Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars It's all so civilised at the start of Vanishing Point's latest study of the world through a lens darkly. A master of ceremonies introduces the night, and points out how what is about to follow was prompted by a photograph by Canadian artist Jeff Wall, and how his image of domestic destruction was inspired by a painting by Delacroix. After introducing actors Elicia Daly, Pauline Goldsmith and Barnaby Power, the MC stands behind one of two video cameras that film the next seventy-five minutes, which is beamed onto a screen above the stage that distances the live action below. The actors sit on the red sofa and chairs in what looks like an elegant looking chat show set, and they talk. In something resembling a dinner party gone increasingly wrong, they talk of online videos and pictures of Bataclan and Syria, and how such images may or may not have affected them. As the talk goes on, meticulously constructed criss-crossing conversations be...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When the lights go out on twenty-something Una mid-way through David Harrower's taboo-busting psycho-drama, she's left alone in a room full of domestic debris. The painful silence and eventual cry for help that follows make it feel like this is the second time she's been deserted by Ray, the man now known as Peter who she went on the run with fifteen years before. That was when he was forty and she was twelve. In the gulf between the couple's two meetings, lives have been lived, torn apart and just possibly rebuilt. In the play's 100 minute duration, played without an interval, those lives are exposed in all their fragility before being turned upside down once more. A decade after it premiered at Edinburgh International Festival, the emotional cache of Harrower's play becomes more powerful with its every reading. As this new production by Gareth Nicholls – no stranger to intense two-handers following his production ...

In a Leith warehouse on a cold Wednesday afternoon, something funny is going on. Just how funny remains to be seen, because, as pantomime favourites Allan Stewart, Andy Gray and Grant Stott have long known, comedy is a very serious business indeed, and when comedy partners fall out, it really is no laughing matter. You can see this when all three are on their feet for rehearsals of Canned Laughter, a brand new play co-written by Ed Curtis with Stewart about Alec (Stewart), Gus (Gray) and Rory (Stott), an imaginary 1970s comedy troupe on the verge of the big time. Such showbiz mythology is familiar territory for Curtis, who had directed Stewart in the title role of Al Jolson in Jolson and Me. Curtis later directed Alan McHugh and Elaine C Smith's Susan Boyle based musical, I Dreamed Dream, in which Gray appeared. Prior to both shows, in 2007 Curtis wrote and directed Never Forget, the Take That jukebox musical which focused on a tribute band trying to get their break. Wit...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars “If we get anymore white people here,” says Little Inez, the sparky kid sister of the male half of Baltimore's first inter-racial teenage couple in this latest touring revival of the 1960s-set John Waters inspired musical, “it'll be a suburb.” Such seemingly throwaway observations speak volumes about where writers Marc O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan's book is coming from in Paul Kerryson's production, which originated at Leicester's Curve Theatre. Adapted from Waters' 1988 commercial breakthrough film and taken from real events, for all it's bubblegum-coloured nostalgia , Hairspray is a show that lays bare the brittle superiority of so-called normal society. That it does so with an all-singing, all-dancing cast led by Freya Sutton as curvy heroine Tracy Turnblad and Tony Maudsley cross-dressing as her mother Edna makes it even better.   Sutton's Tracy is “that chubby Communist” who wants every day to b...

Paul Higgins won't be able to make the Glasgow Film Festival screening of Couple in A Hole, the off-kilter thriller he appears in alongside Kate Dickie, and which has already garnered plaudits at festivals abroad. Instead, Higgins will be just across the river, performing in the Citizens' Theatre's new production of Blackbird. David Harrower's troubling dissection of the emotional fallout of an illicit relationship between twelve year old Una and forty year old Ray shows what happens when Una turns up unannounced fifteen years after Ray was sent to prison. Higgins can also be heard shortly in a new radio adaptation of John Wyndham's ecological science-fiction novel, The Kraken Wakes, in which First Minister Nicola Sturgeon makes an unlikely cameo. All of which is in keeping with Higgins' back catalogue as an an actor unafraid to appear both vulnerable and ridiculous, as he did on TV in both The Thick of It and Dennis Kelly's graphic novel styled Utopia. ...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four stars The French windows are suitably symmetrical at the opening of Tom Attenborough's handsome-looking touring revival of Noel Coward's superior sit-com, knocked off over a long weekend in 1930. They're certainly better matched than Elyot and Amanda, the former lovers now on the rebound and on honeymoon with brand new spouses. It's telling, however, that the adjoining balconies where chance meetings are inevitable on Lucy Osborne's set more resemble an art deco cruise liner that's fleetingly docked in port than the hotel it actually is. What follows as Tom Chambers' Elyot dallies with Charlotte Ritchie's Sybil while Laura Rogers' alpha female Amanda toys with Richard Teverson's pompous Victor is a riot of wildly choreographed savage love that falls somewhere between passion and politesse in its cut-glass execution. Attenborough's production too presents a company of equals, with Ritchie making a bright an...

Michael Head is full of stories. This is something the audience at Oran Mor in Glasgow should find out tomorrow night when Head brings a trio version of his latest venture as Michael Head and the Red Elastic Band to town. There's the one, for instance, about how this prodigiously talented songwriter first fell in love with music beyond his mum and dad's country and western records when he saw Julian Cope's band, The Teardrop Explodes, on a TV show hosted by Factory Records boss, Tony Wilson. “There was a lot of Johnny Cash and Hank Williams in the house,” Head remembers. “I think I was about twenty-five before I heard Revolver, but in 1978, there was this programme Tony Wilson did, and the theme tune got me straight away, 'cos it was Shot By Both Sides by Magazine, and I remember bombing down the stairs, and I was standing there in the living , watching the Teardrop Explodes transfixed transfixed, and my dad said, you like that, don't you. I said, yeah, it...