Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars When Peter Arnott's play about a squadron of Second World War female fighter pilots premiered at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 1985, the notion of powerful women, and indeed women in power, was very much part of the agenda. More than a quarter of a century on, and the true story of Lily Litvik, who marked her kills with white roses on her aeroplane's tail, remains a fascinating look at a piece of hidden history, as well as a metaphor for a gender war that continues. It opens with Lily and her engineer friend Ina drafted in to sex up recruitment films. It ends with Lily grounded for a final time. Inbetween we see Lily square up to an all-male world without compromising her faith in a greater cause. Lesley Harcourt's Lily is a driven young woman who knows what she wants and usually gets it. When that comes to her flight commander Alexei, the age-old ideological  contradictions between the personal and the political come to t

King's Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars England may have been dreaming when Mike Leigh devised his now iconic suburban drama in 1977, but the Thatcherite nightmare was already looming. In this respect, this painful tale of warped aspiration set against a living-room backdrop of garish fixtures and fittings now looks as much like prophecy as the wall-paper appears retro-chic. Leigh's play focuses on one night at home with Beverly and Laurence, who are hosting an open-house to meet their new neighbours, Angela and Tony. Also on the guest-list is middle-aged divorcee Susan, whose teenage daughter Abigail is having a very different kind of gathering to the ones the grown-ups are painfully stumbling through. With such a set of perfect stereotypes, it would be easy to resort to 1970s theme bar kitsch in Lindsay Posner's production for the Theatre Royal, Bath and the Chocolate Factory, and redirected for this tour by Tom Attenburgh. Yet here it more resembles Who's

When Peter Arnott's debut play, White Rose, first appeared at the Traverse Theatre in 1985, Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government were two years into their second time of office, and Britain appeared to be in the midst of civil war. The miners strike was still ongoing, while outside the Royal Airforce base in Greenham Common, all-women peace camps were set up in protest of the American cruise missiles housed there. In 1982, some 30,000 women joined hands around the camp's perimeter. When Arnott read Night Witches, a book by Bruce Miles, which told the little-known story of the female pilots who flew Soviet aeroplanes during the Second World War, something caught Arnott's imagination. “It was my first commission, and my brief was to do something big with three actors,” Arnott says on the eve of the play's first major revival in almost thirty years by the Borders-based Firebrand Theatre company. “It was forty years since the end of the Second World War, and

Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh 3 stars When Puck comes onstage in a woolly hat, shorts, Wellington boots and a football scarf, looking somewhere between a 1970s trainspotter and the ghost of Tom Weir, it sets the tone for the Sell A Door company's bright, youthful take on Shakespeare's most ubiquitous rom-com. When he picks up the transistor radio that sits at the front of the stage, tuning the dial to assorted weather-based bulletins, he's also tuning in on a world where the sun always shines. With a cast of just nine doubling up parts with abandon, Bryn Holding's touring production shows off that world via a network of mobile doors that moves the action from Theseus and Hippolyta's formal courtship to the reckless romp of the young lovers once they get lost in the woods. If the gravitas isn't always present in the portrayals of the older generation's tweedy demeanour, things are far more assured once the Mechanicals stumble into view. These scenes ar

“I'm not a good enough actress to work with scripts that aren't very good.,” Siobhan Redmond says towards the end of her interview with the Herald. “Some actors are so dazzling that they can turn them into something other, but I've never been an alchemist or a shape-shifter in that way.” Redmond is being hard on herself here. On recent form, playing the lead role of warrior queen Gruach in Dunsinane, David Greig's audacious sequel to Macbeth, and as she prepares to play Mephistopheles in the Citizens Theatre's rewiring of Christopher Marlowe's flawed masterpiece, Doctor Faustus, it couldn't be further from the truth. Even so, Redmond's slightly damning observation of herself speaks volumes about her onstage presence. From starting out in 1980s comic sketch show, Alfresco, and her break-out role as Don Henderson's side-kick, Lucy McGinty, in private eye drama, Bulman, Redmond has always retained her striking sense of self, even as she inh

When Bob Dylan was photographed barnstorming his way along Princes Street in 1966 en route to his show at the ABC Regal cinema on Lothian Road, it perfectly encapsulated exactly how much of a hurry that particular decade was in. It also captured how much the times were a changing again. Here, after all, was the acoustic idol of the coffee bar protest scene, who was in the thick of a pivotal UK tour on which he announced his new electric direction, looking, in his wrap-around shades and pixie boots, like the coolest, most glamorous man alive. Yet here he was, in a city with a busy network of dance-halls serving the beat boom on the one hand, but also in the thick of a folk revival which had begun a decade before. The ABC had played host to both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones two years before, but Dylan was pushing the envelope. The ABC audience may not have accused him of being Judas like they did in Manchester on the same tour, but legend has it that a portion of hard-line folkies

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One) until September  8th 2013 5 stars From the opening tease of Magritte, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed physically and mentally by this major mix and match collection of twentieth and twenty-first century work from the moment you step into the first corridor. Which, for a show that’s about the body, but which, in its epic parade through both floors of Modern One, says just as much about mind and spirit, is how it should be. The first room sets the tone by off-setting Sarah Lucas’ spindly and be-stockinged Bunny Gets Snookered #10 with Otto Dix’ more bulbous Madchen Auf Fell, and things seem to swell up into something spectacular with each wonderland entered. Cock, balls and cunt are of course in abundance, but this is no prick-tease, despite the rise and fall of Matthew Barney’s stunningly glossy five-screen Cremester Cycle of phallic fantasias (the cremester, of course, being the muscle that lifts and separates the tes