Coffee-Table Notes

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When Shakespeare wrote the lines that opens his island-set rom-com about how “If music be the food of love, give me excess of it,” it's unlikely that he envisaged a free jazz cacophony to accompany Orsino's attempts to make order of the words he's just plucked from the air, all while sipping a cup of tea. Yet that's exactly how Sean Holmes' long-running production of Twelfth Night begins in an audacious sound-led production for the inventive Filter company. What follows is a fast-moving ninety-minute romp that's more akin to 1980s alternative cabaret or the sort of comic free-for-alls pioneered by the late Ken Campbell's Roadshow, but which somehow manages to keep the essence of its source intact. So the storm is reported on the Shipping Forecast heard on a transistor radio, while clothes and hats are borrowed from the audience to allow Sarah Belcher's shipwrecked Viola to transform herself into Cesario.

It's a cosy scene in the Glasgow-based Glue Factory complex, where Kieran Hurley is rehearsing Rantin', the writer/performer's ambitious but still intimate look at the state of Scotland's assorted nations and the people who live in therm. There are lamps and tables on the rug of a living-room set-up lined with piles of books and records as assorted characters pass through, playing out their stories and looking for a place to call their own. The writer of rave generation meditation, Beats, and the 2011 London riots based Chalk Farm is himself onstage alongside that play's co-writer, playwright/performer Julia Taudevin. Also on board are nouveau folk musicians and singer/song-writers Drew Wright, aka Wounded Knee, and Over The Wall's Gav Prentice, who tell other stories through songs that are integral to the assorted narratives that criss-cross their way. Ranging from a drunk lying face down on the floor to a tartan-obsessed man on a plane, the sto

Two weeks ago, Louise Brealey was on a train coming up to Glasgow to begin rehearsals in the title role of Miss Julie at the city's Gorbals-based Citizens Theatre. Sitting opposite the quietly dynamic actress was a young woman who, without warning, asked her what it was like kissing Benedict Cumberbatch. The woman was referring to the now legendary scene in the first episode of the third series of Sherlock, Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatiss' twenty-first century reboot of Arthur Conan Doyle's equally seminal detective stories. In the programme, Brealey plays mousily put-upon pathologist Molly Hooper, whose massive crush on Sherlock, played by Cumberbatch as a dashingly dysfunctional socio-path, has slowly captured the viewers imaginations. With Sherlock apparently returning from the dead in this season, one of a myriad of possible explanations for his resurrection saw Cumberbatch crash heroically through the windows of Molly's St Bart's Hospital lab and fall into

Poet, playwright, political activist, critic Born October 7 1934; died January 9 2014 When Amiri Baraka, who has died aged 79 following a month in hospital, came to Glasgow in 2013 to speak and perform at the Freedom Is A Constant Struggle event, organised by left-field arts promoters, Arika, he brought with him a spirit of radicalism which a younger generation of artists and activists was hungry for. Sharing a platform with fellow poets Fred Moten and Sonia Sanchez and jazz musicians Henry Grimes and Wadada Leo Smith, here was a rare opportunity to witness a living embodiment of the links between black-powered art-forms and revolutionary politics that the event explored. Baraka had been at the frontline of this all of his life, be it as a young poet and magazine editor in Beat era Greenwich Village when he was still known as LeRoi Jones, as an acclaimed playwright whose play, Dutchman, won an Obie award in 1964, or as a figurehead of the Black Arts Movement calling for

Four stars Thrrp! is a 1987 comic book by Leo Baxendale, who created Minnie The Minx, The Bash Street Kids and a million other pop-eyed cartoon urchins. Published by the tellingly named Knockabout Comics, Thrrp! spins a near wordless yarn concerning twin brothers Spotty and Snotty Dick, who rid a town of 'a mysterious plague of Snotties and Bogies' by leading them out, Pied Piper fashion. With the book's title referring to the noise made by the towns-folk as they let rip en masse with particularly soggy follow-through farts, Thrrp! was hailed twenty years after its publication on Now Read This!, a blog by former chair of the Comic Creators Guild, Wim Wiacek's, as a 'gloriously gross, pantomomic splurt-fest' and 'the most lunatic slapstick to grace the music hall or comic page'. There is something of this in Usurper, the Edinburgh-based duo of Ali Robertson and Malcy Duff, who, for a decade now since disbanding their sludge-doom-racket combo, Gian

Summerhall, Edinburgh Three stars It's telling that a climate of austerity has fostered a thriving alternative cabaret scene that recalls the early 1980s. Unfortunately, the same era's politics of prejudice and greed have also made a comeback. Both trends have inspired a rash of independent shoe-string theatre companies to embrace such a loose-knit aesthetic and apply it to work that is instinctively dissenting in tone. Edinburgh's Tightlaced Theatre have done exactly that in Susanna Mulvihill's production of her own all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza that looks to Berlin's Weimar era for inspiration, but which at times sounds chillingly of the moment. The setting is Anke's club on the day that Adolf Hitler has seized power. With Anke and her staff who double up as the night's acts serving drinks to the audience sat at round wooden tables, what follows feels like eavesdropping on assorted intrigues while the all night party goes on. While

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Light and shade are everything in Tony Cownie's new production of Eugene O'Neill's mighty quasi-autobiographical epic. This is the case from the way the house lights are kept up on the audience during the bright first act of what initially looks like an everyday family breakfast among the Tyrone clan led by the patriarchal James, to the way James' penny-pinching dimming of the living room bulbs reflects the day's ever darkening mood. “I've never missed a performance yet,” says James at one point, and this is the case both onstage and off for an old ham whose acting career slid into mediocrity years before. James and his two sons, the feckless James Jr and the smart but consumptive Edmund are always 'on', especially when their hopped-up mother Mary is around. Mary's own mask of prim self-consciousness that hides a lifetime of disappointment slips after every hit. Years of gathered baggage has left