Coffee-Table Notes

“It's like a children's story,” says Morna Pearson as she makes her way up the steep metal stairs of the Traverse Theatre's Leith-based rehearsal room after observing through a window as a group of actors throw themselves into a dance routine, “but with dirty bits.” Pearson is talking about her new play, The Artist Man and the Mother Woman, which opens at the Traverse next week, and it's the most direct she's likely to be on the subject. Such reticence is peculiarly at odds with Pearson's dramatic voice if her 2006 debut play, Distracted, is anything to go by. Set in a Morayshire caravan park occupied by dysfunctional transients, Distracted served up a wild and vivid form of Doric-accented surrealism which suggested great things for Pearson. Distracted went on to win the prestigious Meyer-Whitworth new playwriting award in 2007, which saw Pearson following in the footsteps of David Harrower, Henry Adam and Conor McPherson. Given such acclaim and the subsequent a

Dundee Rep 4 stars Paul Godfrey’s stage adaptation of Compton Mackenzie’s famously filmed novel is as clever as Michael Frayn’s backstage farce, Noises Off. Framed as a 1950s BBC radio play, such a conceit not only allows for subtle hints of backstage shenanigans among its cast of three who appear alongside a tireless sound effects man. Sharing the original story’s multiple roles among the trio also makes for canny economic sense. Godfrey’s version was last seen at the old Mull Little Theatre. Irene MacDougall’s new production, which tours community centres in the area this week, does much to capture the show’s essence, both in its stylistic dexterity and its deceptively subversive intent. For those who don’t know it, Mackenzie’s World War Two-set yarn is set on two neighbouring islands whose whisky rationing is overcome via a fortuitous shipwreck’s offloaded cargo. As played here, an entire community is personified with a swiftly changed facial expression or accent

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars The snow is falling throughout most of director Matthew Lenton's refreshing new look at Shakespeare's darkest of rom-coms. While this takes literally the bard's own scripted notions of how the seasons are out of whack, it opens with a sorry-looking Bottom tending to a terminally ill wife, his only distraction a TV talent show that might just help him and his fellow wannabes live the dream. Given his wife's blessing to chase his muse following a mercy call from Peter Quince, Bottom does exactly that, led on his way by a gaggle of blonde-wigged fairies who resemble peroxided Harpo Marxes. This is accentuated even more when the mechanicals are conjured into similar apparel by Cath Whitefield's wide-eyed Puck, who sprinkles her star-dust with abandon. The quartet of confused lovers, meanwhile, are too wrapped-up in themselves and their colour-coded space-age winter warmers to connect, and Flavia Gusmao's lusty

HMV Picture House, Edinburgh 4 stars Sparks may have come late to the concept album party with their 2009 album, The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman, but theatricality has always been essential to Ron and Russell Mael's oeuvre, from composer and keyboardist Ron's deadpan demeanour to Russell's sprite-like enthusiasm onwards. This is more apparent than ever throughout the first of UK date of the siblings Two Hands, One Mouth tour. As the name suggests, the duo leave themselves unadorned either by band-mates or onstage scenery, occupying a simply-lit black box space instead. The pair have even penned a lasciviously-inclined theme song, which plays as looped pre-show music sounding like a choir of Oompa Loompas. Ron Mael enters alone to tinkle out a teasing overture of snatches from Sparks' greatest hits before his brother finally comes on sporting a tweedy outfit suggesting a silent movie director turned gamekeeper. The piano-based sprawl across selected highlig

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