Coffee-Table Notes

One of the defining hits of this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe has been Hotel Medea, the six-hour all-night version of the Greek Medea myth that runs each weekend in August from midnight until dawn. Produced by Anglo-Brazilian theatre company Zecora Ura in association with London-based, Yemen-born director and performer Persis Jade Maravala, who plays Medea as well as co-directing with Zecora Ura's Jorge Lopes Ramos, Hotel Medea is a disorienting experiential whirlwind that puts the audience in the thick of the action, from the rave-like fiesta of love, death and colonialism that opens the first two hours, to the after-hours dream-state of a dormitory bunk-bed where you're stroked to sleep by nurse-maids as a very personal war rages close by. As a piece of theatre Hotel Medea is all-consuming. This isn't just the case for the audience too, but also for Maravala and Ramos, who've spent the last six years creating what is clearly a labour of love. As

I, Malvolio – Traverse Theatre – 4 stars As The Flames Rose We Danced To The Sirens, The Sirens – Summerhall – 4 stars 2401 Objects – Pleasance – 3 stars Tim Crouch's ongoing fascination with the nature of performance appeared to have reached its limit with his previous show, The Author. In I, Malvolio, however, Crouch manages to go further, and, by tapping into the out and out ridiculousness of one of Shakespeare's crucial characters in Twelfth Night, he manages to both laugh at his subject while gently unveiling his inner tragedy. As he silently mouths the words of a letter from his would-be beloved, Olivia, clad in stained and tattered long-johns, animal ears and presumably stinking yellow socks, Crouch's Malvolio more resembles Bottom from A Midsummer Night's Dream than the spick and span servant he once was. As he launches into a monologue littered with contemporary references, however, it's clear the pomposity of old remains intact. With the

Beowulf – A Thousand Years of Baggage - Assembly – 4 stars Dry Ice – Underbelly – 4 stars Midnight Your Time – Assembly – 3 stars No. 52 – Summerhall – 3 stars This year's Edinburgh Fringe has already seen one classic ripped into with reckless abandon in the shape of all-night epic Hotel Medea. Now along comes a riotous take on ninth century narrative poem Beowulf by the New York based Banana Bag and Bodice company. What is often delivered as a dusty museum piece is here ripped into in Rod Hipskind and Mallory Catlett's loose-knit extravaganza by turning it into a live art musical that cocks a snook at academe in much the same way same way as the National Theatre of Scotland deconstruct border ballads for the twenty-first century in their bar-room hit, The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart. In Beowulf, a trio of academics clutch copies of Seamus Heaney's version of the story, declaiming into microphones as it comes to life before their eyes like a messed-u

When American film and theatre director Stephen Earnhart met Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami with a view to adapting Murakami's 1995 novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, for a multi-media stage production, the deal was sealed over a mutual love of David Lynch. Six years later, and Lynch's influence on the world premiere of Earnhart's interpretation of Murakami's six hundred page epic that opens at the Edinburgh International Festival this weekend may not be obvious, but it remains telling that the artist that bonded the two men is an American. Because the book's spare, understated prose is more akin to something by Raymond Chandler or Raymond Carver, both in the way Chandler made great literature out of genre fiction, and in the way Carver took the meat and two veg of everyday mundanity and imbued them with an ambiguous significance. Telling the increasingly fantastical story of one Toru Okada, whose loss of his cat initiates a series of encounters wi

King's Theatre 4 stars For the second eastern take on Shakespeare that heads up EIF's theatre programme, Korean director Tae-Suk Oh and his lively ensemble of twenty-three actors and four musicians rip into the bard's final work in a restless display of high-kicking music and dance theatre that fuses Shakespeare's original with a story taken from the Korean Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms. The result is an audaciously playful reading that must mark the production out as one of the lightest, brightest and precociously delightful Tempests ever. It begins with a flourish, as the white-clad troupe conjure up a storm with a gymnastic display and an elaborate network of sheets. Next we're introduced to Taoist magician King Zilzi, this version's equivalent of Prospero, here a black-clad ascetic figure. Caliban becomes Ssangdua, a grotesque two-headed creature, and Ariel a Shaman priestess made of straw. Throw in a menagerie of ducks, sheep and other fa

Royal Lyceum Theatre 4 stars When Chinese maestro Wu Hsing-kuo decided to tackle Shakespeare's greatest tragedy, it was a deeply personal decision rooted in his own creative turmoil. This becomes clear at the end of Wu's own production for his Contemporary Legend Theatre company, when, following the appearance of a scarlet-lit musical ensemble, he's lifted to the heavens in silence as a kind of Zen purging of all his demons. Prior to that, Wu plays the king with demonic brio, extravagantly robed and bearded as he enters in a smoke-filled triangle of light into a wilderness marked out with stone monoliths. A whirlwind of primary-coloured movement is punctuated by the urgent clatter of Lee Yi-Chin's live traditional Chinese score. Near child-like in his own fanciful musings, Wu plays peek-a-boo hide and seek with his own identity, only to erupt in a torrent of impatient rage as he strips bare his disguise to become a solitary warrior caught in a storm.

John Peel's Shed – Underbelly – 4 stars Request Programme - Pleasance@Inlingual School – 4 stars Kurt Schwitters Sound Sonata – Summerhall – 3 stars It may be accidental, but it's somehow fitting that tracks from Belle and Sebastian's still joyous debut album, Tigermilk, are playing in the bar prior to John Peel's Shed, John Osborne's wonderful autobiographical ramble through his love affair with radio. Peel, after all, was an early champion of Stuart Murdoch's Glasgow-based pastoralists. More pertinently, as Osborne observes, all girls love Belle and Sebastian. This is just one of Osborne's quietly witty observations in which he casts himself as the classic geeky outsider who finds salvation, not just in obscure outfits such as Atom and his Package, but through everything from Tommy Boyd's late-night phone-in show The Human Zoo to wilfully leftfield digital station Resonance FM. Osborne's starting point is a box of records he won i