Coffee-Table Notes

When Declan Donnellan was awarded the Golden Lion of Venice for lifetime achievement at this year's Venice Bienale at the end of July, it was for what was described as the veteran theatre director and co-founder of the Cheek by Jowl company's 'profound faith in the text' and 'for placing actors at the heart of his work and managing to get the very best out of them.' Putting faith in theatrical text might not be unusual for a British director, but for Donnellan, who alongside designer and fellow founder and co-artistic director of Cheek by Jowl Nick Ormerod, it is vindication for a singular internationalist approach which has seen the company tour their work to almost four hundred cities in fifty countries. That the award came as Donnellan was preparing to bring his Russian language production of Measure for Measure to this year's Edinburgh International Festival for a short run this week makes the award even sweeter. “Theatre has always struck me as being th...

Three couples pivot around each other in Milk , Ross Dunsmore's play for the Traverse Theatre company, which receives its world premiere in Orla O'Loughlin's production. Steph and Ash are fourteen and horny as hell. Cyril and May are coming towards the end of their lives and with a lifetime of togetherness to protect them from the world outside. Between the two are Danny and Nicole, who are expecting their first baby and flying blind into an abyss of responsibility no-one prepared them for. Out of assorted moments of crisis, lives are disrupted and possibly changed forever in a play that reaches to the heart of how social isolation can prompt desperately extreme responses. Dunsmore's dialogue ripples with the uneasy exchanges of fractured lives trying to find a connection. Beyond Ash's troubling craving for human contact and Nicole's withdrawal, it is May and Cyril, beautifully played by Ann Louise Ross and Tam Dean Burn, stepping in at the last minute for an ...

In Expensive Shit, a Nigerian toilet attendant called Tolu ekes out a living on tips from dressed up women on the pull in a Glasgow nightclub. Once upon a time Tolu had dreams of being a dancer in revolutionary musician Fela Kuti's band in his Lagos-based Shrine club. In different ways, both establishments turn women into objects, especially when it is revealed that the Glasgow club toilets is fitted with a two-way mirror so men can observe the women from a room on the other side of the wall. Inspired by a real-life instance in Glasgow, Adura Onashile's play, presented by Scottish Theatre producers in association with the Traverse, flits between the Glasgow club and the Shrine. This charts Tolu's thwarted ambitions to her near invisibility before rediscovering something within herself. Sabina Cameron invests Tolu with a proud defiance in Onashile's own production, in which three other actresses flit between locations on what in one way or another might just be the ...

In what Orwellian Newspeak might describe as a lively year in politics and pretty much everything besides, one could be forgiven for presuming that the world is about to cave in on us any second. Fret not, however, because while some of the more recent events in a post Brexit climate have yet to trickle down to the Fringe, a younger generation of artists are applying an altogether singular worldview on things. Rather than beat the audience across the head with hardcore polemic, these artists have created a loose-knit set of shows that tap into their concerns with a radicalism that applies to their mix of forms as much as content. Three very different shows seem to embody this approach. Jenna Watt's solo piece, Faslane, focuses on a personal response to the UK government's housing of nuclear submarines on the River Clyde. Kieran Hurley's Heads Up weaves together the lives of four people living in a city on the brink of collapse. In Blow Off, meanwhile, Julia Taudevin com...

The first time Attila the Stockbroker brought his in-your-face brand of ranting performance poetry to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe was in 1982. That was at the Assembly Rooms on a bumper bill of fellow travellers who included Seething Wells, Benjamin Zephaniah, Joolz Denby and Little Brother. The quintet did a seventy per cent door split with the venue, and everyone made a few bob. As the artist formerly known as John Baine returns for an Edinburgh run for the first time in twenty years on the back of an appearance at Edinburgh International Book Festival to promote his autobiography, Arguments Yard, things seem to have come full circle. “I used to make money in the Fringe,” says Baine, “but it gradually became more and more corporate, and I decided I didn't want to do that anymore. Then after I was asked to do the Book Festival, my mate John Otway told me about Peter Buckley Hill's Free Fringe, which I thought sounded fantastic, and is getting back to what the Fringe use...

Royal Lyceum Theatre Four stars Life can initially appear terribly tame in Dan Jemmett's end of the pier reimagining of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, performed in French with English surtitles by Jemmett's Eat A Crocodile company. It opens on Illyria's hut-lined beach-front where Viola has just been washed up without her missing presumed drowned brother Sebastian. After an opening plea to the audience, she's soon flattening her hair and donning vintage tweed to become Duke Orsino's houseboy Cesario. Wigs, hats, comedy glasses and joke shop teeth are well to the fore in a show where Sir Toby Belch is a tartan-suited comic turn who carries a ventriloquist's dummy version of Aguecheek around in a suitcase. Orsino is a smoking-jacketed crooner, who takes the play's 'If music be the food of love' speech to new heights as he gets Feste to play a selection of charity shop classics on a portable turntable in a way that more recalls Noel Coward...

Edinburgh Playhouse Five stars When on Monday night the power went down in parts of Edinburgh a stone's throw from the Playhouse shortly after Godspeed You! Black Emperor had performed the live soundtrack to dance troupe The Holy Tattoo's frenetic performance of monumental, it was as if the apocalypse the Montreal sired octet had been presaging for so long had finally begun. If such a prospect was unfounded by what was merely the city's shoddy electrics, it nevertheless recalled the power failure caused by GY!BE when they understandably blew the private view size speakers in Stills Gallery during their first Edinburgh appearance. Eighteen years on, and two nights after monumental, the shadowy collective's insistent brand of baroque metal sounds like an even more urgent point of holy salvation in an increasingly dark world. With a low rumble already on the go as the audience enter, things begin with a freeish alliance of double bass and fiddle as the rest of the ...