Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars If you think the modern world is killing the art of conversation, Stewart Laing's exquisitely constructed reimagining of nineteenth century salons for a post-modern age is a perfect night out for closet intellectuals in need of stimulation. By taking over the whole of the Traverse and putting the audience at the heart of the action, Laing and his huge team for Untitled Productions are bringing back social networking in the old-fashioned way. It begins back-stage, with the audience attended to by a coterie of dressers, who kit us out in formal garb that improves the posture and inspires all manner of fancy thoughts. Once we step inside a mocked-up drawing room complete with chandeliers, our own costume drama is enlivened by a rolling programme of entertainments. On the first night, these included blindfolded performance artist Donna Rutherford mashing up some 78RPM vinyl with three wind-up gramophones, a stripped-bare tableau viv

Tramway, Glasgow 4 stars To suggest Vanishing Point's latest peep through the windows of the human soul is a sequel to their international hit, Interiors, is to be lulled into a false sense of security. The stylistic trappings of a glass-fronted house in which people wordlessly interact may be the same. This time out, however, director Matthew Lenton takes his cast of six beyond everyday minutiae to produce something infinitely more troubling. It begins idyllically enough, as a young couple move into an empty living room they'll soon turn into a home. Within seconds, it seems, their space is invaded and their private world turned upside down, be it by cloyingly intrusive neighbours, a sprung leak or faulty electrics. As an old woman rocks in her chair upstairs, doors open of their own volition. The wildlife documentaries and footage of the early Apollo missions to the moon that play on the TV become someone's worst fears made flesh. The astronaut who float

There's a place just off Edinburgh's Royal Mile which the chances of you or I ever having been invited inside are pretty slim. By all accounts, the select few who have graced the doors of occasional functions at this residential address a stone's throw from Holyrood are shaping future intellectual thought. Inspired by ideas of eighteenth century salons, in which the latest ideas on philosophy, science and art were debated in a lively social environment, this twenty-first century Edinburgh model is the latest example of a new wave of salons. Here, enlightened thinkers can talk freely in a way in which the democratically elected members along the road either can't, won't, or are simply not clever enough to engage in such a discourse. In his glass-windowed office in Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre peering over a scaled-down model of the theatre's main stage, theatre director, designer and current Traverse artist in residence Stewart Laing appears

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars How would you spend your final hour and fifteen minutes on earth before the world finally ended, with a bang, a whimper or otherwise? One possibility is to idle the time with the black-toothed double-act waiting for rapture in this transatlantic alliance between two ex Benchtours visual theatre types reinvented as The Occasional Cabaret, and the creative couple behind New York-based Edinburgh Festival Fringe stalwarts, Clancy Productions. Combined, these creative couples have put together a politically inclined compendium of monologue and song which, in an ideal world, would soundtrack their way to Heaven. Or Hell. With the audience sat at cabaret tables and a scarlet-draped stage squeezed into the Tron's Changing House space, Lulu and Gdjet are a couple of gold-garbed crones resembling end of the pier fortune-tellers who didn't quite predict what was coming next. As vamped into being by Catherine Gillard and Nancy Clancy, and aid

Perth Theatre 4 stars A new wind has blown into Perth, just as it does in Shakespeare's Illyria. That's the accidental message anyway during the opening storm scene of the theatre's incoming artistic director Rachel O'Riordan's debut in-house production. Because, in something usually played as a knockabout rom-com, Riordan sets out her store from the start by blowing away such surface froth to reveal near-Chekhovian depths. Much of this stems from an update to a post World War One Scotland in a crumbling petrol-blue house where a baby grand piano sits at the top of an elaborate staircase. Here Conor Mitchell's Curio sips cocktails while whipping up a jaunty Palm Court style soundtrack with violinist and fellow gent Valentine. That's about as fizzy as things get, however, as all involved wander about in a kind of shell-shocked limbo, trying to re-connect with some sense of purpose. Samara MacLaren's brittle, flapper-like Olivia and Martin

Wednesday September 28th 2011 When Liverpool's most grandiose post-punk Scally-delicists released their fourth album, Ocean Rain, in 1984, it was advertised as the greatest album ever made. Despite the band's then manager Bill Drummond's provocative hyperbole that he would later refine with the KLF and the K Foundation, it wasn't, but it's collection of string-laden epics was the sound of a band at the peak of their powers. It was also the last time the original four members ever sounded so special in a work that was both fragile and heartfelt. To hear Ocean Rain live, then, complete with all-female teenage string sextet The Cairns Strings bolstering original vocalist Ian McCulloch and guitarist Will Sergeant leading a fine young band, should have been an event on a par with The Crystal Day, the original all-day magical mystery tour around the band's home town that preceded a three-hour live spectacular by the band in Liverpool's St George

Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow 1 star When Liverpool's most grandiose post-punk outfit released their fourth album in 1984, it was advertised as the greatest ever made. It wasn't, although it's collection of string-laden epics was the last time the original four Bunnymen sounded so special. To hear Ocean Rain live, then, complete with an all-female string sextet bolstering original vocalist Ian McCulloch, guitarist Will Sergeant and a fine young band, should have been major. As it was, despite the music's dramatic splendour, an overly-refreshed McCulloch steered us into chaos. During the first 'greatest hits' set, McCulloch apologises for being “a bit shaky...one point off the ten.” Over the next two hours the score gets considerably lower. Like a bad comedian, McCulloch threatens to sing Donald, Where's Your Troosers, and does unlikely impressions of Jim Morisson impersonating Sid James. Ocean Rain is ushered in by Silver's triumphant flou