Coffee-Table Notes

Dundee Rep Four stars In a bombed-out wasteland, the body laid out among the rubble looks set to live on as the clamour of warfare sounds out inbetween the voices of contemporary apologists for war. It's the dead that speak first, however, as the slain Polydorus comes crawling from the wreckage in Amanda Gaughan's up close and personal production of Frank McGuinness' pared down version of Euripides' post Trojan War anti-conflict classic. It's the image of the dead that stand out overall, in fact, as Irene Macdougall's electrifying Hecuba rises up against those who sacrificed her daughter Polyxena and murdered her son in a tit for tat revenge killing that will either provoke further reprisals or else end all wars forever. While history has shown how things have actually worked out in that respect time and again, Gaughan goes for the jugular, with the actors unleashed onto Leila Kalbassi's broken breeze-block styled set like a battered nation in

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars William and Rose were lovers for life. When both are in the dotage, Rose dies, leaving William alone with only the ticking clock, a painful absence and a house full of memories to help get him through his own final days. Death, however, is not the end in Theatre Ad Finitum's wordless meditation on love, loss and lives lived and shared with others. Using masks, choreography and a live accordion score to provide its heartbeat, George Mann's production takes the treasured emotional totems of that life – a tea cup, a letter, a pearl necklace and a summer dress – and transports William to his youth, when every moment of his romance with Rose was a great big adventure. This is touchingly played by Mann as William alongside fellow performers and devisers, Deborah Pugh, who plays Rose, and Kim Heron who provides the score to a show first seen on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2011, and which now forms part of this year's Lumina

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars In a cluttered room, a young woman called Lilly takes stock of her and her mother Elspeth's lives in this new collaboration between the young Strange Theatre company and the slightly more seasoned Plutot La Vie troupe. Where Elspeth's life was once perfectly choreographed, first as a dancer, then running a dance school, as she gets older and her mental faculties fade, she becomes ever more dependent on Lilly to look after her. High-flying career girl Lilly's own life collapses into chaos as she is forced to care for her mother full-time before Elspeth's inevitable demise. As Tory Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt of all people suggests that care for the elderly in the UK is a '”national shame”, Alzheimer's-based plays are at a premium. This latest effort, scripted by Morna Pearson with the company and currently touring as part of the Luminate festival of creative ageing possesses a certain quirky charm in its telli

Summerhall, Edinburgh Three stars If a fire alarm such as the one that briefly delayed the first night of the ConFAB company's new musical theatre collaboration with Dance HQ had affected the show's subject, one suspects all involved would have merely shrugged and got on with it. Because writer/director Rachel Jury and composer Andrew Cruikshank's homage to London's legendary lesbian nightclub, The Gateways, reveals a clandestine world where standing proud and defiant was everything. In the 1950s, before gay bars and discos broke cover, the King's Road basement club was the only fun in town, be it for sharp-suited women, Chelsea bohemians or the assorted movie stars who frequented its smoky interior. Utilising a mammoth twenty-five strong cast that includes singer/song-writer Lorna Brooks and politician Rosie Kane, plus a four-piece band led by Cruikshank on double bass, Jury and co have attempted to capture the speak-easy hedonism of The Gates via a loose

CCA, Glasgow Three stars A man sits onstage at a candle-lit table adorned with wine goblets and other dinner party accoutrements. Dressed up in eighteenth century finery, the man could be some kind of role-playing maitre d if it weren't for the leather trousers and shades that give him more the air of the Marquis de Sade. As it turns out, both are true in Martin Lewton's new piece for Theatre North that forms part of Glasgay!'s twentieth anniversary programme. Newton comes on dressed in suit and tie in what turns out to be an approximation of a fetish dungeon in Andrew McKinnon's production, though over the next fifty minutes he will deliver his unflinchingly intimate monologue almost naked while chained to a wooden St Andrew's Cross as McKinnon himself takes on the role of the de Sade like gate-keeper. As Lewton unveils his fantasy of the man he calls Fat Handel and his imagined lust for a boy castrato, McKinnon administers assorted physical aides to

September 28th-November 9 th Thinking local and acting globally is increasingly becoming the CCA's raison d'etre. No more is this evident than in these twin solo shows by two very different artists working in film. Glasgow-based Forrest looks to Jean Paul Sartre's novel, 'Nausea' to question notions of narrative between film and text she first explored after being awarded the Margaret Tait Residency in 2012, which resulted in Forrest's film homage to Tait, that now. Al Solh, meanwhile, follows on from Dinosaurs, an investigation of independent American film-maker John Cassavetes, with an exploration of the recent Syrian immigration to Beirut following the civil war in a work that couldn't be more current. With both artists questioning the very notion of how such big ideas can be represented on film, and with a sense of place at the heart of their work, a programme of older film-works by both artists will also be screened alongside the two new comm

Just like the Edinburgh International Festival and Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Dublin Theatre Festival forms part of a burgeoning festival season in Dublin, and the two-way traffic between Edinburgh and Dublin seems to be increasing every year. While The Wooster Group's Hamlet formed part of EIF's programme this year following a stint at DTF in 2012, singer and performer Camille O'Sullivan brought her Herald Angel winning solo take on Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece for a run at Dublin's O'Reilly Theatre following its Edinburgh premiere the previous year. This was a major turning point for O'Sullivan, whose career began on the Fringe, and it's significant that two shows from this year's Edinburgh Fringe appeared at DTF. Actors Touring Company's production of David Greig's play, The Events, which opened at the Traverse, appeared at the Peacock, while Australian company CIRCA's Wunderkammer, which also picked up a Herald Angel during