Coffee-Table Notes

It's just before 10am in the Traverse Theatre, and artistic director Orla O'Loughlin has an awards ceremony to get to. It may be the last week of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, but O'Loughlin has already been at work for two hours, as she has been for pretty much every day of August. The reason for such un-artistic early starts is Dream Plays (Scenes From a Play I'll Never Write), the series of twelve performed readings of newly commissioned works curated and directed by O'Loughlin with playwright David Greig, and which ran each day over two weeks. As the mini season's name suggests, each reading took place at 9am, a time when most Fringe carousers are just settling into some rapid eye movement after a night propping up their favoured watering hole. With a final hour's rehearsal for each play beginning at 8am, for O'Loughlin and Greig, at least, sleep has become something of a luxury in the rapid turnover required for each play. The first

Assembly George Square 3 stars When Joe Douglas visited his Auntie Marie in Uganda on his gap year a decade ago, it opened up the then eighteen year old's eyes to a world of possibilities. One of these came in the form of Ronnie, a boy of his own age he instantly hit it off with. When Douglas returned to the UK, Ronnie sent him an email, asking him for a small amount of money to help get him through school. Another email followed, asking for more, and so it went, with assorted university fees, hospital bills and emergency payments, which combined almost hit the twenty grand mark. Bearing in mind that while Douglas was forking out all this, he was going through his own penny-pinching student years, and could have done with the extra cash himself. By transferring his real-life experience into a very candid monologue, Douglas has laid what is either a divine faith in people or spectacular naivete bare in an honest and self-deprecatory fashion. Where the subject might so

King’s Theatre 4 stars When a rowdy bunch burst noisily through the auditorium wielding a felled, full-size tree-trunk at the opening of Dmitry Krymov’s Russian language reimagining of Shakespeare’s frothiest rom-com, only the little dog padding about astride the tree truly knows what we’re in for. Krymov’s production, commissioned by the Chekhov International Theatre Festival for his School of Dramatic Art Theatre, after all, is billed as something ‘after Shakespeare’ rather than of it. So it goes in a wildly irreverent work that puts the Rude Mechanicals at the centre of the action rather than cast as the usual comic fall guys, even if there are prat-falls aplenty. Once the tree-trunk, then a leaky fountain, is disposed of on a stage covered with plastic sheeting, the troupe of players change into formal attire as they await their audience. This comes in the shape of a bunch of disgruntled toffs, whose mobile phones interrupt the action in a makeshift VIP area even

Lowland Hall, Royal Highland Centre 5 stars Before Theatre du Soleil’s four hour epic on life, death, revolution and the creative impulse itself has even begun, you’ve already entered into another world via a foyer transformed into an illusory idyll. With the company’s vast ensemble cast visible through a gauze curtain preparing themselves in makeshift dressing rooms, such an occupation sets the tone for an astonishing spectacle on a huge purpose-built wooden stage that recreates that contained in the company’s Paris home. What translates as Castaways of the Fol Espoir (Sunrises) is ostensibly based on a posthumously published Jules Verne novel, in which a pair of Socialist idealists attempt to make a film on no money as the First World War’s early rumblings begin to stir. Director Ariane Mnouchkine, writer Helene Cixous and an army of collaborators have created something so exquisitely self-reflexive that it goes some way to capturing the spirit and wisdom of Theatre

3 stars The mock-up of the Berlin Wall painted with a German flag over-laden with peace symbols onstage is the perfect embodiment of East-West unification, especially when two dancing girls and a man in a sparkly 1980s jacket kick their way through the bricks that are holding it all together. By this time the beach-balls bouncing around the auditorium and the mass onstage Conga has already ensnared a room packed with willing worshippers. But this isn't some iconoclastic melding of east European avant-gardism and pop culture appropriating post-modernism. This is TV's best known former lifeguard's bombastic solo show, and we are all culpable. Opening with a big-screen montage of his greatest hits, Hasselhoff enters from the back of the auditorium singing a rat pack style rendition of Nina Simone's Feeling Good, before strutting his way to the stage for a tea-time diversion of taking stock, Hoff-style. What this means is a loose-knit narrative from Knight Ri

Royal Lyceum Theatre 5 stars It’s a glorious sleight of hand, putting Brechtian style cabaret performed by a genuine Fringe phenomonan into the Edinburgh International Festival theatre programme. In Irish chanteuse Camille O’Sullivan’s vivid rendering of Shakespeare’s epic poem of one woman’s bloody violation and the self-destruction it inspires, EIF, along with the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose banner Elizabeth Freestone’s production falls under, have struck gold. The intensity of what ensues is difficult to gauge from O’Sullivan’s chattily casual entrance with pianist and co-composer Feargal Murray. Dressed in a floor-length death-black dress and wearing her hair tied up on a sumptuous-looking stage piled high with stacks of paper and descending wall-hangings that veer from stained to distressed, O’Sullivan segues her introduction into Shakespeare’s verse with a seamless charm her Irish accent lures you in with. This already is streets ahead of old-school readin

The final compendium of short new plays with a conscience done in a lo-fi script-in-hand manner in the Traverse bar cafe first thing in the morning was a part greatest hits, part world exclusive show that fully justified the initiative's Bank of Scotland Herald Angel win at the weekend. Two plays, Anders Lustgarten's The Break Out and Clara Brennan's heartfelt and life-affirming monologue, Spine, had been deemed good enough to merit speedy revivals. Lustgarten's piece about two female jailbirds who find they're able to break out with ease after prison budget cuts mean less bricks in the walls even had the added bonus of two different actresses playing the cell-mates to add a different energy to proceedings. It is Spine, however, that should be downloaded and distributed (free of charge, as with all Theatre Uncut contributions) post-haste. Rosie Wyatt's rendering of Brennan's beautiful play about a pan-generational alliance in care of a horde o