Coffee-Table Notes

Morna Pearson isn't the most obvious playwright to have her work open in the run up to Christmas. A darkly comic mix of taboo-busting absurdism and social comment with a magical realist twist. How to Disappear is a not exactly everyday tale of a man called Robert, who confines himself indoors, where he has been since Helen Daniels died. That was in 1997, when the passing of Daniels, a fictional character from Australian TV soap, Neighbours, marked the last link with the programme's original cast. Since then, Robert has spent his days literally tearing his hair out, with his kid sister Isla acting as his carer, and only a menagerie of animals, including an iguana called Scott and a corn snake called Charlene, for company. Scott and Charlene, of course, were the characters played by Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue in Neighbours. Only benefits assessor Jessica, on a mission to prove Robert fit for work, disturbs Robert and Isla's little republic. “It goes off in a differ...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars A solitary piano sits centre-stage on a purple-lit mock up of New York's Carnegie Hall circa mid 1970s at the opening of Douglas McGrath's loving dramatic homage to Carole King. The precociously talented Brooklyn teenager churned out pop gems before stepping into the spotlight to help define an era. When Bronte Barbe's Carole breaks off mid-way through So Far Away, from her multi-million selling 1971 album, Tapestry, to reflect on her success, her un-starry kookiness is as Me-Generation as it gets. Once King's past rewinds in this touring version of Marc Bruni's production, McGrath's script moves into the songwriting factory at 1650 Broadway., where her writing partner and first husband Gerry Goffin compete with contemporaries Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Illustrating King's rise are the songs themselves, performed by passable facsimiles of the Drifters, the Shirelles etc, as if head-lining an all-star variety nig...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars There is a moment mid-way through the second act of this UK touring revival of Laurence O'Keefe, Nell Benjamin and Heather Hach's musical adaptation of the hit 2001 film when the fun stops. Five minutes earlier, Anthony Williams' dazzling pink-hued production was a riot of frothy song and dance routines concerning the perils of Elle Woods, the cheer-leading sorority girl who ditches her air-head image to train as a Harvard lawyer after her preppy boyfriend dumps her. The next, just after plucky Elle saves the day, she's warding off unwanted advances from the high-flying legal eagle university professor who drafted her into his team of interns to tackle the case of the celebrity fitness instructor and her murdered husband. Things have changed a bit since the show first conquered Broadway a decade ago. In the current climate, Elle's refusal to be man-handled in this way looks like a timely and necessary act of everyday...

Caroline Deyga may be playing one of the Ugly Sisters in the Citizens Theatre's seasonal production of Cinderella, but she has already been to one ball this year without any need of a fancy pair of slippers. As one of the high-flying ensemble of actresses who brought Alan Warner's novel, The Sopranos, to life in the National Theatre of Scotland's production of a show restyled as Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour, the Carnoustie raised actress was nominated with her onstage colleagues for an Olivier award for best supporting actress. Deyga and chums may have lost out, but former NTS artistic director Vicky Featherstone's production of Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall's adaptation went on to scoop an Olivier for Best New Comedy. “It was a night I'll never forget,” says Deyga. “Going to the Oliviers and living that experience with those girls, it was amazing. Walking up the red carpet, and you sit in your seat, and Brian May's sitting behind you, and Sheridan Smit...

Festival Square Spiegeltent, Edinburgh Four stars This seasonal variation on the nouveau cabaret sensation sired in the after-hours sleaze of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe begins with a Christmas carol. Given the choice is O Come All Ye Faithful, the candle-sporting troupe of dressed-up turns may have other things on their mind. Running as part of London-based producers Underbelly's take on Edinburgh's Christmas, it's a welcome return to La Clique, hosted with lascivious charm by divine Kit Kat club refugee Bernie Dieter. The parade of acts that follow rattle through assorted bite-size spectacles of excess. Vicky Butterfly swishes into erotic life with a languid burlesque routine that gets back to nature on several levels. Leah Shelton is delivered onstage in a brightly coloured hold-all, from which her legs run through an equally decorative routine. Teen dream Tim Kriegler transforms aerialism into an artform beyond pure physical spectacle. Heather Holliday sho...

The Art School, Glasgow November 21 st 2017 “Be as punk as you like,” says music promoter and producer Alexander Cheparukhin, introducing this live rendering of Riot Days, Pussy Riot leading light Maria Alyokhina's explosive counter-cultural memoir, published in September. Alyokhina was one of three members of the Russian all-female anti-establishment live art troupe imprisoned in full glare of the global media in 2012. This followed their arrest after a forty-second guerilla performance inside Moscow's Orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Saviour caught the public imagination. The publicity also highlighted an intolerance of dissent by Vladimir Putin's puritanical regime. Alongside fellow Pussy Rioters Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich, Alyokhina,received a two year sentence for 'hooliganism motivated by religious hatred'. Having remained in custody throughout the trial, she ended up serving twenty-one months. Almost four years since her rele...

Carole King never wanted to watch the musical play based on her life. This is what the iconic singer/song-writer who penned a stream of 1960s hits with husband and writing partner Gerry Goffin before recording her 1971 classic album, Tapestry, told Hollywood writer and director Douglas McGrath when the pair first met to talk about the project. McGrath's book would go on to be drawn from a series of interviews with King, Goffin and their song-writing contemporaries Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. King was happy to sign over the rights of such era-defining pop nuggets as Will You Love Me Tomorrow and the more reflective You've Got A Friend, but she didn't want her presence in the audience to distract from what was happening onstage. Given that some of that would be the breakdown of her marriage to Goffin, the idea of the audience looking at her while this was happening didn't appeal. McGrath went along with this, and figured that once the show opened she'd soon cha...