Coffee-Table Notes

That there is no main-stage swan-song directed by National Theatre of  Scotland artistic director Vicky Featherstone in her final season before departing to run the Royal Court speaks volumes about her tenure over the last six years. Because it isn't any single production which has defined Featherstone's role. Rather, it is an all-embracing vision which has enabled artists to be bold and to think big while Featherstone has taken on a more diplomatic role protective of her charges. Indeed, it could be argued that Featherstone's own creative work has been neglected because of this. Of the season itself, if there is an element of baton-passing, with associate director Graham McLaren being particularly prolific, there is also a sense that theatre in Scotland has become increasingly exploratory. If the NTS has the resources to raise the bar, then the talent is already there to take advantage of it. It is an attitude the ongoing national embarrassment that is Creat

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars If Clare Balding wasn't already considered a national treasure, her ubiquity anchoring this year's London Paralympics has confirmed it. This may be why her autobiography, the tellingly named My Animals and Other Family, has been number one best-seller for the last two weeks. For a woman whose entire life has been spent in a horse-racing world where competition and the thrill of the chase means everything, one suspects these sorts of things matter to Balding. By the time she ambles onstage for this sold out talk sporting sloppy sweat shirt and jeans, Balding has already done a signing in St Boswell's, with one in Milngavie to go as part of a suitably marathon tour. Over an hour, Balding relates in impeccably jolly hockey-sticks tones a life which sounds not unlike one great big Girl's Own adventure, from posing for pictures astride legendary race-horse Mill Reef aged eighteen months, to being suspended from the same board

Sex and God are quite understandably all over Linda McLean's new play  for Nick Bone's Magnetic North company, which opens this weekend in Easterhouse prior to a short tour as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival. Despite such strong transcendent themes pulsing the worlds of the four twentieth century women from different time-zones who occupy McLean's play, she had never considered it for a title. Only when McLean's son asked her what the new work was about did it become obvious. “I said it was about sex and God, but didn't have a title,” McLean explains, “and he said 'That's it!'” McLean's work is full of little eureka moments like this, in which characters in seemingly domestic situations are enlightened somehow. While you could say this about most drama, over the last decade or so McLean has quietly become one of the most experimental playwrights in the country. Her subversion of dramatic form has been subtle, h

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