Coffee-Table Notes

Mayday and protest are natural bedfellows however some governments may attempt to re-brand it. This was something clearly recognised in the early days of Mayfest, Glasgow's now defunct trade union backed arts festival. It's something that is clear too in Mayfesto, The Tron Theatre's now annual month of politically inclined theatre, which acknowledges its obvious debt to Mayfest. While Mayfesto 2012 has scaled back its activities prior to a larger, city-wide event set to take place in 2013, the radical slack has been picked up by the National Theatre of Scotland, whose second Five Minute Theatre event takes protest as it's very pertinent theme. Following on from the inaugural Five Minute Theatre, which, over twenty-four hours, streamed more than two hundred new miniature plays which were selected from more than twice that number live over the internet, this year the NTS, in a very logical association with STV, have opted for a leaner model. Rather than an

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars The technical hitches that opened the 2012 version of the National Theatre of Scotland’s compendium of bite-size performances beamed live across the internet may have resembled the early days of Channel Four, but the creative anarchy that followed was worth the wait. Run over six hours, and with seventy-two plays on offer , this year’s protest-based theme concentrated things even further, even if the sole screen in the Tron’s noisy restaurant was less than ideal for anyone wanting to witness the event beyond the works performed live in the venue’s Victorian Bar. For those with laptops, the first hour alone included Craigowl Primary School’s study of Grandpa Broon, Amy Conway’s meditation on fallen war reporter Marie Colvin and the CurvebALL Collective’s physical theatre flash-mob in George Square. It was here Tam Dean Burn’s punk Robert Burns outfit The Bumclocks performed an anti-war mash-up of Burns, Pinter and Gunter Grass. Under the

Dundee Rep 4 stars There are explosions in Zinnie Harris's extraordinary play of communal displacement even before its strange, dreamily poetic exchanges between island folk forced from their isolated way of life take hold. In James Brining's lovingly nuanced revival, these come in the form of a stunning clash of sound and vision on stage filled with water that designer Neil Warmington, under the influence of visual artist and 'water consultant' Elizabeth Ogilvie, has reflected via a live video feed onto a huge screen behind. As a man slips into the water under the beatific glow of Philip Gladwell's lighting design, John Harris' monumental choral score is a shattering cry from the deep. If all this threatens to overwhelm the slow-burning quietude that follows, it also accentuates the physical and emotional dams waiting to burst open in an expansively symbolic production of a play loaded with significant portents of the tragedy that follows. As

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars Don’t be fooled by the brevity of Theatre Jezebel’s new version of Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy. Mary McCluskey’s adaptation may be an hour long, but by putting the play’s most fascinating character at its centre on Kenny Miller’s expansively handsome set of upended gold leaf chairs topped by weather-beaten parasols in the mirrored gloom of a leaf-strewn courtyard, it’s as panoramic as it’s ever been. With the Weird Sisters top and tailing the play in black veils masking a blood-red satanic pallor as they become both chorus and every other character save the two leads, by the end it becomes clear too exactly who is pulling the strings. Before all that, Lesley Hart’s Lady M grows increasingly neurotic as power seems to first fall into her lap before the rough and tumble of fulfilling imagined prophecies becomes increasingly addictive. With Michael Moreland’s Macbeth tugged every which way, both by his wife’s newly discovered aspirations and the Sisters,

The Hub, Pacific Quay, Glasgow 4 stars There has probably never been a more relevant week to premiere a dramatic dissection of whatever’s left of the newspaper industry, and the National Theatre of Scotland’s eloquently realised cut-up of interviews with some forty-three main-stage players goes way beyond any fears of self-reflexive brow-beating. While it will never top last week’s events at the Leveson inquiry when both Rupert and James Murdoch were forced to account for both their own actions and the culture of newspapers they were in charge of, Enquirer nevertheless paints a thought-provoking and oddly poignant portrait of a bruised industry being dragged through its own mud. As the audience enter the tellingly unused top-floor open-plan office of a real life media hub, the piles of unsold newspapers used as seats as we’re promenaded from desk to desk are even more telling about the state we’re in. From morning conference to putting the paper to bed, the story, as

I'm standing at a lectern on the stage of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, declaiming in what I hear as an increasingly pompous voice the sort of right wing platitudes I usually abhor. With the entire audience braying so I have to speak over them, the man opposite is firing back retorts of equally schoolboyish one-upmanship. Sporting a suit I'd like to think gave me the air of a European arts mandarin but is probably more Jeremy Kyle, I find myself becoming the ultimate Tory boy. My God, I wonder, hearing my decidedly non-Etonian voice rise and fall, how did I get here? I'm appearing in Demos, a new verbatim play by Tim Price and John Bywater, which takes as-it-happened accounts from two very different manifestations of democracy and turns them into mass participatory spectacle. The first, Sort Your S*** Out People, is taken from the minutes of the daily General Assembly of the Occupy Movement while camped outside St Paul's Cathedral in December 2011. T

Citizens Theatre 4 stars There’s a glorious circularity to David Hayman’s return to the Citz after a twenty year absence in Dominic Hill’s mighty production of Lear. Where Hayman began his career on the same stage four decades ago with a unique take on Shakespeare’s mad Danish prince, here he appears equally unhinged as the elder statesman whose estrangement from his favourite daughter lurches him into a mid-life crisis that leaves him with nothing. It begins with a Hogarthian chorus resembling Occupy protesters breaking into the palace where the party is in full decadent swing. In this sense, the economic and class divide of the story is laid-out from the start, with the chorus punctuating every psychological body-blow with Paddy Cunneen’s live score played on splintered piano strings and other bomb-site detritus. Edmund is a initially a hoodied-up student in search of a cause to legitimise him while his swotty brother Edgar sprawls himself across the sofa. If that is