Coffee-Table Notes

Kings Theatre, Glasgow 5 stars Doors and sardines. These two elements are the essence of theatre, according to director Lloyd Dallas in Michael Frayn’s ingenious theatrical in-joke, which takes every actor’s nightmare and magnifies it to epically grotesque proportions. When the play first appeared in 1982, the sort of trouser-dropping farce Frayn so magnificently pastiched was still a bums on seats staple of the commercial touring circuit. More than three decades on, and Robin Housemonger’s play, Nothing On, may be even more anachronistic, but it remains an instantly recognisable stalwart which refuses to lay down and die. Lindsay Posner’s revival of Frayn’s play was first seen at the Old Vic, and now takes meta-ness to new heights by hitting the touring circuit the play has itself become a staple of. It begins quietly enough, as Dallas’ company of insecure drama queens and ego-maniacs go through their final rehearsals of Housemonger’s play. As inter-personal tensions be

When Pitlochry Festival Theatre's artistic director John Durnin arrived at the Perthshire based producing house ten years ago, he had transformation on his mind. Here was a theatre, after all, which, while situated well out of the central belt, had developed a repertoire and production standards on a par with London's west end. This in itself was a major step forward from the theatre in the hills' beginnings in 1951 when John Stewart opened it in a tent. Once PFT's purpose-built premises opened for business, under Clive Perry and others it developed a reputation for producing calculatedly commercial fare personified by the work of Alan Ayckbourn. While Durnin's tenure has not been averse to producing the odd Ayckbourn over the years, he has broadened the repertoire considerably, so it now includes more contemporary plays in the programme alongside familiar classics. Durnin has also introduced a musical play that forms a major part of PFT's in-house season,

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars A man steps out from the audience and onto a stage that remains bare other than a stool that sits in the far corner while a solitary shaft of light brightens the stage's centre. As the reflective piano music that's been playing fades out, the man, dressed in buttoned-up charity shop suit and a hoodie underneath, proceeds to tell his story. Or rather, in the Cork-based Gare St Lazare Players latest rendering of Samuel Beckett's prose, one of many stories. Because there's a real sense of continuum in the company's approach that becomes increasingly clear with their every visit. Much of this down to the solo performances by Conor Lovett as directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett in a spare and austere fashion. Both suggest that what's being said is just the latest episode in a life of incident and colour. Here, Lovett takes a novella penned by Beckett in 1948 but not published until 1971 and lifts it off the page with a dry

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars There's something astonishing about this rare double bill of short plays by Caryl Churchill, if only to get some kind of insight into how this most singular of writers mind works. In Far Away, first seen in 2000, a young girl is exposed to the brutality of a war which becomes increasingly extreme. At first, Lucy Hollis' Joan appears to be an evacuee who witnesses her uncle doling out violence to a lorry-load of refugees, only to be co-opted into a conspiracy of silence by her aunt. By the end, she's in the thick of a conflict which has corrupted the planet so much that even nature and the animal kingdom are taking sides. Seagulls, which dates from 1978, is less elliptical in its observation of how raw talent can be corrupted by celebrity. Kathryn Howden's Valery is able to move objects with her mind, and, with her manager Di in tow, is about to launch a rocket for charity in front of a huge audience before being investigat

Dundee Rep 4 stars When Tom McGrath's play first appeared in 1986, its depiction of community spirit in a run-down Dundee housing scheme was a telling insight into life on the margins in Thatcher's Britain. A quarter of a century on, and Nicholas Bone's revival of a story based on real Dundee residents reflects the current and all too necessary wave of grassroots protest that has risen up in the face of mass political ineptitude. At the heart of the play is Kora Lee, the eternally optimistic single mum to five boys, who becomes a symbol of survival even as her world is collapsing around her. When an architecture student turns up to ask Kora and her neighbours questions about their living conditions, an accidental campaign is launched to try and improve the neighbourhood. If this sounds like a sentimental polemic, think again. Far from leading the campaign, Kora's main pre-occupation is attempting to sire an even bigger brood, either with community police

Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh 4 stars Film-maker David Lynch may not have the same high profile he once did, but he sure recognises a muse when he sees and hears one. Cue Chrysta Bell, the Texan chanteuse with whom he wrote and produced the 2011 This Train album. Lynch isn't in attendance for Bell's debut Scottish performance in a venue which probably most closely resembles a Lynchian fantasy night-club this side of the pond, but he is on film. His typically opaque introduction refers to Bell as a song-bird, but in truth, as she and her three-piece bar-band open with the thrusting bump and grind of Real Love, she's much more than that. Jet-black apparelled, flame-haired and impossibly cheek-boned, Ms Bell presents a magnificently studied burlesque-style persona. It's her voice that matters, though, in a set of songs full of light and shade, but which in a live context transcend any notions of mere mood music. There's a dramatic and emotive stridency behind her

Perth Theatre 3 stars The circle of fancy chairs that adorn the stage beneath a displaced triangle of giant red roses that hang above them give off the air of a Victorian séance in waiting rather than a well-heeled bachelor pad. There's plenty of romantic life elsewhere, however, in London Classic Theatre's touring revival of Oscar Wilde's classic romp of reinvention and acquired identity between town and country. Here young rakes Algernon and Jack's wooing of Cecily and Gwendolen becomes more an accidental if life-changing voyage of personal self-discovery than anything. Michael Cabot's well turned out production, which stopped off for a one-night stand at Perth Festival prior to a week of Scottish dates, plays considerably with the politics of scale. Much of this is down to Paul Sandys' diminutive Jack, who here becomes more clown-like than dashing. As an orphan, his insecurity further allows Helen Keeley's taller and quasi-predatory Lady B