Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Samuel Beckett's old man Krapp is already sitting there at his wooden table piled with his personal detritus as the audience file in to the Tron's tiny Changing House attic space that lends itself so atmospherically to Beckett's portrait of a lonely soul rummaging through his back pages. Gerry Mulgrew's Krapp peers out, pasty-faced and seemingly already dress-rehearsing the lie of an after-life that can't come too soon. There's a low electric hum in the air, the sound of amplified breathing into a microphone, and is that a disembodied voice keening in the ether? For the first ten minutes of Paul Brotherston's production, Krapp wordlessly strains himself through the basics of getting by, almost coming a comic cropper as he goes. As he rewinds his collected tape-spools that immortalise his younger self, innocence and experience seem to spar with each other as Krapp attempts to recapture the essence of his old loves. ...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars “How did it work, this thing called democracy?” one of the multitude of young women onstage asks their old father Danaus as he returns from arguing the case for this swathe of Egyptian asylum seekers in search of sanctuary in Argos. Given that the first part of Aeschylus' now largely lost Danaid trilogy is two and a half thousand years old, this is quite a question in David Greig's new version, brought to the stage for this flagship production of Greig's new tenure as the Lyceum's artistic director by Ramin Gray. It begins with the performers running through the auditorium before lining up onstage as actor Omar Ebrahim introduces a knowing lesson in theatrical economics delivered by real live MSP Willie Rennie. As an opening gambit drawn from ancient Greek civic ritual it is as inspired and as relevant as everything that follows in this co-production between the Lyceum and Actors Touring Company. In the women we can...

Somewhere in Italy, Dario Fo is talking about his relationship with Scotland, a country where actors and theatre-makers have adopted the plays of the veteran director, actor and political provocateur like few others and made them their own. As the author of modern classics such as Accidental Death of An Anarchist, Cant Pay? Won't Pay! and Trumpets and Raspberries prepares to return to Edinburgh like an adopted prodigal to take part in Dancing With Colours, Whipping With Words, a month-long festival of his work and influence on contemporary political theatre, the now ninety year old Nobel Prize winner sounds in remarkably rude health. At the other end of the line, two translators from the Edinburgh Italian Cultural Institute hang on to Fo's every word, chuckling occasionally at something he says. They refer to Fo as Maestro, a suitably grandiloquent word for an artist who, along with his artistic and life partner Franca Rame, changed the face of theatre, but whose craft is ro...

PHILIP Prowse's reputation travels well before him - exactly what you'd expect from a designer/director of such sumptuous visual finesse, who's pretty much defined the look of Glasgow's Citizens Theatre over the past 34 years as one-third of the outgoing directorial triumvirate alongside Giles Havergal and Robert David MacDonald. His final production, of Thomas Otway's little-known seventeenth century, Venice Preserved, which closes this weekend, effectively ending an era, is as fitting a swansong as long-time Citz aficionados could hope or imagine. A big, brutalist epic of political conspiracy in high and low places, so rich is Venice Preserved in painterly intent, it almost bursts out of the proscenium and spills over into the auditorium. It is a play Prowse has worked on twice now. In the early-1970s, he designed a production by Robert David MacDonald, since when ''I've always wanted to do it, and I figured,'' he says, resignedly, ...

Only an actress of magnitude could get away with wearing specs to match her outfit, but, elegantly clad in various shades of red, Georgina Hale carries it off with surprisingly understated aplomb. With such a display of well-coordinated show-stopping flamboyance in mind, you might expect such a veteran of stage and screen, including a Bafta winning-turn in Ken Russell's musical biopic, Mahler, to come on strong with a winning set of well-worn anecdotes and name-dropping bons mots, all ready-made for the prime-time chat-show circuit. Expectations, however, are decidedly confounded. Because, as Hale trawls through her back pages, as she knows she must, during a break from rehearsals for the Citizens' Theatre's production of The Cherry Orchard, in which she's playing Madame Ranevsky, there's a world-weary languor about her. It is as though she's just come across something in her bottom drawer she'd long-since put out of her mind, or given up for dead in a...

Perth Concert Hall Three stars The Broons annual isn't just for Christmas, it seems, in this bumper-sized staging of Dudley D Watkins' eighty-year old comic strip family, brought to life by writer Rob Drummond and director Andrew Panton for the Sell A Door company in association with Perth Theatre. It begins with Maw Broon attempting to round up her brood for a family snapshot on a stage already framed by cartoon portraits of the clan set against a jumbo-sized logo. As resident glamour-puss Maggie announces her impending wedding, Drummond put flesh and blood on the characters in a topsy-turvy mix of knowingness and nostalgia. The dramatic portrait that follows lays bare a matriarchal microcosm of working class family life stuck in a Sisyphean limbo of everyday adventures where nothing ever changes. While there is much fun to be had from the eleven-strong ensemble's studies of all that is braw with Maw, Pa, Grandpa and co, Drummond paints them as a not always happy ...

In the Royal Lyceum Theatre's Edinburgh rehearsal room, twelve women are gathered around the piano, singing the praises of the goddess Aphrodite. Vocal Leader Stephen Deazley is putting the women, who will be playing the wise women of Argos in the Lyceum's forthcoming production of The Suppliant Women, through their paces. It's only their second rehearsal, but already they sound in fine voice for playwright and new Lyceum artistic director David Greig's new version of Aeschylus' rarely performed Greek tragedy. Half an hour later, another twenty-odd women troop into the room, and gather on chairs beside the wise women. These are a younger generation, who have been rehearsing every Wednesday night and Saturday afternoon for a month now, and whose collective voice as brought to life by Deazley is steelier and more defiant in tone as they spar with their elders. As the young women shriek in rhythmic unison, one of them punches the air like a warrior princess in waiti...