Coffee-Table Notes

The Third Door, Edinburgh Monday November 14th 2011 4 stars Salsa class is cancelled tonight, according to the blackboard outside what used to be after-hours hippy student dive Medina, but which now looks intent on filling the DIY boho gap that the Roxy Arthouse and The Forest once occupied so randomly. The lights are low and the room is rapt for an exquisitely thought out bill to support Anglo/French sextet and Gizeh Records artists Farewell Poetry for a nuanced evening of low-key cinematic poetics. The apocalypse starts early with Opul, a collaboration between poet JL Williams and composer James Iremonger, who blasts out a laptop-sourced blend of industrial beats and impressionistic piano sketches to frame Williams' words. If the music resembles cities being razed and rebuilt in some woozy dreamscape, Williams' words are witchy, her delivery beguiling, threatening menaces with all the rhythmic performative drive of Patti Smith or Kathy Acker, even as she look

Sneaky Pete's, Edinburgh Thursday November 10th 2011 4 stars In her geek-girl specs and floppy Annie Hall hat, Twin Sister chanteuse Andrea Estella appears as quintessentially kooky a New Yorker as any afficionado of 1970s me-generation peak era Woody Allen movies could wish for. The check-shirted quartet of preppy boys cooking up a post Vampire Weekend groove behind her concur, even as they counterpoint Estella's wispiness with something infinitely more twenty-first century. Guitarist Eric Cardona actually opens his mouth first to sing in a disarmingly high voice before Estella picks things up for Bad Street, a sassy little strut fleshed out from the band's debut album proper, In Heaven, and which flits between bass-led punk-funk-lite, twinkly synths and even a brief Debbie Harry style rap. With shades of Saint Etienne, Fleetwood Mac, Broadcast and Curved Air gone disco, more often than not in the same song, such pick and mix eclectism soars into the ether

4 stars The local Noiserati and associates’ recent reclaiming of their Techno and/or Metal roots helped their clan avoid a nihilistic dead end. As this bumper fifteen track compendium of clings, clangs, sci-fi slapstick, sepulchral drones, lysergic loveliness, ghosts in the machine anthropological excavations and other light and shade metal machine music suggests, things remain in the blartiest of health. Nackt Insecten, Blood Stereo, Jazzfinger, Culver, Dead Labour Process, UFO Antler Band and others produce an array of increasingly subtle, artfully mature and largely low-key meditations. All oddly life-affirming, even as it sometimes trips the shit out of you. The List, November 2011 ends

Kings Theatre, Edinburgh 2 stars Noel Coward knew a thing or two about theatre by the time his back-stage set short story was published in 1951. With both absurdism and the Royal Court social-realist revolution about to turn the British stage on its head, Coward's glory days were over, and his own dramatised version never quite grew legs. Just why Christopher Luscombe's adaptation has managed to stay in the commercial repertoire for more than a decade, then, is a mystery. Or at least that's the case if Joe Harmston's flat production is anything to go by. The clue is in the title. Amanda Donohoe plays a leading lady on the wane who runs rings around both the wet behind the ears playwright who fawns over her and the been-there-done-that director who's nominally in charge. It's his 'personal assistant' who really calls the shots, however, as the writer is sweet-talked into making changes to his masterpiece so the dame can still appear grand.

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars You could hear a pin drop on the opening night of Katie Posner's touring revival of David Harrower's blistering psycho-sexual pas-de-deux. The fact that the bulk of the audience for this co-production between Pilot Theatre and York Theatre Royal were in their teens speaks volumes about exactly how much they can take in terms of a thoroughly adult play that neither patronises or exploits them. Instead, Harrower lays bare some of society's greatest taboos through the eyes of one life-changing event's survivors. First seen at the 2005 Edinburgh International Festival, this new, studio size production is made all the more provocative by the close proximity of its protagonists, Ray and Una. Caught off-guard in the mess of his strip-lit work-place, fifty-something Ray attempts to keep a proper distance from the brittle, tomboyish woman on a mission he had a whirlwind affair with fifteen years earlier, when she was twelve. With bo

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars Seeing stars is everything in Hattie Naylor's beautiful new play, made in collaboration with Tom Espiner of the multi-media based Sound&Fury company. In an impressive technical display that leaves the audience in the dark just as Naylor leaves Max, her astronomer protagonist, it's made painfully clear in Mark Espiner and composer Dan Jones' production just how the centre of our universe can be rocked in the blink of an eye. With the audience ushered into a pod-like construction on the Traverse stage that allows full black-out, it begins with Max giving a planetarium style lecture, complete with a map of the galaxy on the ceiling of Ales Valasek's intimately-styled set. If all this initially resembles a chill-out room take on The Sky At Night, things are upended within minutes when Max discovers he's slowly but surely losing his sight. Continuing an ongoing dialogue with his tellingly heard but not seen six yea

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars It’s swings, roundabouts and cheap thrills all the way in writer/performer Derek McLuckie’s latest collaboration with director Pauline Goldsmith, a rough and ready glam/punk era rites of passage for this year’s Glasgay! festival. McLuckie’s fifty-minute solo turn rewinds to a back-street boyhood where the only fun in town comes in a plastic bag full of sticky stuff. One minute Derek is a church-going angel in search of kicks beyond his dyed David Bowie cut, the next he’s finding salvation in visions of Pegasus, the doors of perception laid wide open to more flesh and blood pursuits. As he fancifully immortalises his own self-created mythology, McLuckie’s inner aesthete is torn between the Siouxsie Sioux pictures on his wall and the Judy Garland records he discovers behind the sofa of the Paisley high-rise that fails to hem in his wilder urges. There are a million stories like this, but McLuckie’s tale is infinitely less sentimental than a