Coffee-Table Notes

Five minutes in Morocco, and the taxi radio is reporting a bombing in Marrakesh. While it's safe enough driving towards the centre of Fez on the other side of the country in April, it's just one more real life incident that colours the creation and rehearsals for One Thousand and One Nights, English director Tim Supple's epic multi-cultural, multi-lingual staging of the greatest set of stories ever told. It isn 't the first chapter of an awfully big adventure that began in Egypt before Supple's Dash Arts company and their co-producers from the Toronto based Luminato festival were forced to decamp to Morocco after the revolution there began, and, as it turns out, it won't be the last. Even in Fez, where the rain is unseasonally biblical and where Supple is putting his cast of nineteen actors and five musicians drawn from all the Arab states in a show of artistic strength and unity in a rundown temple where seven families still live on the edge of t

Friends said she was a loner, the obituaries might read when talking about the sole woman onstage in Request Programme, German writer Franz Xaver Kroetz's bleakly funny study of loneliness known in its original German as Wunschkonzert. She just kept herself to herself and didn't bother anyone. As Kroetz's 1973 play arrives in Edinburgh in a production by ad hoc Swedish company, SIRIS Original Theatre, given how much those words could apply to a twenty-first society in which more people now live alone than ever before, according to a recent survey by the Institute for Public Policy Research, Request Programme might just look like prophecy. Following one night in the life of a middle-aged woman who comes home from work to a private place where she can indulge in her personal little rituals while listening to her favourite radio show, Request Programme too is a fascinating insight into what goes on behind closed doors where the woman has effectively built herse

When Shakespeare wrote King Lear, his title character was an angry figure, so wounded by the seeming betrayal of his favourite daughter that he isolated himself from the world he could in turn rage against. Lear is a might role for any actor, and requires stamina as well as versatility and the weight of wisdom and experience to carry off such a complex personality. Most productions of Shakespeare's Lear, even in cash-strapped times, allow full vent to the play's epic nature, in which even Lear himself is allowed an offstage breather. Imagine, then, how exhausting it would be for one actor and one actor alone to play, not just Lear, but all the other characters as well, from his three warring siblings to their respective spouses and the court that surrounds them. Such a heroic task is tackled in this year's Edinburgh International Festival by Wu Hsing-kuo, whose Contemporary Legend Theatre has long sought to revitalise Chinese theatre by applying the total th

Viewless – St Georges West – 3 stars The Dark Philosophers – Traverse – 4 stars Zanzibar Cats – Gilded Balloon – 4 stars Traumatikon – Summerhall – 3 stars Tonight Sandy Grierson Will Lecture, Dance and Box – Assembly – 4 stars In a room in the middle of nowhere, two bespectacled and bearded men wearing overalls are reinventing people's lives. For Cumbernauld Theatre's first ever Fringe visit, director Ed Robson and his cast of three have devised Viewless, a quirky piece of quasi European absurdism that cuts through the lost files of botched bureaucracy in a manner Czech satirist Vaclav Havel might have recognised. This is Britain, however, until recently the cleverest police state on the planet, that looks ridiculous. With only an ancient typewriter, a window that looks out to nowhere and their increasingly cyclic imaginations for company, the uncharted territory these lost coppers occupy is the no-man's-land of the Witness Protection Programme, the polic

Free Run Udderbelly 3 stars Audience St Georges West 4 stars It was inevitable that the phenomena of inner city free running be turned into a stage show. Like the metal-bashing extravagances of Stomp and other spectacles dragged off the street before it, trying to make sense of such a blink and you'll miss it trend from the safety of a front row seat is a hit and miss affair. As performed by the members of the 3Run crew, an eight-strong ensemble of musclebound twenty-somethings who can't help look like a boy band, Free Run attempts to capture the back-flipping energy of leaping tall buildings with a few bits of gym equipment and a lot of attitude. This isn't always easy, despite the high-energy expertise of a troupe whose only concession to girliness is a young woman expert in martial arts. As each in turn flings themselves across metal bars and assorted obstacles that never quite capture the bricks and mortar on the images that flash onscreen behind t

National theatres are everywhere in Edinburgh this year. After five years, the National Theatre of Scotland are paying dividends with their none building-based 'theatre without walls', effectively enabling the company to do and be anything it wants to be. This is evident on the Fringe, both in Vicky Featherstone's production of Zinnie Harris' new play, The Wheel, and in David Greig and Wils Wilson's The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart. While The Wheel is housed in the relatively conventional setting of the Traverse Theatre, the size of the play's cast alone sets it apart from much home-grown theatre. Prudencia Hart, on the other hand, may feature similarly in the Traverse programme, but its performances in the bar area of Ghillie Dhu just up the road are a fantastically audacious adventure in style, technique and subject that marries traditional border ballads with twenty-first century post-modern pop. This year, the NTS is joined by not one, bu

After thirty years of hurt, Paul Simpson's reignited pop classicists are on a mission. Featuring a supergroup of musical crusaders recruited from the ranks of Echo and the Bunnymen, Spiritualised and Brian Jonestown Massacre, this dozen-strong manifesto of epics sounds like a one-man war on the sort of botched urban regeneration that has left Simpson's beloved Liverpool so bereft of character and heart. Amid jangling guitars and piano flourishes, Simpson's brooding baritone train-spots a litany of desecrated pop cultural iconography, from Turner's sunsets in pools of vomit to William Blake in Cash Converters. Mrs Albion, as well as a lovely daughter, you have a brand new champion to call your own. The List, August 2011 ends