Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Two kids fall-out because one won't let the other be in their gang. The gang-leader ends up with their two front teeth being knocked out for his pains. By rights, that should be the end of such rough and tumble. In Christopher Hampton's English language translation of French writer Yasmina Reza's play, however, it prompts a meeting of the two boys' parents to act as mediators of some kind of unspoken settlement. As with that other most painful of plays, Abigail's Party, the incident that kick-starts Reza's play happens off-stage, as an eruption of social savagery destroys any pretence at politesse. Only Erik Satie's quietest of revolutions playing on the stereo keeps calm. Gareth Nicholls' production starts off well-behaved enough, as Annette and her lawyer husband Alain endure the niceties of the more seemingly liberal Veronique and Michel in their too-perfect white home. The soft play area is a dead giveaway of ...

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Three stars If Shakespeare's plays were the blockbusters of their day, the bard wasn't shy of churning out a sequel if the mood took him. So it goes with the middle two plays of his Tudor tetralogy, which focus on the eventual succession of young Prince Hal, who'd rather slum it having bantz with Falstaff and the boys down at their local than get involved with the assorted power plays going on at his dad's court. Gordon Barr's adaptation of both plays enables audiences to digest his production in one sitting. Performed by students of the RCS' MA Classical and Contemporary Text course in partnership with Barr's Bard in the Botanics operation, the weight of Shakespeare's text is retained without losing any of the story's alternating light and shade. So while King Henry sits regally at one end of the Chandler Studio's performing area at the play's start, the bare floor before him becomes an entire...

When Martin Bramah left The Fall in 1979 to form Blue Orchids, it set in motion a musical lineage that has run parallel with fellow Fall co-founder Mark E Smith's bloody-minded forty-year assault on culture. History will decide whether the latter is either a masterpiece of social engineering or else the extended public self-destruction of a terminal drunk. While ex Fall guitarist Marc Riley and now Brix Smith-Start have come to renewed prominence playing records on the radio, the off-shoot acts spawned by Smith's army have received less attention than they deserve. Now that Smith-Start has attempted to reclaim her past with early eighties Fall rhythm section Steve and Paul Hanley and push it towards a future with less baggage as Brix and The Extricated, all that might be about to change. This is good news for Bramah, whose current incarnation of Blue Orchids is having something of a renaissance, as this new four-track EP confirms. Partly recorded at the same time as 2016...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Three stars The all-male chorus line that opens this touring revival of the musical that arguably took drag culture into the mainstream look like a troupe of high-kicking angels as they sashay in formation down the glitzy looking steps of the French night-club that gives composer Jerry Herman and writer Harvey Fierstein's creation its title. Drawn from a 1973 play by Jean Poiret and adapted for the screen five years later, Herman and Fierstein's musical take on Poiret's story hit the big time just as AIDS was making its deadly presence felt. Something of a sleeper hit because of that, Herman and Fierstein's tale about club-owning Georges and star diva Albin, a long-term gay couple who are forced to jump through social hoops to appear 'normal' to their son's prospective in-laws is both a high-camp farce and accidental show of strength. This loose-knit plot is also the best excuse to gift the world one of the great gay anthems ...

The spirit of nightclubs past, present and future hangs joyously over these two releases by different permutations of a Glasgow underground supergroup steeped in the city's DIY art/music interface. Both are limited edition 12” vinyl releases packaged in sleeves that resemble old-school DJ-friendly platters as flash as they are cheesy. Both too are as myth-makingly conceptual as you can get. The first finds electronicist and Turner Prize-nominated artist Luke Fowler, Franz Ferdinand drummer Paul Thomson and vocalist/composer Richard Youngs joining forces for six slices of insular techno. These pieces are seemingly inspired by allegedly long-lost Italian synthesiser factory worker turned composer/performer, Emmanuel Maggi. The second finds the trio augmenting the line-up with bassist Michael Francis Duch as they morph into AMOR to produce a more organic stew of post-punk avant-disco that could have been excavated from circa 1979 Ladbroke Grove. Key to both records is Richard Young...

When Syd Shelton arrived back in London in 1976 after four years working as a photo-journalist in Australia, it was to a city and a country in the thick of change. Margaret Thatcher's regime as UK Prime Minister may have been three years away, but the seeds of her ascension were already being sewn. Mass unemployment was biting away at working class society, and a rising right wing populism had demonised ethnic communities ever since Tory MP Enoch Powell had made his notorious anti immigration 'rivers of blood' speech in 1968. A disaffected youth was already starting to stir with a rising punk culture which was casting aside the old guard of bloated rock stars with a year zero approach that craved something faster, louder and more abrasive. Battle lines were drawn when a drunken Eric Clapton ranted his support for Powell to an audience in multi-racial Birmingham during August 1976. Clapton's guitar playing had been inspired by the blues greats, and he had scored a cha...

If Susan Wooldridge hadn't have grown up in an artistic household, she may not have gone on to become a distinguished star of stage and screen in era-defining TV drama The Jewel in the Crown, for which she was nominated for a BAFTA. This was an award Wooldridge went on to win as Best Supporting Actress in John Boorman's film, Hope and Glory. Wooldridge's parents were actress Margaretta Scott and composer John Wooldridge, who exposed her and her brother Hugh, now a theatre director, to a world of culture that saw many bohemian types around. All of which sounds like the perfect grounding for playing Judith Bliss in the Citizens Theatre's forthcoming production of Noel Coward's play, Hay Fever. Written in 1924 and first produced a year later, Coward's play is set over one lively weekend in the bohemian Bliss family's country house, where they hold increasingly crazed court to assorted guests from a less hysterically inclined world. Together, they become witne...