Coffee-Table Notes

When a Scots language production of a Quebecois play originally written in French toured to Montreal, it wasn't so much the equivalent of taking coals to Newcastle as making a serious political statement, about language, about women and about the self-determination of two small nations. Twenty years on, The Guid Sisters, Martin Bowman and Bill Findlay's translation of Michel Tremblay's play, Les Belles-Soeurs, is regarded as a contemporary classic twice over. As the National Theatre of Scotland prepare for a major revival of The Guid Sisters in co-production with the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, there are many theatre-goers too young to remember Michael Boyd's original production for the Tron in Glasgow. Yet without this tale of fifteen women who gather for a party after one of them wins a million Green Shield stamps, arguably an entire generation of Scots playwrights might never have expressed themselves so vigorously in their own voice. The roots of Les Bel

Queens Hall, Edinburgh 5 stars When Kevin Rowland's latest incarnation of soul brothers and sisters appeared live in May, One Day I'm Going To Soar, the first Dexys album for twenty-seven years, had yet to be released. Four months on, the album's eleven songs played in order sound like a pub theatre musical in waiting. Emotional and geographical exile, romantic yearning, fear of commitment and sheer hormone-popping lust are all in Rowland's loose-knit psycho-drama, pulsed by the music's joyously libidinous thrust. It opens in darkness, with keyboardist Mick Talbot playing an after-hours piano motif before the band burst into life and the lights go up on Rowland and co sporting various shades of Cotton Club depression chic in front of a big red velvet curtain. Rowland pimp-rolls the stage in synch with the music, or else sits astride a wooden chair for the ballads. For She's Got A Wiggle he and vocal foil Pete Williams conspire like the Dead End ki

Dundee Rep 4 stars Life is one long tea-break in Chris Rattray’s 1960s-set play, first seen on Dundee Rep’s stage fourteen year ago, and now revived in Andrew Panton’s solidly assured production. Performed back to back with Sharman Macdonald’s She Town, this is the male flip-side to that play’s women only zone, as it follows a sextet of mill workers escaping from the daily grind via the laddish banter of the rest room and its accompanying toilets. It’s here we meet simple-minded skivvy Archie, old lags Robert, Geordie and Jim, upstart Teddy-Boy Henny and Beatle-loving Kevin, who mark time indulging in assorted shaggy-dog stories and pranks with seemingly little consequence. Out of this comes a lovingly observed portrait of working class society in flux that revels in its localism even as it follows in the work-play tradition of John Byrne’s The Slab Boys and Roddy McMillan’s The Bevellers. Barrie Hunter’s pompous Robert and Martin McBride’s nasty Henny are both reli

His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen 4 stars Robin Jenkins’ World War Two set novel is a broodingly strange affair. Peter Arnott’s new adaptation takes all of Jenkins’ concerns about class, good, evil and the self-destructive fear of otherness on the one hand and an empathetic desire to transcend one’s own station on the other, and makes a big serious statement on the human condition that retains its human heart. Set on a remote Highland estate, the leafy splendour occupied by what are here referred to simply as Lady and Captain, as well as Lady’s liberal-minded twelve year old Roddie, is ripped asunder by the rude intrusion of two brothers, the dour Neil and his brother Callum, the latter of whom would be classed today as having learning disabilities. Watching over all this is game-keeper Duror, who, with a terminally ill wife in her sick-bed, resembles a contemporary vigilante on the verge and is already on the shortest of fuses. In Callum, Duror recognises imperfection

Dundee Rep 3 stars If Dundee was Scotland’s first female-led republic, it is all but reborn in Sharman Macdonald’s epic tale of life in the city’s jute mills during the 1930s depression. Wages are being cut every week, and a strike led by would-be writer Isa looks imminent. Elsewhere, legendary singer and Spanish Civil War veteran Paul Robeson is booked to play the Caird Hall, and auditions are underway for a local choir to back him up. In some respects, the latter element reflects the sheer scale of Jemima Levick’s production, which puts some forty women onstage to deal with Macdonald’s multi-layered narrative. This begins with a sick child, a loaded gun and some mass constructivist choreography before opening up Alex Lowde’s huge skewed tenement set where smaller lives epitomised by Isa and her feisty sisters dwell. If Isa’s aspirations lead towards Spain, other women make different choices. For some, sexual allure will keep them in glad rags, while mill owner’s w

There's something familiar, if not instantly recognisable about Rachael Stirling. The Scottish-born actress may have been playing a leading role on prime time telly the night before in the first episode of three-part mini-series The Bletchley Circle, but, as she sits munching on a salad in the garden of the Union Chapel, Islington, you'd never guess it. Stirling is on a lunch-break from rehearsals for Mike Bartlett's new contemporary version of Medea, which opens the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow's new autumn season in a co-production with Headlong. In the early September sunshine, however, with her claret-coloured hair tied up, she could be any north Londoner seeking sanctuary in the Union Chapel's leafy quietude. Only the much thumbed script in front of her with the words 'Why am I here?' scrawled across the first page in big inky letters in Stirling's girlish hand-writing is a give-away. “It's the most amazing, exciting – I could lick the s

CCA, Glasgow until September 15 2012     Anyone who ever visited the wonderland that was the Third Eye Centre will know that, pre-Transmission/Tramway/Arches/Kinning Park Complex/Summerhall, this holistic, slightly ramshackle Sauchiehall Street hub was pretty much the only avant-fun in town. Before it morphed into the CCA, the Third Eye's multi-purpose art-space, studio theatre, vegetarian restaurant and the best bookshop on the planet was a boho nirvana for seekers of artistic enlightenment.   Much of the Third Eye's early spirit was down to the enabling energies of the late Tom McGrath, the Rutherglen-born playwright, poet, pianist, polymath, former editor of counter-cultural bibles Peace News and International Times, and the Third Eye's first director between 1974 and 1977. This first public sighting of an ongoing excavation of the Third Eye archive as part of the Glasgow School of Art Arts and Humanities Research Council research project on Glasgow's hidden cultural