Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars Isolation may be the crux of Samuel Beckett's literary and dramatic canon, yet such is his waggishly profound understanding of the human condition that it connects in a way that mere navel-gazing never could. So it goes in the Cork-based Gare St Lazare company's latest dissection of Beckett-world, a solo rendition by Conor Lovett of a short story first published in 1955. A monologue from the point of view of a man discharged from some form of institution forced to make his way in the world alone, what starts out as a kind of picaresque rake's progress becomes a slow decline into self-negation, until Lovett literally vanishes. With only two wooden benches onstage, Lovett may be clad in charcoal suit and tacketty boots, but, as directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett, his is a more understatedly casual approach to Beckett than mere clowning around. Instead, Lovett relates his yarn of seeking refuge in a near roofless, dilapidated sh

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars There's lads anthems aplenty played throughout Ishy Din's, in which four working class northern English wide-boys reunite over a pool table in their local on the anniversary of the first of their gang to die, by his own hand or otherwise. Billy's been down south, Kamy's trying too hard to be one of the boys, Shaf is talking big and hustling hard, and Mo is on the way up. Over the course of the night, old scores simmer under the surface of an overload of drink-fuelled testosterone that eventually spills over. So far so in-yer-face, you might think in first time writer Din's savage little microcosm of back-street culture in close-up. The difference here is that the track-suited, smart but casual young men in question are British Muslims of Asian descent, and that the near-silent bar-man is white. The difference again is that none of this is an issue, but is merely incidental to the quartet's collective plight, no

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars “Married?” says one character in the first of two darker-than-you-think plays by Johnny McKnight for his and Julie Brown’s Random Accomplice company. “It’s not ideal, but neither is being single.” It’s such bittersweet truisms that fuel Mary Massacre, in which two very different women hitch a ride on an emotional rollercoaster to become unwitting adversaries turned allies. In the second half, Seven Year Itch takes office politics to the extreme in a world where the voice of God sounds like Dolly Parton, and top secret memos aren’t the only things that get shredded. Both pieces start off with McKnight’s trademark high-camp accentuated by Lisa Sangster’s inventively lush sets. The sparkly letters that spell out the word ‘FAIR’ in Mary Massacre might easily be appended by a question mark, as married lush Jenny and single girl Leyla dovetail monologues that sound straight off Jeremy Kyle but end up more a Roald Dahl style tale of the unexpecte

Inverleith House, Edinburgh 12 February – 29 April 2012 “We are actors in a play...whose plot we don't know...and whose end I dare not imagine.” These words delivered by iconoclastic Glasgow-born 'anti-psychiatrist' R.D. Laing not only form the opening gambit of 'All Our Divided Selves', Luke Fowler's latest feature length video that cuts up rarely seen archive film of Laing with new footage. As soundtracked by Alasdair Roberts, such grandiose epithets also go some way to summing up the entirety of this at times demandingly overwhelming but most deeply personal of Fowler's collections to date. The ninety-three minute film is the (un)holy grail at the end of a show which begins with 'Ridges on a Horizontal Plane', an installation made in collaboration with sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda, who also fills a room with his own sonic sculpture, 'Composition for Maguchi Bay.' At all points inbetween, the walls are lined with a series of

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars Mwana is a Zimbabwean young man exiled to Glasgow to study medicine, but carrying the weight of his family’s expectations to a land of material temptations. Mwana’s return home for his brother’s wedding should be heroic. As it is, the initial flash of his limited edition trainers and a white Glaswegian girlfriend soon pales beside a letter from his university confirming the worst. Somewhere inbetween, cultural suspicions are flipped on their head in a drought-ridden society torn between old superstitions and the promise of a strictly scientific future where rain promises salvation rather than an ongoing head-cold. So it goes in Tawona Sithole’s debut play, a co-production between the multi-cultural based Ankur and The Tron. Opening with an out-front declaration from Denver Isaac’s Mwana, Shabina Aslam’s production mixes forms and styles in a busy display to allow Sithole to make his point. Pulsed along by Mark Melville’s African-fused sou

Margaret Thatcher might not approve of Agent 160, the new theatre company set up by playwright Lisa Parry and dramaturg Louise Stephens Alexander, even if this UK-wide venture is named after one of the nom de plumes (Astrea was another) of a government spy in the employ of Charles 11. The fact that Agent 160, aka Astrea, was in fact Aphra Behn, who was not only one of the earliest recorded female playwrights in history, but was also savvy enough to make money from it, might suggest a kind of feminist separatism by stealth to the once iron lady. As those behind Agent 160 are keen to stress, however, their idea of promoting work solely by female playwrights is more about addressing a serious imbalance which Parry discovered while attending a conference in the National Theatre's Olivier space in 2010. During the day, it was revealed that of all the plays produced in the UK, only seventeen per cent are written by women. “If you flip that figure around, you're sayin

Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh 3 stars We've all had days like Joseph K. As Franz Kafka's troubled everyman is shunted from pillar to post in a bureaucracy gone mad on his thirtieth birthday, it's easy to identify with his nightmare. Blackeyed Theatre's new production of Steven Berkoff's adaptation sticks pretty close to its dramatic template, as five actors in black suits and white shirts with scarlet collar and cuffs move through a series of white painted door-frames and hollow boxes that map out K's road to nowhere. The result in Ella Vale's production is a well-studied facsimile of Berkoff's oeuvre that delivers a kind of street-wise mime that's clearly not to be messed with. As Simon Wegrzyn's K fights to clear his name regarding an un-named crime he's not aware of having committed, an entire society based on sexual repression and corruption in high places is laid bare. Gradually, though, as K moves in ever-decreasing circ