Coffee-Table Notes

1. When the Tom McGrath Trust held a fund-raising event at the Centre of Contemporary Arts in Glasgow on March 1st this year, its melee of jazz, performance and poetry captured the polymathic chaos of the late playwright, poet and pianist in all its inclusive glory. It was, said someone, ;like spending a night inside McGrath's head. With the CCA housed on the site of the old Third Eye Centre, the event also marked something of a spiritual home-coming. It was McGrath, after all, who was the Third Eye Centre's first artistic director when the hippified arts lab opened its doors in 1974 to become Glasgow's first multiple artform space. Theatre, music, exhibitions, readings and out and out happenings could all be housed under the same roof, with the best book shop on the planet and one of the city's first vegetarian cafes thrown in to plot, scheme, dream or just hang out in. With his own artistic roots at the centre of the 1960s London underground, be it editing c

MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling 3 stars Take a child away from home for long enough and put them in an insecure situation, and chances are they'll create their own world just to protect themselves with the power of their imaginations alone. So it is with Star, the ten year old north African asylum seeker who lives with her mother in a damp and run-down Glasgow high-rise. With the constant threat of deportation coming via a knock on the door at dawn, Star finds comfort in mythical tales from home and Dog Man, a Calvin and Hobbes style imaginary friend with a nice line in sweary words that help keep the nightmares away. AJ Taudevin's play is produced in association with the Scottish Refugee Council and the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, where it plays for two nights this weekend to open Scottish Refugee Week. It may initially look like a piece of up to the minute kitchen-sink social realism, with neighbours hanging out on the balconies of Clare Halleran's set and social

Most regular arts page readers will have heard of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of A Justified Sinner, James Hogg's seminal nineteenth century Scottish novel. This will be the case despite the fact that the book was initially published anonymously, and was hugely neglected during Hogg's lifetime. Only in the twentieth century was Hogg's finest work pretty much rediscovered and given the classic status it so richly deserves. The same excavation of unknown brilliance looks set to happen to Paul Bright, who, according to director Stewart Laing and writer Pamela Carter, was an avant-garde director who in 1987 staged dramatised extracts of Hogg's novel in a set of site-specific performances at locations that included Arthur's Seat. Now, along with actor George Anton and a coterie of artists and film-makers, Laing's Untitled Projects company in a co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland and Tramway will look at Bright's all too brief moment i

You could be forgiven for thinking that Citizens Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill is taking a breather. As the Herald exclusively announces Hill's plans for the Gorbalas-based theatre's autumn season right through to 2014 as tickets go on sale today, Hill is characteristically laid-back. This despite having just directed his current season's final show, a double bill of Far Away and Seagulls, a double bill of short plays by veteran iconoclast, Caryl Churchill. In fact, despite appearances to the contrary, Hill is anything but in repose. The afternoon we meet, Hill is in and out of meetings working on a major refurbishment dor the Citz's auditorium, set to take place this summer. He's also working on long-term projects, including developing new musicals which may see the light of day at some point. For the moment, however, before looking forward, Hill allows himself a brief moment of reflection. “It seems a long time since the beginning of the season

Oran Mor, Glasgow 3 stars The raison d'etre of Jacobean comedies is for their characters to romp around the houses in lengthy perambulations of duplicitous intent en route to love, money or both. So it is with Ben Johnson's yarn about a Venetian gentleman who tricks three of his peers after his fortune into believing him to be on his death-bed. In the original play there are further complications, but what adaptor and director Andy Clark has done to mark his directorial debut with the first of this summer's lunchtime season of Classic Cuts is to strip the play down to its bare essentials in a way that does it plenty of favours. It opens with Clark's white-faced cast of four serenading the audience with some gentle guitar strums before Edward Kingham's Volpone and his conniving servant Mosca hold court to Voltore, Corvino and Corbaccio. These come bearing gifts to curry favour with Volpone, who disguises himself in order to woo Corvino's wife Celia w

Dundee Rep 5 stars When a bullied boy meets the strangest of girls in the woods at night, they are instantly drawn to each other. Yet, in Jack Thorne's stage adaptation of Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel and feature film, things are even more peculiar than mere adolescent awkwardness. While Oskar comes from a broken home where his mother gets by with a glass in her hand, his new neighbour Eli has her own dysfunctional relationship with an apparent father figure who brings her fresh blood. With a serial killer on the loose, Oskar and Eli eke out a quiet form of co-dependence while all about them is turmoil. Fans of Lindqvist's work will already know the outcome of Oskar and Eli's story, but John Tiffany's exquisitely realised production for the National Theatre of Scotland in association with Dundee Rep transcends its source to become a rich and beautiful theatrical experience that is by turns gripping and tender. The forest has long been

Linlithgow Palace 4 stars There was a glorious informality to this major restaging of the oldest known play in Scotland's dramatic history, presented as part of a major research project involving the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the University of Edinburgh and Historic Scotland. Before a cast of almost forty actors wrestled with the full five hour version of Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount's sixteenth century Scots language epic, they milled about in the sunshine next to the outdoor playing area set against the dramatic backdrop of Linlithgow Palace itself. While some were in full period costume, others, presumably not scheduled to appear onstage for a couple of hours, were in dressed-down modern day civvies. While not deliberate, seeing the centuries brush up against each other so casually gave a hint of just how much Lyndsay's play addresses the here and now of a Scotland on the brink. When the play itself began, with the audience sitting on the grass in