Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars When Ella Hickson’s debut work appeared at the fag-end of the twenty-first century’s first decade, her octet of monologues tapped into a similar emotional and spiritual void that had fascinated a new wave of playwrights a decade before. Almost half a decade on, the student-based NewUpNorth-Scotland company’s revival now looks and sounds like a little time capsule of a fragmented society at rest and in motion, with each of Hickson’s characters taking pause for thought at what they’ve become. Nowhere is this more evident than with Millie, the jolly-hockeysticks hooker who tends to poetry-loving toffs put out to grass by the rise of New Labour. With David Cameron’s Westminster government posher than ever, one suspects the Millie of today would either be serving her constituency with renewed gusto or else find herself side-lined as her boys pack some Bullingdon-sired lead in their pencils elsewhere. While many of the pieces now look similarly

Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh 4 stars “Welcome to Liberty City!” bellows Mark Stewart early on in a set to tie in with the recent release of his all-star The Politics of Envy album. Stewart may not need a megaphone, but he makes his point loud, proud and without recourse to the album's guest list, which includes dub legend Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Raincoats bassist Gina Birch, subversive film-maker Kenneth Anger on theremin and all of Primal Scream. Live, such a Who's Who? may be impossible on this short tour, but it doesn't stop Stewart and a dangerously well-drilled three-piece band augmented by fellow-traveller, reggae MC, Brother Culture, lambasting the audience with a thrillingly fearless set of punk-funk dub-reggae metal clatter. Stewart begins proceedings limbering up physically as much as vocally, looking every inch the contender sporting a shiny red tracky top with a towel wrapped round his neck. Stewart's regular foil and production wizard Adrian

“I've spent half the time running round in my underwear,” laughs Kate Quinnell as she swishes into the bar of Pitlochry Festival Theatre. “So it's like Noises Off all over again, basically.” Quinnell is talking about her role as Jessica in Alan Ayckbourn's Communicating Doors, one of three plays she appears in during this year's PFT season. This marks the sparkly-eyed Welsh actor's return to the theatre after causing something of a stir during her last two stints here. As opening gambits go, Quinnell's remarks on her costume – or lack of it – for her latest appearance is refreshingly if somewhat disarmingly candid, albeit utterly without guile. It wasn't just running round in her underwear as ditzy wannabe starlet Brooke in Michael Frayn's ingenious back and front stage farce that caused such a commotion. Rather, it was Ms Quinnell's lively mix of a magnetic stage presence, instinctive comic timing and multi-tasking versatility in role

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars Imagine throwing a party and nobody came. That's kind of what happens in Romanian absurdist Eugene Ionesco's absurdist classic, revived here in an Irish-accented pop-eyed take on proceedings by the wonderful Sligo-based Blue Raincoat company, who apply their trademark physical tics to the play's conscious sense of its own ridiculousness. As the Old Man and Old Woman await their guests in a semi-circular room where the much admired Orator will hold court to their salon, the Old Man sits on his spouse's knee like some ancient ventriloquist act, as the couple discuss the apparent destruction of Paris, just who is pulling the strings is never quite clear. As a succession of invisible 'guests' arrive to be seated in a makeshift auditorium, is this red letter day an elaborate construction to survive the last days on earth with dignity and marbles intact? Or, on a more theatrically practical level, is it merely good e

Dundee Rep 4 stars The mountain of overstuffed black bin bags, broken-down TVs and other detritus looks more post-apocalyptic junkyard than brave new world piled onto the set of Jemima Levick’s revisitation of Shakespeare’s island-bound epic. Levick turns Shakespeare’s world upside down even more by having the island populated solely by women. With Irene MacDougall’s Prospero a steely matriarch in exile, Emily Winter’s Ariel and Ann Louise Ross’ Caliban are jump-suited prisoners in their own country who end up as surrogate daughters alongside Kirsty Mackay’s initially tomboyish Miranda. After the opening amplified bombast that shipwrecks the men from Milan onto Ti Green’s set, what emerges is a serious and stately minded Tempest. With Prospero a single mum bringing up her Miranda without any paternal influence, by magicking her usurping brother Antonio, King Alonso and his son Ferdinand to her crumbling queendom, Prospero is not only reclaiming what’s rightfully hers, but,

Nice N’ Sleazy, Glasgow 4 stars The Jubilee-tastic Punk Britannia celebrations may be reminding the world of the spirit of 77’s snotty year zero aesthetic, but it arguably misses a trick in terms of what happened next beyond assorted turn-coat rock stars and cause celebres. Take The Nightingales, Robert Lloyd’s reignited vehicle for his unique form of back-street Black Country beat poetry set to a wilfully Luddite garage-band racket. Formed out of the ashes of Birmingham’s first ever punk band, The Prefects, Lloyd and co’s relentlessly literate yarns of urban absurdism soundtracked a fistful of John Peel sessions that were only second to fellow travellers The Fall in number. Back in the saddle since 2004, and featuring original Prefects guitarist Alan Apperley alongside a disparate trio of relative youngsters, The Nightingales have now released more records than their 1980s incarnation. Much of tonight’s set is taken from the just-released No Love Lost album, with a b

Pitlochry Festival Theatre 3 stars From Rocky Horror to Forbidden Planet, sci-fi B movies and rock and roll nostalgia have been all the rage for now. Howard Ashman and Alan Menken's 1982 stage musical even has the parallel universe luxury of being both inspired by one such feature film only to be adapted into another. Based on Roger Corman's 1960 yarn about a blood-sucking plant who eats up a Skid Row flower shop, Little Shop of Horrors isn't the obvious choice to open Pitlochry Festival Theatre's Summer Rep season. Nor, in John Durnin's production, does it fully spark into the sort of big campy life required to make it such a ridiculous pleasure, even as it tackles how greed and money corrupt in a dog eat dog – or rather, plant eats man – world. It's not without its charms, however, from the moment the girl group turned Greek/Brechtian chorus shimmy out of Mushnik's recession-hit store, to the alien plant's devouring of everything in sigh