Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 3 stars James is a man who left Lewis for London, made a mint on computer games and became a twenty-first century self-made metropolitan man. Now, however, he’s in meltdown. Having quit his job, lost his wife and been declared bankrupt, he attempts to get back to the roots he can barely remember anymore. Old university chums found on Facebook don’t help. James can’t even recall the Gaelic word for somersault, so does them out instead, defining himself by an action where a long-neglected language used to live. This is the rich and complex tapestry behind Iain Finlay Macleod’s new play for the National Theatre of Scotland’s Reveal season, set in a square-shaped and shrouded sandpit where past and present impressionistically rub up against each other as James tries to find himself anew, even as a gimlet-eyed accountant sells off his assets. Vicky Featherstone’s production lets loose a tantalising meditation on the struggle to retain one’s language and identity

Paisley Arts Centre 3 stars Contrary to what some naysayers may think, inclusive theatre between disabled and able-bodied performers is thriving to the extent of barely being able to notice the join. Following hot on the heels of Robert Softley’s Girl X, Birds of Paradise’s Glasgowed-up take on Lee Hall’s chewily modern-sounding translation of Bertolt Brecht’s war-torn epic plays much of it for laughs. So while the action may nominally take place in seventeenth century Poland during the thirty years war, Alison Peebles’ wily and hard-bitten Mother Courage and her brood are gallus enough to suggest they’re manning a stall down at the Barras. The way they stuff their junk in carrier bags from Lidl and swig back Buckfast adds to the effect, as does Johnny Austin’s portrayal of Courage’s son Swisscheese as some galumphing escapee from Gregory’s Girl. The encircled A for anarchy sign grafittied on the bombed-out walls of Hazel Blue’s set, however, suggests something more serious. Such conte

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars Blonde ambition is all over the Citz this week. To compliment Marilyn, Sue Glover’s audacious look at the ultimate tragic pin-up girl for its final lost weekend in the main theatre before transferring to Edinburgh, the Circle Studio plays host to writer and director Neil Doherty’s arguably even wilder dissection of the Marilyn Monroe legend, in which Doherty attempts to reclaim the screen goddess’s fragile psyche in an entirely different fashion. At first glance things look geared to a post-Warhollian trash aesthetic in exelcis, as Tyler Collins’ be-wigged Drag Act enters his/her boudoir to a David Bowie soundtrack. As emotional traumas are laid bare, the superstars in the doorstop-size Monroe biography under the bed step off the pages to find a truly captive audience. First up comes Jonathan Dunn’s Sharp Shooter, part gangster, part shrink, part grim reaper, who puts the Drag Act under the influence until Kirsti Quinn’s Dumb Blonde herself appears to

Kings Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars Something ever so slightly shocking happens towards the end of the first act of Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn’s updated stage version of their 1980s political TV sit-com. One minute PM Jim Hacker, his cabinet secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby and private secretary Bernard Wooley are in Chequers trading decidedly old-school repartee that nevertheless reveals them to be occupying a world filled with Blackberries, Euros, global warming, a brand new recession and female advisers in the shape of the formidable Claire Sutton. The next they’re considering the moral maze that comes with the prospect of procuring an under-age prostitute for the foreign secretary of the imaginary state of Kumranistan in exchange for a loan. In a show that in the brutal age personified by the far racier environs of The Thick of It, such a lurch shows how politics has become even nastier since the days of Thatcherism that still hang heavy over Westminster and beyond. What follows beyond

A Victorian costume drama with a radical feminist bent might not sound the most entertaining of prospects. As has already been proven at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre, however, Stellar Quines’ production of Canadian writer Linda Griffiths’ Age of Arousal, which opens at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre before touring the country, defies convention at every level. ‘Wildly inspired,’ as Griffiths would have it in her programme notes, by George Gissing’s progressive novel, The Odd Women, Age of Arousal is a playfully serious and utterly theatrical look at female liberation during as time when women outnumbered men three to one. Those unlucky enough not to marry, it seems, were marginalised by a society that had yet to view women as equals. Based around a secretarial school which hopes to liberate its pupils via the typewriter, the play focuses on the different solutions chosen by three sisters who enroll in the school run by a precursor to the Suffragettes and her younger lover. A

Theatre Royal, Glasgow 4 stars It’s been some time since Shakespeare’s mightiest imagined history epic has been seen in full pomp in these parts, but Michael Grandage’s stately and grandiloquent take on these touring dates of his Donmar Warehouse production has event written all over it. Central to this of course is the appearance of Derek Jacobi in the title role, although the full sixteen-strong ensemble contribute to the overall picture in spades. Grandage sets things on Christopher Oram’s dappled barn of a set, where Jacobi’s initially impish and attention-seeking king plays the sort of games with his three little girls that only those in their dotage can get away with. Only his favourite, Cordelia, alas, recognises how every daddy’s girl needs to fly the nest, even as her big sisters play a more ambitious game. The casting of the sisters unveils a fascinatingly complex set of archetypes, with Gina McKee’s Anglo-Saxon steeliness as Goneril contrasting increasingly sharply with the

It wasn’t the first time David Hayman had been inside HMP Barlinnie. In truth, the veteran actor and director’s appearance this week in the former home of convicted murderer turned sculptor Jimmy Boyle to give a bravura solo turn in his friend and colleague Rony Bridges play, Six and a Tanner, makes him something of an old lag. In the 1980s when Hayman was at the helm of left-wing theatre company, 7:84, he would frequently host rehearsals of forthcoming works before inmates. Hayman’s associations go back even further, to the days of Barlinnie’s controversial special unit, which enabled Boyle and other offenders the resources to become artists under a progressively enlightened regime. Hayman played Boyle in the 1981 STV drama, A Sense of Freedom, based on Boyle’s autobiography. Hayman also directed Silent Scream, a 1990 feature film starring Ian Glen as Larry Winters, another Special Unit inmate who died of an overdose of barbiturates in the institution. Neither film was made at Barlinn