Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars A vintage recording of Lulu belting out Shout is the perfect scene-setter for Martin Bowman and Bill Findlay's audacious Scots reimagining of Quebecois writer Michel Tremblay's ensemble piece for fifteen women. It's also a magnificent double-bluff, as Serge Denoncourt's National Theatre of Scotland revival in co-production with the Royal Lyceum proves time and again. Yes, Tremblay's 1960s-set tale of a working-class back-kitchen sorority brought together by Kathryn Howden's blousy Germaine's winning of a million Green Shield Stamps is funny to it's riotous core. Look beyond the fur coat and nae knickers one-up-womanship, however, and you'll find a raging back-street portrait of a post World War Two society fit to bust. Life's a lottery for all of the women who gather to stick Germaine's stamps into books before she transfers them for a catalogue-bought dream home. As each woman repeats in

There's something heroic about Johnny McKnight. The writer, director,  performer and co-founder of Random Accomplice productions appears to be everywhere just now, so ubiquitous are his theatrical wares. With Random Accomplice, he and fellow director Julie Brown have just opened their sixteenth production, The Incredible Adventures of See Thru Sam, which is written and directed by McKnight, and currently running at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow prior to a Scottish tour. Beyond Random Accomplice, as a director, McKnight is currently at work on a rehearsed reading of All The Promise, a new play by Colin Bell performed as part of Glasgay!, as well as workshops with the National Theatre of Scotland on Sponsored Silence, a new piece by Douglas Maxwell. As a writer, McKnight is about to have an even higher profile. In October,his first radio play, Beloved, is set to be recorded. Onstage, McKnight has two new projects with Scottish opera in the pipeline. The Curse of the Macca

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars Heroes and villains mean everything when you’re a teenager, especially one who’s living in a world of his own like Sam. Sam used to be invisible, but once his mum and dad prove to be thoroughly mortal in a car crash, he loses those powers, and starts to be noticed. Even so, as Sam tells the audience his not so secret origin from the off he has a destiny to fulfil. Or so it seems in Johnny McKnight’s fantastical rites of passage strip-cartoon adventure, in which Sam, his side-kick best pal Walrus, and maybe, just maybe his very own super girl Violet take on the world. In Sam’s head, this comes in the shape of evil genius Uncle Herbie and Violet’s bullying boyfriend. The power of the imagination can only take a small-town school-boy so far, it seems, no matter how high Sam is aiming. McKnight’s own production for Random Accomplice takes an array of comic book idioms and brings them to life via a set of meticulously timed animations which a

Summerhall until September 27th 2012 4 stars There's something heroic about David Michalek's three-screen sequel of sorts to his similarly styled Slow Dancing triptych of larger-than-life slo-mo studies of dancers in motion, first seen in 2007. Where in that piece five blink-and-you'll-miss-em seconds apiece were stretched out to ten minutes of extended play performed by professionals, the choreography applied here is to a more diverse array of long, short, tall and less whippet-like physiques. Seen largely naked, acting out routines of every-day movement, Michalek's subjects – a woman with a double mastectomy, a bearded old man shifting bags of cement in his Y-Fronts, a couple holding their baby aloft – become monumental pin-ups striking a pose, as every sinew, muscle and twitch is accentuated and buffed into shape. As a conscious form of homage to and reinvention of cinematic and photographic techniques pioneered in the nineteenth century by Eadward M

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