Coffee-Table Notes

Graham Valentine cuts a striking dash as he enters the room. Taller than tall, the way he eyes you up and down with hawkish appraisal gives him the air of an eccentric school-master who's just caught you out doing something you shouldn't. This may have something to do with the perfectly odd match of the green tweed suit off-set by a shock of dyed red hair he's sporting. All of which is pretty much perfect to play Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe's treatment of Bernard Shaw's play in which Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle is transformed into a cut-class society belle by the Frankenstein-like Higgins, who gives her elocution lessons. Not that Meine faire Dame – ein Sprachlabor (My Fair Lady – a language laboratory), Swiss director Christoph Marthaler's bi-lingual creation for Theatre Basel that opens at Edinburgh International festival this week can be called a conventional version of either play. Rather, Marthaler sets out his sto

Barry McGovern was twelve years old when he first discovered the world of Samuel Beckett. The year was 1961, and McGovern was an Irish schoolboy watching a BBC television production of Waiting For Godot, Beckett's seminal piece of existentialist vaudeville which had seemingly rewritten the rules for theatre when it premièred first in Paris in 1953 in its original French-language production as En Attendant Godot, then two years later in the young Peter Hall's English-language première in London. The TV production of Beckett's play about two tramps wiling away their time on the roadside watched by McGovern starred Irish acting legend Jack MacGowran as Vladimir, one of the two central roles. This small-screen take on Godot was shown the same year an American production, starring Burgess Meredith and Zero Mostel, was broadcast. The twelve-year old McGovern would be as unaware of that version as he was that some forty years later he too would appear on-screen in Godot after mak

Royal Lyceum Theatre 4 stars As with the work of William Burroughs, Samuel Beckett’s prose fiction works best when taken off the page and heard out loud. Only then are they revealed as extravagant routines that become a form of deadpan existential stand-up which many Fringe comics could learn much from. There are few better exponents of this than actor Barry McGovern, who takes one of Beckett’s more cryptic novels and, in Tom Creed’s production for the Gate Theatre Dublin, transforms it into a fifty minute treatise on one man’s arrivals and departures. The man in question is the Watt of the title, who takes up residence on the ground floor of the home of the reclusive Mr Knott, whose man-servant Watt becomes. A simple enough yarn, one might think, but one which, in McGovern’s delivery, becomes something deadly. With only a chair and a coat-rack one could easily mistake for a microphone stand onstage, McGovern enters slowly into the light, removes his over-coat to reveal a

Lowland Hall, Royal Highland Centre 4 stars There’s fire in the belly of Grzegorz Jarzyna’s contemporary war-zone set reimagining of Shakespeare, even before its final explosions signal the last gasp of battle. The rain and laughter of those liberated following the deposing of a once loyal General turned tyrant suggests a curse has been lifted and an entire country cleansed. In the two hours build-up to this on Stephanie Nelson and Agnieszka Zawadowska’s huge two-tiered construction, Jarzyna’s TR Warszawa ensemble take a real-politik approach to the play’s sound and fury, with Macbeth a camoflauge-clad major, who encounters, not three witches, but veiuled goddess Hecate, who flatters his unspoken ambitions. At Macbeth’s homecoming where the military coup is hatched, Lady Macbeth dresses as a geisha to entertain the troops in-between Elvis impersonators and a white-faced magic act in Uncle Sam apparel. Interior monologues re delivered via live video projections, and after Duncan’s killi

The List – Summerhall – 4 stars In an increasingly death-laden Fringe thus far, Stellar Quines’ production of Quebecois writer Jennifer Tremblay’s solo play is a blessing. A woman in the spotlight confesses all concerning the death of a neighbour she became friendly with after attempting to start a new life in the country. As she obsessively prioritises the daily minutiae, the one thing that might have mattered for her increasingly sickly friend slips unnoticed off the agenda. This is a raw and emotionally wrought piece of work, given even more power in Muriel Romanes’ production by the heart-wrenching power of Maureen Beattie’s towering performance of Shelley Tepperman’s English translation. In a play that’s in part about the fear of losing control, Beattie lends a brittleness to the woman’s guilt that feels fully natural without ever resorting to forced quirkiness. While Beattie is a magnificent presence, beyond the words, Romanes has crafted a full theatrical expe

When Tadashi Suzuki decamped his theatre company from Tokyo to the remote mountain village of Toga in 1976, the esteemed director, actor and founder of the physically rigorous Suzuki Method of Acting was making a point. If Tokyo's big city bustle was a form of insanity, then Togo gave his company the space to breathe, while Suzuki could flex his creative muscles far from Tokyo's maddening crowd. An effect on Suzuki's life's work from such a conscious seismic shift is inevitable, as Waiting For Orestes: Electra, his take on Euripides' version of the Greek myth produced by his Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT), which opens at Edinburgh International Festival this weekend. In the play, as Electra waits for her absent brother to help her murder their adulterous mother who killed their father, given such a dysfunctional back-story, perhaps it's no surprise that Suzuki has opted to re-set the play in a psychiatric hospital, where Electra exists in a near speechless c

Mies Julie – Assembly Hall – 5 stars Woza Albert! - Assembly Hall – 4 stars The People Show 121 – The Detective Show – Assembly George Square – 4 stars Assembly Theatre's South African season is an intoxicating mix of old and new theatre from the frontline of the country's creative ferment. Baxter Theatre and South African State Theatre have joined forces to present Mies Julie, which places Strindberg's psycho-sexual pot-boiler in their post apartheid homeland. The result in Canadian playwright Yael Farber's own production of her version, set in a farm in the remote Eastern Cape Karoo, is a devastating reinvention that throws racial taboos into the mix of cross-class shenanigans and self-destructive power games between genders that already fester. Here Julie is a white young woman, a troubled wild child who's just been dumped by her fiance and is drunk after gate-crashing the black servants' party. The object of her affections, John, is a black