Coffee-Table Notes

The Old Ambulance Depot, Edinburgh 4 stars It’s the cosiness that draws you into theatre designer Kai Fischer’s moodily lit installation and performance piece. The casual listener might never guess where the words being uttered in such soothing female tones through speakers attached to a series of wooden platforms are taken from. Once you realise they are drawn verbatim from the catalogue for the Nazi-organised Degenerate Art Exhibition that took place in Munich in 1937, the piece takes on a new measure of seriousness. The exhibition, organised by Adolf Hitler and his cronies, aimed to deride and discredit anything the state could not control or understand. As the sensors that operate each speaker are triggered whenever a viewer draws close, the gentlest of cacophonies comes gradually and shockingly into focus. When performers Pauline Goldsmith and Pauline Lockhart draw the audience into what initially resembles a children’s story-telling session, the content of their si

1 International Women’s Day March 1982 In a black-painted former city centre warehouse turned venue in Liverpool, called, oddly enough, The Warehouse, The Raincoats are singing a traditional Latin-American folk song a cappella. The song is the encore to a set honed in the wake of the all-female trio’s (plus assorted male and female drummers) previous two albums of lo-fi Ladbroke Grove squat-rock with a lyrical feminist bent, their self-named 1979 debut, which features an even more gender-bending take on The Kinks’ song Lola than the original, and its smoother, more world-beat-inclined 1981 follow-up, Odyshape. A live cassette recorded in New York, The Kitchen Tapes, will follow a year later, and a final album, Moving, in 1984, before The Raincoats fall prey to whatever things bands fall prey to. It will take more than a decade for Nirvana's Kurt Cobain to bring The Raincoats into the spotlight once more. Tonight, however, with Gina Birch, Ana Da Silva and Vicky Aspinall lined

Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh 4 stars Arthur Miller's little seen Broadway flop might just have found its time in this new touring co-production between the enterprising Sell A Door company and Mull Theatre. When the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh presented it on their main stage in 2009, the ongoing recession was already biting hard. Three years on, Miller's tale of one man finding material and domestic success while all about him flounder feels even fresher and more pertinent than it did then. Miller's play was written in 1940, and first seen in 1944. It focuses on David Beeves, a young mechanic in a small town in middle America. When he attempts to speak to his sweetheart Hester's father about marrying her, the tyrant is hit by a car and killed. When Beeves is flummoxed as to how to fix a particularly flashy vehicle, Austrian whiz-kid Gustav turns up to show him how it's done, this ensuring that Beeves' business thrives. So it goes in a fla

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars The pains of confinement inside women’s prisons have long been a source of dramatic intrigue, sometimes of the exploitative variety. Rona Munro’s play is no Prisoner: Cell Block H, however. Rather, Munro’s exploration of what happens when one inmate’s life sentence is interrupted by visits from the daughter she hasn’t seen for fifteen years is a tense and complex affair. First seen at the Traverse in 2002 and revived here by director Richard Baron for the Borders-based Firebrand company in association with the Heart of Hawick, Iron is a battle of wills between Fay, who stabbed her husband to death, and Josie, the daughter Fay never saw growing up. While Fay has been made brittle and manipulative by institutionalisation, Josie only wants to know what life used to be like, when she still had a dad. Baron’s brooding production is led by Blythe Duff, who plays Fay with a flint-eyed concentration and complete lack of sentimentality. As Josie,

King's Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars The wheels of post-war industry were briefly halted on Monday during the opening Edinburgh date of Graham Linehan's new take on William Robinson and Alexander Mackendrick's classic 1954 Ealing comedy. When designer Michael Taylor's elaborate set got stuck on the revolve as Shaun Williamson's crazed Romanian gangster was supposed to be clambering out of the upstairs window of old Mrs Wilberforce's topsy-turvy house, it not only added an accidental comic frisson. It also inadvertently symbolised how an entire country was attempting to push its way towards a new society, but was collectively unable to budge. This is perfect for a play chock-full of little Englander archetypes attempting a King's Cross bank heist planned from the seeming sanctity of Mrs Wilberforce's upstairs room. A cross-dressing major, a pill-popping spiv, a psychopathic immigrant and a lunk-headed ex-boxer are brought together by Professor Marcus

“Darkness is important,” says theatre designer Kai Fischer as he clicks through a series of images on his laptop for Entartet, his performed installation which arrives at Edinburgh's off-piste Old Ambulance Depot art-space this week. Entartet is the German word for degenerate, and Fischer's stand-alone visual and audio work draws its inspiration from Nazi Germany's notorious Degenerate Art Exhibition that took place in Munich from July to November 1937. Arising from Adolf Hitler's furious stance against what he perceived to be the threat of abstract and modernist art, Die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst was the brain-child of Hitler's right-hand man Joseph Goebbels and favourite painter Adolf Ziegler. The pair confiscated some 650 artworks from German museums for an event designed to run parallel with what was considered to be the far purer Great German Art Exhibition. The Degenerate Art Exhibition featured works by Chagall, Kandinsky and Klee, as well as pieces by

It's been a long road from Beryl Battersby to Miss Havisham for Paula Wilcox. Yet, as the Manchester-born actress arrives in Aberdeen this week to play the latter in Jo Clifford's stage adaptation of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, both characters seem to be bookends of a sort on a career which has seen Wilcox move from 1970s TV sit-com star and household name to classical stage actress with ease. Not that the still youthful-looking sixty-two year old's career is over yet. Far from it, in fact, if recent stage turns in everything from a musical role in La Cage Aux Folles and playing an ageing rock chick in Stella Feehily's play, Dreams of Violence, for Max Stafford Clark's Out of Joint Company, to a new play by Jonathan Harvey at Liverpool Playhouse, are anything to go by. It's just that, there's something about the hopelessly romantic Beryl in Jack Rosenthal's still fresh sit-com, The Lovers, in which Wilcox led Richard Beckinsale's Ge