Coffee-Table Notes

When two or more theatrical types get together, excessive gossiping will ensue. As alcohol and other substances flow, this will invariably descend into a laughter-punctuated bitch-fest of epic proportions. So it goes in An Actor's Lament, the latest vehicle for tireless Fringe veteran, one-time enfant terrible and theatrical icon Steven Berkoff, who has been venting his spleen onstage outwith the mainstream for almost half a century. This grotesque pastiche of theatre line might well be Berkoff's manifesto, as an actor turned playwright, a writer and an actress unleash their rhyming coupleted litanies on targets including the critics (natch), the theatrical establishment, bad directors, writers and other actors, the West End, the TV drama treadmill, and, ooh, anyone who isn't them, really. While one actor riffs on their personal pet hate, the other two drape themselves behind, miming out the largesse and excesses of what looks like one endless first night part

There's a moment in Nirbhaya, South African writer/director Yael Farber's theatrical study of events leading up to and following the gang rape of a young woman on a crowded bus in New Delhi in December 2012 when you realise just how powerful a work it is that you're watching. The ensemble cast have already set a ritualistic tone with a mixture of reportage and first person testimony from abused women who stopped being silent after the horrific incident. As becomes clear from one woman's story of how her husband set her on fire, then beat her so badly that it ruined the surgery that followed, these litanies of violence, abuse and rape at the hands of brothers, fathers and husbands aren't culled from journalistic interviews. These things actually happened to the women onstage, and, as they tell their stories, by turns shocking and heartbreaking, they bare their scars every day. As damning and shaming an indictment of institutionalised misogyny on a mass scale as thi

EICC 4 stars Suspension of disbelief is everything in Edinburgh-based site-specific auteurs Grid Iron's science-fiction spectacular, which moves its audience between worlds in epic fashion. Old Earth is finished, and a mass migration programme to a New Earth has been initiated. Chief architect of this is Vela, who has become a figurehead for the new society. We're told all this during a film in a blacked-out bus as we travel out to the new planet. We've already checked in to an ambient soundtrack, and, once we've crossed the threshold as the final in-comers before the ties with old earth are cut, are given a guided tour by assorted mandarins who explain how our shiny new future will pan out. Behind all this, however, things aren't quite what they seem, as some of New Earth's inhabitants nostalgically cling to totems of their past held in the Old Earth Museum, while Vela herself appears to be falling apart. Set mainly in the stunning confines of

This time last week, Edinburgh-based site specific experts Grid Iron were strictly earth-bound. Rehearsals for their Edinburgh International Festival contribution, Leaving Planet Earth, were taking place in a former Morningside church which has been converted into a drama studio. As of this weekend past, however, the company have blasted off to Edinburgh International Climbing Centre in Ratho, which doubles up as New Earth in director Catrin Evans and writer Lewis Hetherington's new play. The play casts the audience as the final new arrivals from Old Earth, which has been decreed no longer a viable place to live. With mass migration into space seemingly the only alternative, the umbilical cord to the old planet is about to be cut. In its place, the idyllic dawn of a brave new world. Or is it? Such scenarios have long been the stuff of science-fiction literature and film, from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World to hippy sci-fi films such as Silent Running. On stage, ho

Kings Theatre Four stars “My tiny body carries the weight of the world,” says Gregor Samsa in Wu Hsing-kuo's free adaptation of Franz Kafka's seminal novella for Wu's Taiwan-based Contemporary Legend Theatre. Such a notion is the rub of what is clearly a very personal take on Kafka's story of a young man who wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed into a giant bug. Utilising a fusion of ancient Peking Opera techniques and state of art projections, Wu performs solo, playing both Gregor and the sister he dotes on, while even a black-and-white clad Kafka makes an appearance, willing the empty shell Gregor has become to live. Wu's version of Gregor crawls out of a rock-like structure looking not unlike a 1970s Dr Who monster, but once he launches himself into the piece, even the bug's tendrils seem to have been choreographed to perfection. Out of this Wu lays bare Gregor's life of drudgery by way of a back story for Gregor as an a

As role models for budding young existentialists go, there are few more recognisable than Gregor Samsa, the down-trodden salesman who morphs into a giant bug in Franz Kafka's 1915 novella. This is something Wu Hsing-kuo, the maverick driving force behind the Taiwan-based Contemporary Legend Theatre since the company's inception in 1986, recognises in his new multi-media solo stage version which he brings to Edinburgh International Festival this month. The production follows Mr Wu's equally singular take on Shakespeare's King Lear, which Contemporary Legend Theatre brought to Edinburgh three years ago. Then too, Mr Wu applied a sense of isolation he gained while training in Peking Opera from an early age. Similarly, as with Lear, he applies a very personal take on his portrayal of Gregor. “ I feel that my situation resembles Gregor,” says Mr Wu, “who shoulders the responsibility for his family. From the perspective of modern people, traditional Peking opera is

Edinburgh College of Art August 1st-September 1 st If ever there was a match made in northern English heaven, it's this one between Liverpool-born polymath Paul Rooney and arts collective Leeds United. While Rooney has plundered pop culture to create a series of fantastical parallel universes featuring the likes of open-top bus tours, 1960s counter-cultural icon Jeff Nuttall, and a sprite trapped in a 12” vinyl record called Lucy Over Lancashire, the pseudonymously inclined Leeds United appropriate other artists work for their own ends. As Rooney returns to his alma mater mob-handed, he and Leeds United sniff each other out in a series of mutual homages, mythologies and make-believe histories that break cover with a project begun in 2011 that blurs the boundaries of who exactly did what. Such death-of-the-author tactics include a new video and text-based works, including a video that attempts to claim the Loch Ness monster for the Museum of Modern Art and a bleak little f