard boxes, each one containing a totem of a remarkable story. She pulls a pair of tacketty boots from one, an ornate ladies hat from another. From one a seemingly endless reel of ticker tape unfurls its hidden messages. These messages and more are relayed in Alice Mary Cooper's evocation of a time capsule from The Great War packed by Dundee postal workers in 1921 and only rediscovered in 2013, a year before the centenary of the war's start. This timing is handy, because, while the actual box, crammed full with letters, photographs and documents, now sits in the McManus Gallery in Dundee, its accompanying instructions that it wasn't to be opened until the centenary allows Cooper's hour-long show and tell to put flesh on the bones of a piece of hidden history that goes beyond mere war stories. Commissioned by Harlow Playhouse...

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Three stars In a muddy bog, Robert The Bruce is crowned king of Scots after crushing the English and claiming the throne as his own. As with history, it is Bruce's younger brother Edward you have to keep an eye on in Ben Blow's speculative reimagining of the Bruce boys post-Bannockburn assault on Ireland, produced here by the Edinburgh-based Black Dingo Productions. Like a Shakespearian villain on the make, Gerry Kielty's Edward snipes from the sidelines prior to a power-hungry burst of sibling rivalry that sees him left to his own manipulative devices on Irish soil, intent on creating a kingdom of his own. Once in the wilds with his troops, he encounters Failtrail, a young milkmaid who is forced to sing for him before the two face up to the dehumanising realpolitik of power games and become accidental allies, Director Kolbrun Bjort Sigfusdottir sets all this in the bleakest of landscapes in a meditation on war which sounds at times ...

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, November 7th-June 26 th Long before the current generation of female Scottish artists started making waves, muscles of joy were being flexed in a way that paved the way for everything that followed. This major show of more than ninety works from familiar names including Joan Eardley and Phoebe Anna Traquair to less well-known but just as significant figures bookends its time-frame from when Fra Newberry became Director of Glasgow School of Art to the year of Anne Redpath's death. In the years between, the doors were opened to women artists in a way that was unprecedented as they seized on new liberties in a way that allowed them to express their art as never before. Not that it was easy, as the exhibition makes clear by framing it in the context of the conditions female artists negotiated as students and practitioners due to their gender. Given that it moves through the age of suffrage to a more seemingly swinging age, the new researc...