Coffee-Table Notes

There's a feeling of deja vu sitting in the bright and airy office of Tron Theatre artistic director Andy Arnold. This time last year, he was preparing to launch the inaugural Mayfesto, a mini showcase of politically motivated but all too human theatre that drew inspiration from the now defunct Mayfest festival that throughout the 1980s formed a major part of Glasgow's cultural calendar. Then, as Arnold unveiled his programme in what looked set to be the last days of New Labour in a recession-blighted Britain, a happy coincidence saw Mayfesto open on the day of the Westminster General Election that would – eventually – force then Prime Minister Gordon Brown from office and usher in the dubious alliance of Tory leader David Cameron and Lib Dem sidekick Nick Clegg. In the year since, there's been rioting on the streets, an increase in unemployment and an increasingly widespread sense of public unrest manifesting itself in threats of industrial action and civil

Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh 4 stars When Aberfeldy front-man Riley Briggs lost both a record label and some crucial members of his band following two albums of classically crafted grown-up pop, some thought the group would implode completely. Eighteen months on, Briggs hasn’t so much reinvented Aberfeldy as reinvigorated the band’s existing template. There’s a new duo of female multi-instrumentalist vocal foils playing keyboards that still sound lifted from a 1970s science programme. There’s also Chris Bradley adding weight on acoustic guitar, which allows Briggs to go a little bit Peter Frampton if he chooses. What’s clear most of all through tonight’s selections of material old and new is that Briggs’ commercial sensibilities and way with a lyric should by rights see him hailed as one of the country’s cleverest song-writers. New single Claire, a homage to a complaining neighbour, is up there with the Difford and Tilbrook back catalogue, Denial may be the best break-up song since Pref

Tramway, Glasgow 4 stars When an underclass couple slaughter their two children in a small town hotel room, the kneejerk reaction is to find them guilty as charged. Seated side by side in the cruel public glare, Cathy and Michael Delaney’s own lives are relentlessly poked and prodded in a manner that tests every liberal sensibility they’re in the presence of. What unravels in Duncan Mclean’s English-language version of Pol Heyvaert and Dimitri Verhulst’s Flemish original is a brutal cycle of poverty, crime and abuse destined to repeat and repeat until it’s beaten out of existence. Over a punishingly intense 70 minute interrogation by an un-named Voice (provided by Gary Lewis), Cathy and Michael are in turns edgy, remorseful, merciless, indifferent, self-deluding, pathetic and manipulative, their twisted logic a bewildering justification for their crime. Based on a true story, Heyvaert remains director for this co-production between the Belgian Victoria company, Tramway and the Na

Verdant Works, Dundee 4 stars The fascinations of Grid Iron are manifold. In previous site-specific works Gargantua and The Devil’s Larder, the Edinburgh based company have ravished our senses with body-centric feasts based on sex, food and other delights. So it is with this latest knitted-together compendium conceived around the idea of clothes and their intrinsic meaning. Director Ben Harrison has taken material from Louise Bourgeois, Henry James and Thomas Carlyle, and fused it with some very candid auto-biographical scenes that leave the six actors metaphorically if not actually naked. As we’re led through the industrial splendour of the Verdant Works old jute mill, beyond the buttoned-up men in grey for whom everything’s black and white is a dressing-up-box in which every garment tells a story. From the totemic qualities of an old coat, a scarf or some long lost hand-me-downs, we’re led along catwalks and through an oversize wardrobe into Mr Benn style adventures, where a glim

King’s Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars The impact of this multi-lingual epic rendering of Shakespeare’s trawl through the underworld was huge when it first played outdoor arenas in Bombay. It was thrilling enough six months ago when it moved indoors to London’s Roundhouse. Here too on the last legs of its UK tour, Tim Supple’s production remains impressive, even if some of its expansive sense of scale is lost by squeezing it into an old-fashioned proscenium arch space. What it holds onto is its joyously realised bravura that rips into a tale long hi-jacked by the heritage industry and makes it sexier and more muscular. Acrobatics, live music and a gorgeous looking cast work their magic on a climbing frame underworld hidden by a paper curtain that’s literally ripped aside to reveal its rigging. Puck is a bad-boy with Mohican hair-cut and Frankie Goes To Hollywood moustache, whose fairy helpers’ gymnastic displays give them the air of a tribe of lost boys and girls locked out of

Kings Theatre 4 stars When Henrik Ibsen wrote his proto feminist dissection of the sex wars in 1879, the scandal it caused can’t have been a patch on Lee Breuer and Maude Mitchell’s post-modernist dissection of it. Using what Breuer calls ‘the Politics Of Scale’ as its starting point, the result is a dazzlingly audacious deconstruction, which takes its central premise of patriarchal infantilism to its logical limit. All male characters are played by actors of restricted growth, while the women are all nearly six foot tall. Breuer even makes Ibsen laugh out loud funny via a series of routines derived from American music hall, silent movie slapstick and a knowing faux melodrama which acknowledges its own artifice at every turn. Having the cast talk in the sort of sing-song Scandinavian accent not heard since the Swedish chef baked his last cake on The Muppet Show helps too. Opening on a bare stage, pianist Eve Beglarian takes a bow before seating at her keyboard to usher in what loo

In the upstairs bar at Dundee Rep, the theatre’s two artistic directors are sitting apart. Given that one of them, Dominic Hill, is about to leave his post after five years to ease his way into his new job as artistic director of Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre following this week’s opening of his production of Peer Gynt, you might think some long festering impasse has finally come to a head. Especially as Hill’s co-director James Brining – also the theatre’s Executive Director – sits on the next table to Hill with his back to him while Hill sits alone with a bowl of soup. First glances, though, can be deceptive. As it turns out, Brining is in a meeting with writer Colin Teevan, whose adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s picaresque epic attempts to convert a very Norwegian yarn into a far more familiar and contemporary looking romp. Hill, it transpires, has been on the go in the rehearsal room all morning, and is catching his breath and some much needed sustenance before squaring up to the play