Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars On a table-top size desert landscape, a solitary egg sits in the spotlight as the sound of the tide ebbs and flows around it. By the end of Julian Crouch and Saskia Lane's thirty-five minute epic that formed part of the Manipulate visual theatre festival's Wednesday night programme, all life will have stemmed from it. As the egg bursts open as operated by Crouch and Lane with concentrated diffidence, a brown bag blows in, unfurls itself and puts flesh and bones on an ever morphing creation that slowly finds its uneasy feet. From a stumblebum gangle to an imperious stride, this ever-expanding new-born sheds skins and grows stronger with every wobbly step. At first glance this all seems a far cry from Crouch's large-scale spectacles as a designer and director with Improbable Theatre on the likes of Shockheaded Peter and the company's collaboration with the National Theatre of Scotland on a staging of Neil Gaiman's The Wol...

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars Newspaper advertising may be down these days, but without it, Agatha Christie's thriller as brought to life in Middle Ground Theatre Company's production couldn't exist. The small ad in question appears in the local rag that serves the sleepy English hamlet of Chipping Cleghorn, where a Friday night murder mystery is promised in Little Paddocks, the country pile occupied by sixty-something village matriarch, Letitia Blacklock. With the house brim-full with former school chums, extended family members and an east European refugee servant, it's all a bit of a wheeze until the Swiss assassin himself comes a cropper. Enter Miss Marple, who, as played by Judy Cornwell, is happy to sit knitting in the background as she nudges Tom Butcher's Inspector Craddock towards solving what turns out to be a case of international intrigue. Despite confining the action to one room rather than the more scenic locales of Christie...

When John Dove talks about his forthcoming production of The Crucible at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, he doesn't talk about Arthur Miller's twentieth century masterpiece in terms of its plot. This is despite Miller's ever-pertinent post-McCarthyite fable of seventeenth century witch trials in the American backwater of Puritan-led Salem. Nor does he mention the forbidden dalliance between John Proctor and Abigail Williams that drives the play. Or how that opens up things previously left unspoken in a repressed community that is eventually torn apart by prejudice and a fear of the unknown encouraged by the equally terrified authorities. Rather, Dove talks about the attempted destruction of the NHS and the welfare state by those in office. He talks about how people today need to look after each other more, and to question those in power more than once every four years when an election is pending. And he talks about the sheer human heart behind the play, just as he...

Edinburgh Playhouse Three stars The great big number 25 emblazoned in white on a Milk Tray coloured backdrop scales the full height of the Playhouse stage at the opening of this greatest hits tour by any other name by the most singular of comedy double acts. The charity-shop lounge-core pre-show soundtrack too is as showbiz as it gets. Sired on a mix of punk and working men's club cabaret, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer have always played with such iconography, even as they've subverted it with absurdist abandon. True to form, catchphrases of the “You Wouldn't let it lie” and “Look at the size of that sausage” variety are cheered to the rafters on the second night of a tour that almost never was after Bob Mortimer's triple heart bypass operation necessitated its first leg to be cancelled last autumn. Old friends such as The Man With The Stick, Donald and Davey Stott and Mulligan and O'Hare too are greeted like conquering heroes. All of which makes for what i...

Stills, Edinburgh, 6th February-9th April At first glance, two old women gossiping on a half-demolished street may not have much to do with the group of nymph-like waifs in swimsuits draping themselves across the branches of a tree in synchronised unison. Seen alongside each other as in this two-part exhibition at Stills, however, the documentary photographs of Joseph McKenzie and images by Fred Daniels taken from the collection of choreographer Margaret Morris fuse social history and artistic archive in fascinating counterpoint. Where Joseph McKenzie was regarded as the father of Scottish photography up until his death in 2015, the shapes thrown in Morris' 1920s world were the epitome of abstraction applied to everyday life. Both, in their own ways, were radical pioneers. “The Margaret Morris collection is a really early example of an artist recognising the importance of documentation,” Stills director Ben Harman says,“while Joseph McKenzie's photographs are early e...

Coronation Street may look like the end of the world to some, but for Chris Gascoyne, his time on the iconic TV soap has in part been a platform which has allowed him to explore other avenues. While on the one hand Gascoyne has notched up some seventeen years “more on than off,” playing Peter Barlow, son of the ever-present Ken, in the red-brick Wetherfield limbo, he has also developed a parallel theatre career. This has taken him to the National Theatre, the Royal Court and now to Glasgow in the Citizens' Theatre's new production of Samuel Beckett's dystopian masterpiece, Endgame. Performing alongside his long-term Corrie colleague David Neilson in co-production with the newly-established Manchester venue, HOME, Gascoyne plays Clov, the doting servant to Neilson's blind and ruthless master, Hamm. With Hamm unable to walk and Clov incapable of sitting, the pair's sparring is punctuated by the dustbin-dwelling appearance of Hamm's parents, Nag and Nell, in a b...

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Three stars When second year acting students from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland performed Romeo and Juliet a couple of weeks ago, it may have been their first introduction to classical tragedy. Seen next to John Ford's seventeenth century gore-fest, however, Shakespeare's play must look pretty prim to the other half of the year's ensemble who perform Ford's masterpiece this week. The same iron bed is there in Gareth Nicholls' production to help illustrate consummation of the play's doomed young lovers' affair. It starts similarly enough too, with over-exciteable boys sparring and confessing all while the object of their affections preens herself impassively in front of a full-length mirror. The fact that Ford's lead starlets, Giovanni and Annabel, are brother and sister, makes this an infinitely more grown-up affair. All of Nicholls' eight-strong ensemble grab hold of Ford's taboo-busti...