Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars The projection of what looks like a space storm beamed onto a huge steel-grey drum suggests that matters of intergalactic importance are about to unfold. As it is, novelist Ian Rankin's first ever stage play, written with Royal Lyceum artistic director Mark Thomson, doesn't quite scale those heights, though there are enough twists and turns in his Edinburgh-set yarn to keep audiences spellbound. It opens with a nightmare, as top cop Isobel McArthur is awoken in her living room by ghosts from the past she can't shake off. Coming up for retirement, Isobel declares to write a book about her experiences, with one particular case from a quarter of a century ago dominating. That was when a man called Alfred Chalmers was imprisoned for the murders of four young women. Did he do it? Isobel isn't sure, and visits Alfred in search of clues. Isobel's sexually voracious teenage daughter Alexandra, meanwhile, has already begu

Tramway, Glasgow Four stars The silence, when it comes at the end of Melanie Wilson's hauntingly intense multi-media monologue, speaks volumes about how much Wilson's unique oeuvre is about sound as much as vision. Wilson enters in darkness, sitting behind an antique kitchen table on which sits a laptop, a microphone and other electronic kit from which Wilson generates and performs her intricately controlled soundscape that accompanies her ornately chosen words. Such a set-up hints at how past will meet present in what follows, with Wilson's words delivered into the microphone with a cut-glass precision that turns her voice into another instrument. Wilson's first-person narrative is told by Vivien, a photo-journalist trying to get her head together in the country following her experiences in a middle-eastern war-zone. In the solitary cottage she confines herself in, she finds a journal written by her great-great grand-mother in the summer of 1899. At the s

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Three stars TV monitors flash up night camera images of war at the start of Ian MacDonald's sixty-five minute Gaelic translation of Shakespeare's Scottish play, directed by Liz Carruthers. It's not the only modern conceit for a production that puts just two people onstage as the murderous couple at the heart of the play. The three witches that drive the MacBheathas ambition are beamed in via the screens, as are the spectral projections of Banquo's ghost. Daibhidh Walker's brutish MacBheatha, meanwhile, arranges assorted murders from his newly acquired throne via a mobile phone. The result of this, as Catriona Lexy Chaimbeul's initially languid but soon to be steely NicBheatha takes her husband's opening call from her bed is a kind of dance, in which the pair's sexually charged alliance is swept aside by a McBheatha more interested in power for himself alone. Chaimbeul even sports a scarlet and black flamenco style

Sound is working against Melanie Wilson. On the eve of the first showing in Dublin of Landscape II, the wilfully singular writer and performer's latest solo show, which tours to Tramway in Glasgow for one night only next week, Wilson is wandering an echoey corridor looking for a place where she can be heard. Given how key sound has become to Wilson's work ever since she brought her first solo piece, Simple Girl, to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe back in 2007, such attention to detail is all too fitting. Wilson, after all, operates her own soundscapes using a console situated on a desk in front of her as she performs her work, lending a mysteriously hypnotic depth to her stories. Following Simple Girl and 2009's Iris Brunette, as well as a larger work, Autobiographer in 2012, Landscape II is Wilson's most ambitious work to date, and incorporates a panoramic film and video backdrop into her increasingly multi-media mix. As applied to a story of three women se

The police tape wrapped around the billboards on Lothian Road and Grindlay Street beside Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum Theatre suggest that a serious incident in need of investigation has occurred. In fact, as the posters inside the cordoned-off billboards make clear, the incident in question has yet to happen. Dark Road, the first ever stage play by best-selling crime novelist and creator of Inspector Rebus, Ian Rankin, is still being rehearsed inside the Lyceum, where actress Maureen Beattie is squaring up to her nemesis. Beattie plays a top Edinburgh cop who was instrumental in the conviction of an alleged serial killer twenty five years ago. Now, on the verge of retiring, she must face up to the doubts that have been lurking at the back of her mind for a quarter of a century. She must also face up to the man whose life she effectively took away. This is typically gritty stuff from Rankin, who has co-written the play with Lyceum artistic director Mark Thomson, who also dir

Perth Theatre 4 stars A clatter, a thump and a piercing drone usher in the opening battle scene of Rachel O'Riordan's all too manly Macbeth, which points up how some little boys violent ambition can damage them more than they already are. This is self-evident in the all-lads-together bromance between Keith Fleming's Macbeth and Michael Moreland's Banquo, who thrust, swagger and sneer, even as the three Witches promise Macbeth the world. The Witches themselves are twisted, pandrogynous figures, played by three of the almost all male cast, who whip off their greatcoats to reveal tightly bound torsos. It is the same later, when Richard Conlon dons a skirt as the Gentlewoman who reveals a Lady Macbeth on the verge of mental collapse. It's as if the female of the species in its entirety are blessed with mystical powers beyond man's ken. With Lady Macduff excised completely, Leila Crerar's Lady M is the only actual woman onstage. Rather than play her

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh October 5th-May 4 th 2014 When a bust of the late trade union activist Jimmy Reid was removed from the Scottish National portrait gallery and taken around cross-general communities in Clydebank, where Reid co-led the famous ship-builders work-in on 1971 and 1972, it led to a voice drama being performed on the site of the former John Brown Shipyard on Mayday 2012. The performance was one of five major projects developed as part of Nation//Live, the Scottish National Portrait gallery's first major outreach project since the gallery's refurbishment. “Some people think museums are just about dead people,” explains the SNPG's Chief Outreach Officer, Robin Baillie, "and all about kings and queens, but we wanted to have people explore their own history and make it relevant to today.” Based around five themes that have shaped modern Scotland – Work, Union, Faith, Civil War and Roots – Nation//Live put artists into r