Coffee-Table Notes

For some time now, the University of Edinburgh-based Dialogues initiative has hosted residencies by a stream of major international figures in experimental music. The likes of guitarist Fred Frith, saxophonist Evan Parker and sound recordist Chris Watson have all worked closely with composers and musicians from the University prior to concerts which has seen them play solo as well as with the group now styled as Edimpro. The latest of these featuring veteran improvising vocalist Phil Minton with double bassist and long-term collaborator Simon H Fell was a game of two halves. The first opened with a chirrup and a whistle, as Minton, perched on a chair with his legs dangling, launched into a tightly wrought set of shrieks, yelps, gurgles and howls that moves language beyond words to something more primal. There's a call and response of sorts with fell, who at one point uses to bows on his instrument to create a self-reflexive counterpoint that's feverishly controll

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars The scarlet drapes that hang down centre-stage surrounded by even more vivid rouge-flamed walls hide a multitude of sins at the start of Lucy Bailey's touring revival of her 2009 production of Frederick Knott's labyrinthine 1950s pot-boiler immortalised in Alfred Hitchcock's film. Such ravishing décor might well be engulfing an opulently realised Greek tragedy if it weren't for the elegant London town-house accoutrements and a tellingly red telephone that screams emergency as it furnishes the scene of the crime. That crime isn't one of passion, but, as retired tennis star Tony Wendice plots to murder his faithless wife Sheila, who, as played by Kelly Hotten, has been conducting a long-distance amour with Philip Cairns' crime writer Max, it's one of pathologically driven, ice-cold calculation. That Tony blackmails an old school chum turned con-man to do the deed by proxy only serves to make it nastier, as

When David Harrower's play, Blackbird, first appeared at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2005 in a production by German maestro, Peter Stein, it provoked shock-waves among audiences who witnessed it. Given that Harrower's play was a blistering study of a reunion between a fifty-five year old man and a twenty-seven year old woman who had a sexual relationship fifteen years before when the woman was twelve, such a reaction was understandable. However serious a dissection of an ambiguous liaison the play undoubtedly was, it was the production's closing scene that proved the most jaw-dropping. In contrast to the play's over-riding intimacy, Stein grafted on an unscripted five-minute finale in which the office block store-room where the action took place was transformed into an underground car park. Here, an actual car was driven onstage as the play's two protagonists wrestled to a power ballad soundtrack, so the whole thing resembled a 1980s MTV video epic

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars If love is a bourgeois concept, as was suggested in the song of the same name by Pet Shop Boys last year, there are few plays that articulate it better than Noel Coward's dissection of unhappy honeymooners which he knocked out over a long weekend in 1930. Martin Duncan's production places a noticeably younger and sexier Amanda and Elyot on the adjoining balconies of designer Francis O'Connor's art deco erection of a white and pink hotel. Here each treats their new spouses Victor and Sybil with a mix of desperation and disdain, even as they cling to such classic mismatches for comfort before unfinished business of an altogether less ordinary kind comes calling. All this may be archly played by John Hopkins as a narcissistic Elyot and Kirsty Besterman as a restlessly coquettish Amanda, but there's a brutal ennui at play too as the pair thrive on their own indulgent self-destruction. This mainly fires into life in the

It's all too fitting that Julien Temple's 2010 documentary, 'Requiem For Detroit?', is being screened at The Arches as part of this year's Glasgow Film Festival prior to a night hosted by Pressure that features Detroit Techno legend Carl Craig. It's not just reflecting the two cities' mutual interest in club culture. Nor does the fact that the event takes place in the former derelict space beneath Central Station that became an institution in any way compare with the near apocalyptic collapse of Detroit's once thriving industrial epicentre depicted by Temple in his trademark cut n'paste fashion forged in his years filming the Sex Pistols. Yet, as other film-makers have recognised, there are similarities. Detroit's success was built on the automobile industry, a gas-guzzling personification of what in his epic verse poet Heathcote Williams dubbed 'Autogedden', a title later appropriated by eco-primitive pop star, Julian Cope. Glasgow

Edinburgh Playhouse Three stars When gravel-voiced blues singer Rod Stewart sold his soul for a life of pop excess accompanied by a roll-call of ever-blonder accessories, it's unlikely that the devil made him do it. That's exactly what happens, however, to Stuart, the geeky hero of Ben Elton's jukebox musical of Rod the Mod's hits which has been on the go for a decade now. Stuart works in a garage in Detroit, where he fawns over the equally bookish Mary. An intervention by a peroxided Satan not only gives Stuart the confidence and star quality of his name-sake, but his promiscuous proclivities as well. Taken under the wing of archetypal rock chick Baby Jane, Stuart and his new band blaze a trail to the top, but there's a little part of Stuart that's always the nice guy. If all this sounds ever so slightly ridiculous, bear in mind that Elton probably knows his Goethe and his Marlowe as well as Peter Cook and Dudley Moore did when they reimagined the

CCA, Glasgow until March 23 rd . Four stars It's the sound of clock-clacking typewriter keys that strikes you first stepping into this three-way split of a show which, in different ways, reflects on the colour of memory. In the case of all three artists, who have a long history with the CCA building when it housed the Third Eye Centre, it reveals – or not - how that memory, collective or otherwise, can be moulded, shaped and customised to order, be it through preservation, wilful negation or else, in Boyce's case, via a gloriously messy reclaiming of half-hidden pop-cultural detritus. The typing noises come from Buchler's ''I am going to use this projector', in which a cassette recorder hung on the wall plays a recording of someone typing out a transcription of the rollingly endless text that hangs next to it. Hiller too shows how free-association can be harnessed in 'Measure by Measure Section II', which preserves the ashes of paintings burnt