Coffee-Table Notes

Abandoned Street Lighting Depot, Edinburgh Four stars Make the most of Hidden Door, the now annual nine-day festival of grassroots art, music and performance, which opened this weekend. This year it styles itself as The Electric City in honour of its sprawling temporary home off King's Stables Road which will soon be converted into yet another soulless development. This despite Hidden Door proving the hunger for such an enterprise on a more permanent basis. The theatre programme opened with a new take on Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi by Edinburgh-based international collective, The Ludens Ensemble. Here, four Pierrot-faced actors in identi-kit junkshop outfits took on Jarry's gloriously puerile reinvention of Macbeth and invested it with a kitchen-sink's worth of styles. Philippos Philippou's wilfully messy work in progress featured grotesque puppets, live video feeds and animated projections, while an entire battle scene was acted out in shadowplay in a way that gives ju...

Dalcrue Farm, Perth Five stars In a barn outside Perth, three young men are being forced to face up to their unplanned, unwanted and heartlessly unnecessary destiny in Oliver Emanuel's meditation on the 306 men executed for cowardice in World War One. As brought exquisitely to life in Laurie Sansom's impressionistic music theatre staging, this epic co-production between the National Theatre of Scotland, World War One centenary art commissioning project, 14-18 NOW, and Perth Theatre in association with Red Note Ensemble belatedly honours the dead. Emanuel's play focuses on three of the men; Harry Farr, Joseph Byers and Joseph 'Willie' Stones, and shows the human frailties behind their eventual fate. From a shellshocked Farr's final moments with his young wife Gertrude, to Byers' enthusiasm to join up, all three men are brutalised by the institution they so loyally served. Seen between the hours of 2.30 and 4am, the action moves across five stages w...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When the eight squaddies fighting for king and country swap Protestant sashes before going into battle towards the end of Frank McGuinness' 1985 play, revived here by Jeremy Herrin, it resemblance a victorious football team swapping shirts with their noble opponents. Such an image speaks volumes about McGuinness' mighty meditation on maleness in all its troubled forms. By this stage the World War One volunteers have moved from act one's peacockish barrack room sparring to become a unit who would die for each other, with everything that really matters between them left painfully unsaid. These men too are the ghosts conjured up by old Kenneth Pyper, the regiment's sole survivor of its final battle, who wakes as if from a nightmare at the start of the play and ushers his former comrades to would-be triumph at its end. Inbetween, Pyper's effete aesthete holds court to a role-call of Belfast tough guys, failed preachers and o...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars The play may be the thing, but the lives of those who write them can often prove equally compelling. So it goes in Liz Lochhead's comic love letter to her greatest inspiration ever since her Scots version of Tartuffe graced the Lyceum stage thirty years ago. Here we find Moliere himself, played by Jimmy Chisholm as a middle-aged roue dubbed 'Pokey' by the rag-tag troupe of actors he and his inspiration, Madeleine Bejart, have pulled together, riling up the establishment as he goes. Enter a cast list of Steven McNicoll's queeny old ham Gros-Rene du Parc, Nicola Roy's past her sell by date debutante Therese and James Anthony Pearson's thrusting young buck, Michel Baron. There is also Sarah Miele's ingenue Menou, whose presence turns everyone's world upside down in a telling take on the consequences of what happens when you do let your daughter on the stage. Lochhead's story of an older woman usurp...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars If romance is dead, nobody told Holly Golightly, the self-invented good time girl at the heart of Truman Capote's 1958 novella, made iconic in Blake Edwards' big-screen adaptation three years later. Nikolai Foster's Curve Theatre, Leicester production of Richard Greenberg's stage adaptation opens with Emily Atack's Holly gazing at her own shop-soiled reflection clad in regulation little black number and movie star shades as Moon River serenades her. In terms of button-pressing homage, however, that's as far as it goes. Here Matt Barber's would-be writer Fred narrates the story of a woman he might easily have dreamt up, and who already seems to be every man's fantasy figure as she burls her way through New York's high and low 1940s society with bohemian abandon. When her past and present collide with suitably dramatic panache, the country girl who chased something more glamorous in the big city is as quick t...

As international calling cards go, having the words New York, London, Dundee emblazoned on your stationery is possibly as good as it gets. For David Hutchinson, who as a young graduate of Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts in 2009 co-founded a small theatre company called Sell A Door, it's one more milestone on what after seven years is looking increasingly like an ongoing exercise in world domination. This week sees the company's production of Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach arrive in Edinburgh as part of a tour which has just visited the Middle East and will soon travel to Hong Kong. The company's take on Footloose: The Musical will shortly arrive in Glasgow and Aberdeen following a run in Edinburgh, while a revival of grown-up puppet musical, Avenue Q, was seen in Edinburgh earlier this month. In the autumn, ambitious plans for a new stage version of iconic comic strip The Broons are already under way, while a new tour of cult musical Little Shop of Horr...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars In a cell in Scotland Yard, a knight of the realm is in custody awaiting questioning after being found on an Irish beach with a bag full of bullets. By the next day, where he should have been immortalised as a glorious martyr to a doomed cause, other factors will dictate that he is, not written out of the history he helped make, exactly, but hardly lionised the way his fallen comrades are. So it goes for Roger Casement in Peter Arnott's gripping two-hander, in which Casement's rebellious adventurer, human rights activist and republican gun runner caught out in the run up to the 1916 Easter Rising sounds like some pulp fiction super-hero. This is especially so considering the fact that he is also a well-heeled establishment figure and a homosexual who likes to document his illicit liaisons in prose that comes to define him even as it brings about his downfall. Such contradictions run deep in Andy Arnold's Tron Theatre Company produ...