Coffee-Table Notes

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars A big red-brick inner city construction with towers of suitcases dotted across the stage becomes adventure playground, sanctuary and accidental prison for the fourteen year old boy at the heart of Lemn Sissay's stage adaptation of Benjamin Zephaniah's teenage novel. At times it looks like home, as Alem attempts to fit in with London's multi-cultural diaspora, from his foster family the Fitzgeralds to hyper-active bully Sweeney and his new best friend, Mustapha. At others it's as lonely as a prison cell, with Alem yearning for his own parents, caught in the crossfire of the Eritrean/Ethiopian war he's fled from. From flash-backs of Alem and his father gazing up at the North Star to a first experience of snow with the Fitzgeralds' daughter Ruth and discovering that very English chronicler of orphans, Charles Dickens, Alem embarks on an unflinchingly cruel rites of passage. While the judgement passed by social wo

National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh Three stars Given just how much we are living in an age of instant archiving via Instagram, Tumblr and whatever other social media app may have just gone live, Adrian Osmond's play about one man's rummaging through the emotional totems that shaped him is a particularly timely piece of work. As performed by Lung Ha's inclusive ensemble company in Maria Oller's site-specific tour around a building that holds a vast store of archival material that gives a hungry public several keys to the past. As John Edgar's ageing Peter goes through boxes with mobile phone wielding Sally to conjure up his past while a distracted Bridget loses sight of her little girl elsewhere, this is an infinitely more personal display than anything held off-limits in glass cases. This is something the bumptious Professor Stone's lecture on 'Thing Theory' makes clear. With Peter's younger self reappearing to attempt to woo his dr

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars The stream of 1980s hen night classics that form the pre-show fanfare for Denise Van Outen's solo turn in her new play co-written with Terry Ronald may be telling about what follows, but this is no dancing-in-the-aisles gin-fest. There's something endearing about Van Outen's portrait of Essex girl made good Stephanie as she seeks sanctuary in her posh hotel room following the launch of her latest fancy underwear range. As she confides in the audience like we're all having a girly chat, something vulnerable emerges beyond Samantha's brassy front, especially when her long lost first love gives her a virtual poke on Facebook. What follows in Michael Howcroft's production openly acknowledges its debt to Shirley Valentine,Willy Russell's monologue by a similar woman of a certain age on the verge of temptation. Things have moved on, however, for women like Stephanie, and there's a kind of trickle-down femini

“It's a literary and philosophical group,” says the voice of the late Edinburgh-based poet Paul Reekie in a faux-radio interview at the start of this 2CD, forty-four track retrospective from Vic Godard. As a singer/songwriter, Godard's band Subway Sect may have been forged by punk, but his adopted surname, taken from iconoclastic film-maker Jean Luc Godard, revealed a far smarter talent who quickly and quietly stepped aside from the melee to plough his own maverick furrow. On this respect, Godard's low-key singularity has slowly but surely cast him as an elder statesman reclaiming and refreshening his past. Reekie, like many people on this album, first encountered Godard with his band Subway Sect supporting The Clash at Edinburgh Playhouse on the 1977 White Riot tour. Reekie went on to become president of the Scottish branch of the Subway Sect fan club – the literary and philosophical group he waxes lyrical about here. As Godard's online sleeve-notes relate, the p

When Paul Haig, Malcolm Ross and co called time on Edinburgh's jangular art-rock funkateers Josef K following the release of both theirs and Alan Horne's Postcard label's sole album release, 'The Only Fun In Town', in 1981, Haig styled himself as the original European son, all electronic beats and artfully moody sidelong glances. In the NME, Paul Morley even went so far as to somewhat fancifully declare Haig as 'the face and sound of 1982' and the 'enigmatic fourth man' in a parallel universe imaginary New Pop quartet which also included Billy Mackenzie of The Associates, Simple Minds singer Jim Kerr and ABC front-man Martin Fry, and look how that worked out. As this two CD compendium of some thirty tracks recorded during a peripatetic tenure between 1982 and 1991at Michel Duval's chic post-modern Belgian label and some-time Factory Records affiliates, Les Disques du Crepescule, testifies to, Haig was more slippery than all of his then cont

It's not hard to see why Lemn Sissay was the obvious choice to adapt Benjamin Zephaniah's teenage novel, Refugee Boy, for the stage. Zephaniah's book tells the story of fourteen year old Ethiopian boy who is forced to flee his homeland following a violent civil war in his homeland. As Alem and his father take flight to London, a litany of thwarted attempts at asylum and institutional red tape ensues. While Sissay was born near Wigan in Lancashire, his mother too left Ethiopia for England. That was in 1966, when she was pregnant with Sissay, who, for most of the next two decades, was shunted from foster home to children's home by a care system that was bound by less explicitly hostile but equally bureaucratic measures. By his late teens, Sissay was working with a community publishing company in Manchester, and by twenty-one had published his first book of poems. Tender Fingers in A Clenched Fist was a street-smart collection that could be said to have picked u

Dundee Rep Three stars There's a whiff of anarchy about Agatha Christie's much loved murder mystery yarn, revived here by Kenny Miller, who puts Christie's island-set affair in an impossibly chic drawing room complete with catwalk, bar and a rhinoceros skeleton on top. It's as if by putting ten thoroughly ghastly archetypes of her age in the same room and bumping them off one by one, she's attempting to wipe out an entire society. The fact that the opening scene where the ten strangers meet for the first time resembles something out of Big Brother makes Christie's righteous indignation at such a motley crew of boy racers, corrupt coppers, dried-out doctors, well-heeled fops and career girls on the make even more justified. While none of this is pushed to the fore in an at times unintentionally funny rendition as Dundee Rep's ensemble cast navigate their way through Christie's cut-glass period demotic, it still simmers beneath the play's