Coffee-Table Notes

When Tightlaced Theatre and Sporadic Music's co-production of Susanna Mulvihill's new play, 1933: Eine Nacht Im Kabarett, opens in Edinburgh's Summerhall complex in a couple of weeks, it not only marks the opening of 2014's home-grown theatre season. The show also points to a fertile under-the-radar arts scene that exists in the capital via a network of young companies working in venues outwith traditional theatre spaces. This has recently manifested itself, both in the In Your Face Theatre company's recent revival of the stage version of Irvine Welsh's novel, Trainspotting at Out of the Blue's converted drill hall home, and in the Village Pub Theatre's ongoing presentations of new work in the back room of the bar the company have adopted as home. Previously, the Siege Perilous company have produced work at the Malmaison Hotel on the Shore, while Creative Electric have been devising experimental work with young people in the bowels of the Bongo Clu

When novelist Alasdair Gray suggested that we should 'Work as if you were in the early days of a better nation' on the frontispiece of his 1983 short-story collection, Unlikely Stories, Mostly, the landscape he imagined might have looked and sounded a little like Scot:Lands. The New Year's Day centrepiece of Edinburgh's Hogmanay programme, Scot:Lands presents a microcosm of Scottish music and performance that both looks to its cultural roots for inspiration while remaining utterly contemporary as it is performed in the throbbing heart of the capital city. With nine unnamed but iconic venues in Edinburgh's Old Town hosting some imagined new 'Land', each features a rolling programme of international artists curated by venues and figureheads from a particular area. So where High:Land will be run by The Ceilidh House venue in Ullapool, Heid:Land will be curated by The Pathhead Music Collective from Fife. While the former will feature the likes of radical f

The Sexual Objects – Feels With Me (Eyelids in the Rain) Five stars For seekers who know, Davy Henderson is the greatest rock poet on the planet, and has been ever since he exploded into Edinburgh's post-punk art/pop scene with the short-lived but fast-burning Fire Engines. High-concept pop entryism followed with Win before the guitar shards of The Nectarine No.9 got things back to basics. Henderson's latest vehicle is an altogether warmer affair, and this first recorded sighting since 2011 debut vinyl long-player, 'Cucumber', retains its loose-knit appeal. A download-only parallel universe smash hit, it opens with Simon Smeeton's acoustic guitar intro before ooh-oohing its way into a gorgeous harmony-kissed instant classic that warns against false prophets before bursting into raptures of its own making. There are shades here of '22 Blue', an early lament by The Nectarines, which Henderson, Smeeton, drummer Iain Holford and bass player Douglas

Out of the Blue, Edinburgh Four stars It's like stepping into a time-warp even before the young and tellingly named In Your Face Theatre company's revival of Harry Gibson's stage version of Irvine Welsh's seminal debut novel properly begins. The early 1990s techno that plays prior to the show in a venue dark and expansive enough to fool the audience into thinking they've stumbled on some dilapidated warehouse in the middle of nowhere has something to do with it. So too do the studiedly observed re-creations of the poster images from Danny Boyle's 1996 film version on the programme of Christopher Rybak and Craig Boyle's promenade production, which arrives just a few months shy of the play's twentieth anniversary. There, however, similarities end, as Rybak and Boyle's chorus of glow-stick wielding hoodied-up grim reapers lead us through a ghost train vision of Mark Renton and his assorted drug buddies in what is essentially a series of cut-u

When Jimmy Chisholm was asked to direct Aladdin, this year's top of the range pantomime at the King's Theatre, Glasgow, it was a marriage made in back-stage heaven. Chisholm, after all, is an actor who, over some forty years experience, has done pretty much every Christmas show going. Not only has he written and directed his own pantomimes in Stirling and, with Ian Grieve, in Perth, but he has played dame on the stage of the King's itself. The King's is the big one, after all, with great expectations from all involved. As such a seasoned performer, Chisholm will understand only too well what his starry cast have to deal with in their efforts to make Aladdin the biggest and brightest show in town. It will have helped too that an actors short-hand will already exist between him and the likes of TV favourites Karen Dunbar, who plays the Genie of the Ring, Still Game's Gavin Mitchell, as the evil Abanazar, and Widow Twankey herself, played by Gordon Cooper. C

Naomi Wilkinson – Theatre designer Born, August 16th 1963; died November 18th 2013 Naomi Wilkinson, who has been found dead at her home in Islington, North London, was a singular stage designer with a vision and flair that was a natural fit for large-scale shows, but which could also be applied to smaller studio pieces. In the former, there were few bigger than Dominic Hill's epic production of Peer Gynt, which began its life at Dundee Rep during Hill's tenure there as co-artistic director. In the latter, a box that was part kennel, part museum exhibit was enough to bring atmosphere to an already chilling play such as Hattie Naylor's play about a young boy living wild on the streets of Moscow, Ivan and the Dogs, which toured to the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh. Gifted with a strong visual aesthetic from an early age, Wilkinson initially studied fine art in Bristol before being increasingly drawn to stage design, going on to study it on the Motley Theatre Design

This time last year, the artistic team at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh were preparing celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of Scotland's new writing hub. While a certain amount of looking back over a colourful history since its beginnings in a former High Street tenement brothel turned 1960s bohemian hub was necessary, it was the future that concerned artistic director Orla O'Loughlin and associate director Hamish Pirie the most. With this in mind, the Traverse 50 was launched. This initiative initially saw some 630 writers with no more than two professionally produced plays under their belts respond to an open call for 500-word micro-plays inspired by Edinburgh's capital city. From these, some fifty writers were selected to take part in a year-long programme of events. This was kicked off by Plays For Edinburgh, a performed reading of all fifty selected plays by a professional cast that took place over one long but exhilarating evening