Coffee-Table Notes

In the run up to the 2014 independence referendum in Scotland, there has been much talk of Iceland as a role model to aspire to. As is usually the case, artistically and culturally, connections have been ongoing between the two countries for some time. While the recent left-field music festival, Tectonics, which presented events in both nations, is the highest profile Scots-Icelandic collaboration so far, theatre too has explored the similarities between the two cultures. Much of this has been down to Graeme Maley, the Ayrshire-born director who has worked extensively in Iceland, and has brought a series of new translations of Icelandic plays to Scotland. The latest of these is Breaker, a new piece by Salka Gudmundsdottir, a young female Icelandic writer who looks set to make waves during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Maley's production of Breaker has already scooped the Best Theatre Award in this year's Adelaide Fringe, where it also picked up the Underbelly Edinburgh Award,

The last time Chilean theatre director Juan Carlos Zagal's Teatro Cinema company appeared at Edinburgh International Festival in 2010, they brought with them some very dark materials indeed. That was with Sin Singre (Without Blood), adapted from a novel by Italian writer Alessandro Baricco, and an original piece, The Man Who Fed Butterflies. Now they return with the final part of their trilogy, Histoire d'amour, this time adapted from Regis Jauffret's novel about a quasi sado-masochistic relationship between an English teacher and a woman he sees on the underground. “ Histoire d'amour is a tragic story of two people searching for love who get lost in a dark labyrinthine abyss,” according to Zagal. “Their souls get lost and sink because they cannot find a way out of this encounter that condemns them. This is a story that shows the emotional instability of many of us nowadays, where the masculine side is strong, and exerts a strong influence over the

Edinburgh Playhouse five stars Rock and roll, Beat poetry and contemporary classical music aren't exactly staples of Edinburgh International Festival's programme. The appearance of composer Philip Glass and singer, poet and shamanic force of nature Patti Smith to pay homage to counter-cultural guru Allen Ginsberg, however, is a bold and unexpected move that should point the way for EIF's future. The New York duo's opening performance of Smith's Notes To The Future before an audience of ageing hippies and young bohemians is all too appropriate in this respect. The evening is divided into four loose-knit sections. In the first, Smith reads words penned by both Ginsberg and herself, with Glass discreetly underscoring on the piano. As Glass leaves the stage, Smith is joined by guitarist Tony Shanahan, who accompanies her on emotive renderings of songs from her back pages. Glass returns to play three solo miniatures before Smith rejoins him for some final ex

When whistle-blowing American soldier Bradley Manning was found guilty of espionage at the end of July, the old ideals of truth, justice and the American way suddenly seemed like more of a hollow mockery than ever before. It also made The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning, Tim Price's dramatic rendering of Manning's story for National Theatre Wales, look like the most pertinent play on the planet. When NTW first presented John E McGrath's production, it was in the Welsh school that Manning attended. For their Fringe run they do something similar, with the noises off and camouflage-clad figures occupying classrooms as the audience enter suggesting something a lot stronger than mere playground stuff. Once seated on four sides of the school's echoey assembly area, the audience witness Manning's course from a displaced childhood between small-town Wales and America, as a bullied gay computer geek came to develop a disrespect for authority that would event

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