Coffee-Table Notes

Shakespeare and Death Metal aren't the most obvious of theatrical  bed-fellows, especially when performed in Mandarin. Yet this is exactly  the culture clash that ensues in Beijing People's Art Theatre's epic  production of The Tragedy of Coriolanus, which opens as part of  Edinburgh International Festival's drama programme next week. In a  production which features some 100 bodies on a near-bare stage, veteran  Chinese iconoclast Lin Zhaohua's version of Shakespeare's political  tragedy makes the conflict between nations a noisy affair by having two  of China's leading metal bands onstage.     Miserable Faith and Suffocated  are stalwarts and leading lights of a  fertile Beijing metal scene, but remain little-known outside of their  own country. Miserable Faith were formed in 1999, and by 2001 were regarded by many as the best nu-metal band in Beijing. Consisting of  vocalist Gao Hu, guitarists Song Jie and Tian Ran, bass player Zhang  Jing, harmonica playe

Meredith Monk wasn't aware of When Bjork Met Attenburgh before we spoke, but suddenly I'm giving her a link to the recent Channel Four documentary that looks at the relationship between music and the natural world through the eyes of film-maker David Attenburgh and Icelandic singer, Bjork. The fact that I'm reading it down the line during a telephone call to the pioneering seventy-year old composer, director, vocalist and choreographer's New York speaks volumes about the hi-tech global village we live in. Given that Monk's return to Edinburgh International Festival this weekend following her debut here in 2010 with the spiritually inclined Songs of Ascension is with a show called On Behalf of Nature, it's also somewhat ironic. On Behalf of Nature is a poetic meditation on the environment and how it is gradually being eroded by man's lack of concern for it. With roots in Buddhist thought and the poetry of American Beat Gary Snyder, Monk and her

Kings Theatre Two stars When a school-teacher spots an attractive young woman on the train, he decides there and then that he'll marry her. He gets there eventually in Chilean company Teatro Cinema's rendering of Regis Jauffret's unrelenting novel, but before that he stalks her, rapes her, beats her and violates her in every way imaginable, and that's just on the night he first sees her. Beyond this, the man becomes dangerously obsessed with the woman he learns is named Sofia, his self-loathing manifesting itself in flashes of rage in a blindly self-deluded one-sided courtship until, finally, she acquiesces. This is an ugly little piece of male fantasy wish fulfilment which, in Teatro Cinema's hands, becomes a comic book strip cartoon writ large, complete with speech bubbles, as actors Julian Marres and Bernardita Montero interact with a meticulously synchronised set of animations in director Juan Carlos Zagal's production. The story is told throug

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