Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars When Mike Cullen's play about a hypnotherapist, the young woman she treats and the young woman's father appeared in 1997, it was devastatingly timely. Sexual abuse of children by their families was being exposed in a way it never had been before, but so was False Memory Syndrome, whereby seemingly long-buried traumas were 'revealed.' Almost sixteen years on, and Cullen's play is no less breath-taking in Rekindle Theatre's intense and up close and personal revival. It begins with Anna and her live-in patient Lynn surrounded by boxes all neatly packed with forgotten memories in a limbo between the past, present and a brand new future. As Lynn frantically rummages around for a long lost photograph, the pair spar with the brutality only co-dependents can muster. Lynn has invited her father who may or may not have abused her to visit in order to confront him. Anna doesn't approve, even less so when David appears. For s

Kings Theatre, Edinburgh 3 stars When Communicado Theatre Company toured Adrian Mitchell's adaptation of Gogol's satire of small-town corruption in 2011, it's tale of back-handers, bungs and out and out bribes in high places looked all too timely. Two years on, and Gerry Mulgrew's scaled up revival, a co-production between Communicado and Aberystwyth Arts Centre, looks more pertinent than ever. This is the case even as Mulgrew's knockabout ensemble put style above polemic, making the self-serving clique who get wind that their antics are under investigation by a mysterious inspector appear even more ridiculous. Equally ridiculous is Khlestakov, the penniless cad who the long, the short and the tall of the town presume to be the inspector, simply because he has the upper-crust swagger of the St Petersburg set, albeit without the cash to back it up. As played here by Oliver Lavery, Khlestakov is a feckless fop, whose own pomp woos the town-folk into caterin

Edinburgh Festival Theatre 4 stars When it comes, the climax of Simon Beaufoy's stage adaptation of his 1997 film about a group of unemployed Sheffield steel-workers who find emancipation by becoming strippers is as hen night-tastic as you expect it to be. The wolf whistles began some two and a half hours earlier, from the moment Kenny Doughty stepped onstage as Gaz, the laddish everyman who breaks into the deserted factory where he and his mate Dave used to work to nick girders to flog for scrap. Also left behind is a blue crane named Margaret, after the woman who effectively put a nation of heavy industry workers on the dole. Meanwhile, sisters are doing it for themselves watching The Chippendales, which inspires Gaz to enlist a troupe of his own to make a few bob. What Gaz, Dave and their motley crew of ne'er do wells actually achieve isn't just a rediscovery of their own personal mojos, but a reawakening of a collective spirit through the power of dance, brillia

Electric Circus, Edinburgh Sunday March 17 th 2013 4 stars The first time Ulrich Schnauss appeared in Edinburgh, back on Easter Sunday 2008 at the Voodoo Rooms, there wasn't a still body in the room, such was the infectiousness of Schnauss' laptop-generated electronica that has since defined a mashed-up hybrid of dancefloor indie some might call Shoe-Rave. Since then, Schnauss seems to have found his time, as assorted nouveau sonic cathedralists appear to have caught up with him. Schnauss' latest visit tied in with the release of his long-awaited fourth album under his own name, A Long Way To Fall, a deliciously warm concoction which humanises electronica in a way other laptop-based artists fear to tread. This is so even as Schnauss stands over his kit with total concentration, while a a female sidekick stands opposite him, equally rapt over her laptop. The result of all this, with impressionistic films beamed out on the venue's multi-screen set-up behind

It will be something of a homecoming for actress Eileen Walsh takes to the stage in Rob Drummond's new play, Quiz Show, at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre this coming weekend. It was in that very theatre, after all, that a teenage Walsh first appeared alongside an equally youthful Cillian Murphy in Disco Pigs, Enda Walsh's blistering and poetic coming of age tale that was an Edinburgh Festival Fringe sensation in 1997. Quiz Show also marks the Cork-born actress's return to the city she actually does call home, after originally moving there shortly after Disco Pigs before decamping to London for several years. Quiz Show is Drummond's latest dissection of popular culture that follows on from Bullet Catch and Wrestling. Unlike those two works, which were solo pieces performed by himself, Quiz Show is a fully-fledged play without any onstage appearance by Drummond. Instead, the play looks at today's celebrity obsessed world via a TV game show that doesn't quite

When the film of The Full Monty was released in 1997, there was a delicious irony that it did so a mere week after Tony Blair was elected UK Prime Minister with a landslide victory that saw his New Labour project end eighteen years of Conservative rule. Here, after all, was a commercial feature film about a group of former steel-workers turned strippers in Sheffield who had been thrown on the scrap-heap which Margaret Thatcher's destruction of heap by industries had reduced the steel industry to. Fifteen years on, and with a Conservative/Lib-Dem alliance in Westminster, Simon Beaufoy's original screenplay of The Full Monty has been adapted for the stage. As with the film, Beaufoy's first stage play has proved a feel-good hit even as it deals with some very dark things, about masculinity and the by-products of losing one's livelihood during an era of mass unemployment. “It's a recession comedy,” Beaufoy says. “It was a really grim time, and it was visibl

Dundee Contemporary Arts until April 21 st 2013 4 stars The back catalogue of seventeenth century painter Nicolas Poussin isn't the most obvious frame of reference for German iconoclast Jutta Koether, but when she was taken to see his The Seven Sacraments at the Scottish National Gallery, something clicked. The end result for Koether's first major show in Scotland following an appearance at the DCA as part of the Altered States of Paint group show in 2008 is this large-scale, hopelessly devoted homage/reimagining of Poussin, rebranded and rewired for a post-modern twenty-first century pop age. The fact that Koether's versions of Seasons, four paintings first shown at the Whitney Biennial in New York in 2012, and the more sculptural The Seven Sacraments, created in situ, feature bit part players such as philosopher Jacques Derrida, German racing driver and walking product placement Sebastian Vettel and the Queen adds a playful wit to the pop classicist sheen. The