Coffee-Table Notes

Kings Theatre, Edinburgh 3 stars There can't be many Agatha Christie pot-boilers that feature pre-show music by the Beatles. Yet this late period whodunnit revived here by director Joe Harmston's Official Agatha Christie Company is as groovy as when Hammer revived Dracula in swinging London. Blessed with a holy trinity of female leads, it's hard not to warm to such unabashed hokum. First performed in 1960 but re-set here to1968, Christie's adaptation of her novel, Five Little Pigs, follows the tenacious travails of Carla Le Marchant, the twenty-something daughter of Caroline Crale. Caroline died in prison after being convicted twenty years before of the murder of her artist and serial adulterer husband, Amyas. Carla breezes from lawyer's office to drawing room and fancy restaurant looking for clues, quizzing her father's mistress, the family maid, her mother's sister and two very different brothers both in love with her mother. Once gathered in the

Ken Alexander is used to turning theatres on their head. When the newly appointed – and first ever – artistic director of the Royal Court theatre in Liverpool was in charge of the Byre Theatre in St Andrews, he initiated touring and outreach programmes while at the same time overseeing the in-house company’s move from its old premises to its new lottery-funded state of the art home. Once in the new building, Alexander increased production from five shows a year to eight, a remarkable feat that paid dividends in both attendance and quality. When Alexander took over Perth Theatre, where his career had begun as a trainee director under theatrical legends Joan Knight and Clive Perry, during his year-long tenure he re-established the venue as a producing house and increased audiences. Given the tragic closure of the Byre two weeks ago following the company’s insolvency several years after its Scottish Arts Council funding cut caused its production arm to be scrapped outside o

Perth Theatre 4 stars It’s easy to mistake the first half hour of Conor McPherson’s 2006 West End and Broadway hit for a hangover from the in-yer-face era. Once McPherson’s metaphysical fascinations kick in, however, this furious tale of five booze-sodden men holed up in an Irish cottage playing poker on Christmas Eve becomes a matter of life and death. Sharky has returned home to look after his blind brother, Richard, who’s also tended to by his drinking buddy, Ivan. Sharky is off the sauce and trying to put his life back together, but when local wide-boy and Sharky’s nemesis Nicky turns up with a mysterious stranger called Mr Lockhart in search of a game of cards, it’s as if all his demons have come home to roost. McPherson has crafted a meatily fantastical yarn which rips into macho self-loathing, the psychologically addictive allure of gambling, and how the long term consequences of every misguided action will always get you in the end. It’s an astonishing piece of

Film City, Glasgow 4 stars To suggest the art world is full of fakes is an understatement. That they’re usually in the business of buying and selling rather than artists themselves is also generally true. Maverick writer and director David Leddy and his Fire Exit company tackles the art of faking it in a fantastical flight of fancy that dissects the whole notion of authenticity and finding truth through onstage artifice by leaving everything exposed. Actors Wendy Seager and Neil McCormack greet the audience as they enter a room in Govan’s former town hall that’s part studio, part gallery chock-full of apparent old masters draped in dust-sheets. The Jackson Pollock style splurges that decorate the floor looks the part even more. What we’re about to watch, Seager and McCormack explain, comes from a real life meeting in a Glasgow bar between Leddy and a couple slightly worse for wear. The shaggy dog story that follows involves Liz and Jim, a couple of extreme con artists

Electric Circus, Edinburgh 4 stars As My Bloody Valentine fever went into (interstellar) overdrive last week on the back of the surprise release of their first album for two decades, enraptured converts could have done worse than check out former Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie’s low-key shows to see where MBV copped some of their FX pedal moves from. Previous visits by Guthrie have seen him playing atmospheric soundtracks to his own equally impressionistic films. With Australian bassist Steve Wheeler and Finnish drummer Antii Makinen co-opted into the fold, his new trio vehicle puts brevity to the fore in a series of instrumental sketches that drift between slowcore fuzziness and post-rock jauntiness. Each miniature is possessed too with a human warmth which at times borders on the sentimental. Guthrie is a towering figure, whose bearded visage these days makes him resemble a hybrid of Vangelis, Jerry Garcia and John Martyn, a trio that reflects too on the different shades d

Conor McPherson likes going to dark places. This was obvious from his phenomenally successful breakout play, The Weir, and it’s more than evident in The Seafarer, his 2006 smash hit, which is given a new production in Perth Theatre this week after taking London and Broadway by storm. While the original production at the National Theatre in London also saw McPherson direct his own work, this time out he’s content to let Perth director Rachel O’Riordan take the reins. McPherson isn’t saying whether he’s given her any clues on how to proceed, but there’s certainly no mystery to how he came to write it. “It came like a lot of plays,” he says. “The better ones come from an image, and for The Seafarer I just saw this room in this place. I’d always been interested in this place called the hellfire club, which was a place where people would play cards. There was a folk tale, about how there’d be a knock on the door, and this stranger would be standing there who turns out to be the devil. S

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars It’s a mad world for the runaway teenager in Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson’s novel for young people, adapted here by Tron artistic director Andy Arnold for Katie Posner’s dark, fast-moving co-production with York’s Pilot Theatre. The play follows the perils of Leonora, or Leo, the orphaned Anglo-Chinese daughter of musicians, who goes on the run from her creepy Uncle John in search of her Chinese grand-parents in Glasgow. Once on the streets, Leo falls in with the city’s fractured flotsam and jetsam who’ve fallen outside society’s loop, finding sanctuary with Gayle Runciman’s Mary, who survives by dancing to Johnny Cash records at full blast. With paper boy and would-be gumshoe Finlay as a sidekick, Leo’s search is as much for herself as anything else. With five actors clambering across Gem Greaves’ impressionistic set, and pulsed along by RJ McConnell’s burbling sound design, Arnold and Posner capture the full urgency of Leo’s plight from th