Coffee-Table Notes

In the corner of the Citizens Theatre rehearsal room, seven young women are gathered round a piano, at which is sat musical director Hilary Brooks, who leads the ensemble through their scales. In their dressed-down tracksuit bottoms and voice-protecting scarves, the women might well be attending some common or garden open-call audition for some big west end musical in search of fresh blood. Such a notion seems to be confirmed a few minutes later when they’re put through their paces on a metal building-site set in a cheesily choreographed routine involving umbrellas that help punctuate a song infused with unabashed peppiness. Such a bright mood has been salvaged after a piercing electronic shriek shattered the scales into discordant submission. Such an incident gives a hint that what’s being knocked into shape is no ordinary musical, as well as highlighting the tensions between old-school jazz hands routines and more modern fare. Such creative tensions are at the heart o

Matthew Lenton has never directed Shakespeare before. At first glance, Lenton's visually rich magical-realist imaginings with his Glasgow-based, internationally acclaimed Vanishing Point company don't really fit with the bard's poetically dense flights of fancy. Peel back the layers, however, and the two worlds that collide in his new production of one of Shakespeare's most revisited rom-coms may have more in common with Lenton's world than you might think. “ It's the Shakespeare play which as a kid I always found the most accessible,” Lenton says of the Dream. “I've always been interested in the magic and the darkness and the beauty of it, and it's nice to be able to spend time in such a different place. I've always had a difficult relationship with Shakespeare. It was certainly not something I loved as a kid, and not something I found easy. It's still not something I find easy to watch on a stage, and not something I find easy

HMV Picture House, Edinburgh 4 stars Don't be fooled by the vaguely Stonehenge-like set dressing which adorns the stage for Natasha Khan's current tour to promote her recent third album in her Bat For Lashes guise, The Haunted Man. Khan's hippy sensibilities may still be intact, but the school-assembly whimsy of yore has been ditched in favour of a more muscular synthesiser-led euphoria that adds a more grown-up sense of drama to her vocal gymnastics. Sporting a full-length blue-grey backless robe slit at the sides, Khan is all smiles for album opener, Lillies. With microphone in one hand, drumstick in the other, she whacks the accompanying drum-pads with a relish gloriously at odds with her visual elegance. When she sings the words 'Thank God I'm alive' with arms outstretched, it sums up the sense of release that pulses throughout the new material. With a lone cellist tucked behind the stage set, much of the songs' dense textures are provid

                                              The Shock of the Old – A History 1 It's no coincidence that some of the earliest sightings of 3D in mass mainstream culture came via science-fiction B-movies of the 1950s. Here, after all, was the ultimate immersive future-shock, in living colour and walking in, about and among us, albeit in a utilitarian, grim-faced Cold War climate. 3D movies were, of course, a gimmick, designed by and for geeks to sex up an ailing post-war film industry high on alien-invasion induced paranoia. As gimmicks come and go, it worked. For a while. 2 On November 26th 1952, Life magazine photographer J.R. Eyerman took a series of photographs of the audience attending the premiere of the first ever full-length colour 3D movie at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California. Arch Oboler's Bwana Devil was based on a real-life story in which a big-game hunter in Africa squared up to man-eating lions after his predecessors fell prey to

From Kill Your Timid Notion to GI, sound and vision have become  increasingly promiscuous bed-fellows over the last decade. Throw in an increased sense of theatricality to sound-based art, and all the elements are in place for Sonica, a brand-new feast for the senses that forms the latest addition to an ever-expanding Glasgow-based left-field arts diaspora. Produced by Cryptic, the music-theatre company who have bridged art-forms and worked internationally for almost twenty years, Sonica's inaugural ten-day city-wide programme of 'sonic art for the visually minded' brings together already existing works by the likes of Janek Schaefer, whose turntable-based work featured several years ago in a major show at the CCA, alongside new commissions from home and abroad. These include Remember Me, an opera by Claudia Molitor's opera performed inside a desk in Scotland Street School Museum. Elsewhere, Turner Prize nominee Luke Fowler will collaborate with Jean-Luc

Kings Theatre, Edinburgh 3 stars Despite all appearances to the contrary, Jim Cartwright's 1992 play, written for actress Jane Horrocks, is not a showbiz spectacular. Nor was it ever meant to be, not even with a cast drawn from cabaret, comedy and popular TV and theatre circuits as they are in Cartwright's own touring revival. Rather, this close-up of a shy young girl finding salvation through song is more of a feel-good flip-side to Road, Cartwright's debut, which arrived six years earlier like a template for Shameless.in the thick of Thatcherism Little Voice may be set among the same northern English housing estate underclass, but where Road was unflinchingly brutal, Little Voice is a Viz comic picture post-card with a drunken punchline at the end of every scene. Nowhere is this best encapsulated than in the figure of Mari, LV's brittle good-time girl mother who falls in with would-be agent Ray Say before watching her shaky life go up in flames. Meanwhil

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars It’s taken almost twenty years for Dermot Bolger’s free dramatisation of James Joyce’s life in a day tale of Leopold Bloom’s travails through Dublin’s underbelly to have life breathed in it via a full production. For director Andy Arnold too, one gets the heady sense that his exquisitely realised production is the climax of a love affair with Irish letters which began in his early years of running The Arches. Because, as we follow Bloom into the slow-burning languor of a red light district of the mind, this looks like one of the best things Arnold has done. Charlotte Lane’s big wooden set on which the floorboards slowly wind into themselves like a serpent suggests Bloom might just be walking round in circles. As drink gets the better of him, Stephen Dedalus and the thrusting Blazes Boylan, the day takes a turn into a woozy, libido-driven dream-state. In this way, Bolger’s adaptation both grounds Joyce’s wilder excesses in the everyday, yet also allows the