Coffee-Table Notes

King’s Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars Happiness is at a premium for the eponymous heroine of this joyous musical adaptation of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s off-kilter turn of the century rom-com. For Amelie, alas, that happiness is other people’s, brought about by her surreptitious manipulations of the world she keeps her distance from in her solitary room and the café she waitresses in. When she stumbles on kindred spirit Nino and his collection of torn-up photo-booth images, even her desire to do as much good for the world as Princess Diana comes second to the merry dance she leads him on in a 1997 disconnecting nicely towards its fin de siècle endgame. The result in Michael Fentiman’s production is a gloriously European hipster musical, driven by a sixteen-strong cast of actor-musicians playing a set of baroque chamber pop show-tunes seemingly sired by some impeccably eccentric busking ensemble. With a book by Craig Lucas and lyrics by Nathan Tysen, the show’s musical pulse actual...

Out of the Blue, Edinburgh Three stars Gentrification of major cities around the world has arguably reached crisis point, with the rise of short term lets and developers attempting to bulldoze away local communities at a global premium. With such moves particularly visible in Edinburgh, writer Duncan Kidd and director Gavin Crichton’s piece of allegorical agit-prop looks at the very real consequences of what is happening right now on their Leith doorstep, a stone’s throw from Out of the Blue’s art space. This collaboration between Active Inquiry and Strange Town theatre companies alongside the All or Nothing aerial dance company sets out its store in the mythical town of Omawick, where the circus visits every year, keeping the local economy afloat. When the circus attempts to buy up everything in sight for themselves, despite initial encouragement from the mayor and her yes men and women, the local townsfolk revolt, with the result being that the circus departs forever. ...

Carla Easton loves to collaborate. Even so, after almost a decade making music, both with her band Teen Canteen and solo, sharing a stage with a colony of 150,000 leafcutter ants probably wasn’t what she had in mind when she set out on her pop-tastic path. This is exactly what will be happening, however, when Easton and her band provide the live soundtrack for Them!, the latest theatrical outing from the partnership of director Stewart Laing and writer Pamela Carter in a new show for the National Theatre of Scotland. “It’s kind of nuts,” says Easton. “It was also totally unexpected when Stewart and Pamela got in touch and sent the script through. I’ve written two songs for the play, and am onstage as the house-band as part of a chat show, but the sounds from the ant colony are being sampled for the play as well, so that’s pretty exciting.” Them! draws its inspiration from the 1954 science-fiction monster movie of the same name, in which a nest of ants exposed to nuclear radiat...