Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Lyceum Theatre four stars The natural world in all its glory is celebrated in Meredith Monk's remarkable seventy-five minute dramatic meditation performed by her and her nine-strong Vocal Ensemble for Monks return to Edinburgh International Festival. With a live marimba-led score which moves from rhythmic codas to frantic little bursts of out-of-wackness, Monk and co flap around the stage in set-pieces of unadorned Zen choreography, chirruping in call and response harmony as they go. With the performers dressed in what looks like pioneer-type outfits, at times their gambolling looks like a hoe-down in Eden. At other, more intimate moments., their propless mimesis flutters into being with a stark beauty. There are solos, duos and ensemble-based miniatures, each one an impressionistic thumbnail sketch of birds, trees, bees and other wildlife rendered in physical terms occasionally upended by outside forces. There are clear parallels here, both thematically and st

Popping out for a cuppa can be full of surprises during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. At least it can down at Hunt and Darton Cafe, the pop-up cafe opened for thr entire month of August by live artist double act, Jenny Hunt and Holly Darton. Last year, the St Martin's College of Art graduates ran the place on St Mary's Street dressed in pineapple decorated outfits with a sense of style and wit that made it the ultimate drop-in centre. Inside the cafe's vintage environment, our two hostesses and occasional guest waiting staff would serve basic but carefully prepared meals, snacks and drinks with a meticulous sense of customer care. Some days would be themed, with customers being asked to serve each other, or else asked if they would care to choose a record to play on an old Dansette. Each financial transaction would be carefully marked out on the wall in chalk alongside details of the outlay for supplies. At the end of the week, the total profit would also be marked u

When Lorne Campbell was appointed artistic director of Northern Stage, Newcastle's most adventurous theatre producing house, he arrived at a tumultuous time. One of the theatre's main funders, Newcastle Council, had begun consultations to deal with a proposed 100 per cent cut in its arts budget. This came after two rounds of cuts by Arts Council England, Northern Stage's other chief funder, in the midst of swinging cuts from the UK government in an attempt to stave off the recession caused primarily by themselves in cahoots with the banks. Several months on, and Newcastle Council has upped its contribution to Northern Stage by fifty per cent, and, if the theatre's Edinburgh programme of some eighteen shows that form the theatre's ambitious Northern Stage at St Stephens is anything to go by, as with many artists reimagining creative possibilities during lean times, the theatre is in the midst of an artistic revolution. “There's an awful lot here that r

Jim Haynes has something of a dilemma on his hands. The legendary driving force behind the early days of the Traverse theatre in the 1960s, founder of the UK's first ever paperback bookshop in Edinburgh, counter-cultural polymath and host of the hottest dinner parties in town in his Paris home is bringing two show to this year's Fringe. Haynes' return to a producer's role shouldn't come as too much of a surprise to anyone who knows anything about the man who's probably the most well-connected man on the planet. “Yeah, I remember introducing David Bowie to Lindsay Kemp,” Haynes casually mentioned one time after I'd told him I'd spent the night before watching Michael Clark's dance company do a routine set against a backdrop of the iconic video to Bowie's song, Heroes. The trouble is, unlike every other eager beaver publicity person in town, Haynes doesn't want to oversell them, no matter how remarkable he might think both The Surren

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