Coffee-Table Notes

Edinburgh Playhouse four stars If ever there was a sound more perfectly suited to Shakespeare's high-ranking tragedy of power and glory involving a Roman warlord who can't accept the will of the common people, it is the pomp and little circumstance of heavy metal. Such potential for a bombastic borderline fascist rally is something which iconoclastic Chinese director Lin Zhaohua clearly recognised for this epic reading of Coriolanus for the Beijing People's Art Theatre, which puts Chinese rock bands Miserable Faith and Suffocated either side of a stage that houses a multitude of bamboo spear wielding extras who make up the Roman hordes. Chinese superstar Pu Cunxin struts the stage in a flowing cape and chest-plate as Martius, who is granted the title of Coriolanus after waging war successfully on the Volsces, led by the scheming Aufidius. This makes for a stunning series of set-pieces, which finds assorted noblemen picking up microphones and raging at the world

The first time producer and director Michael Colgan brought I'll Go On to Edinburgh, he and actor Barry McGovern were chased by police. That was in 1986, when McGovern was performing his solo stage adaptation of Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, at the Assembly Rooms as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Colgan and McGovern had been out with a bucket of paste putting up posters for the production by the Gate Theatre, Dublin, which Colgan had been artistic director of for three years, when the local constabulary intervened. Twenty-seven years on, Colgan is still at the Gate, and the pair are returning to Edinburgh with McGovern revisiting I'll Go On for a season of Beckett works as part of Edinburgh International Festival. Rather than opt for the familiar terrain of Beckett's great stage works such as Waiting For Godot, Endgame and Happy days, however, Colgan and EIF have opted to present stagings of work originally penned for

They don't make bedsit romances like they used to. Once the preserve of kitchen-sink angry young men and bookish young women, both of whom cling onto their squalor and each other for comfort before falling demonstratively apart, these days such fictional scenarios are more likely to be carried out via Facebook updates or Twitter. Cue The Islanders, a reassuringly old-fashioned romance written and performed by Amy Mason alongsideEddie Argos, frontman of arch avant-popsters Art Brut, who provides the live soundtrack for this lo-fi musical alongside award-winning folk singer and musician, Jim Moray. Mason's script tells the story of a couple of teenage lovers who run away from home and shack up in a tatty basement that gradually tears them apart. Only when they flee their grotty one-room existence for a holiday in the Isle of Wight do things start to change, and even though it doesn't last, their love affair binds the pair together forever. The thing is, Mason's p

When composer Michael Begg went to see Bertrand's Toys, a production by Russian physical theatre fabulists, blackSKYwhite, he was smitten. At that time, east Lothian-bsased Begg was about to release Consolation, his first album under the name, Human Greed, named after a theatre production he put on in 1999. The theatre Begg had been involved in up to that point was very much focused on text-based narratives in a more or less linear style. Bertrand's Toys and blackSKYwhite changed everything. “ I was blown away,” says Begg. “They came in and did it, and it was the loudest, scariest thing I'd ever seen. It touched me in a deep way, sand completely exploded what I thought was possible in a theatrical space. I made a note then that this was a company I'd very much like to work with.” Begg tracked down an address for the company, and eventually met blackSKYwhite's director and visionary, Dimitri Aryupin, when the company played in London. A decade on, and Begg

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