Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars “If you could see inside my head you'd be terrified,” says a character in Christine Lindsay's relentless fifty-five minute dramatic collage of life behind bars for a group of female prisoners. As words and experiences explode into view in a litany of cut-up first-person monologues, that's exactly what Muriel Romanes' dynamic production for Stellar Quines feels like. With six actresses dressed in regulation track suit bottoms and t-shirts, each one plays a multitude of inmates and officers, with the names of each character flashed onto a network of TV monitors as they either talk out front, hang back in the shadows or else dangle from a climbing frame at the back of the stage. To point up the fact that many of these women's crimes are ones of circumstance as much as anything else, there are similarly crafted dispatches from the past, as suffragettes and women tried as witches recount their own experiences of persecutio

Collective Gallery, Edinburgh March 29-May 11 Kathryn Elkin doesn't want to say too much about 'Mutatis Mutandis', her new video installation that forms part of Edinburgh's Collective Gallery's Satellites programme. She doesn't want to give too much away, the Belfast-born purveyor of performance, video and text-based work says inbetween rummaging through the BBC archives as one of six Scotland-based artists given access to such a treasure trove of sound and vision with a view to creating new work from it. That Elkin has the time to explore such a major undertaking may in part be down to the fact that 'Mutatis Mutandis' is a stand-alone work that doesn't require her physical presence. “It's the first time I've really had to do a straight-forward exhibition,” says. Elkin, who, as well as her own film and performance work, has presented and curated her own events at CCA in Glasgow and elsewhere. “I'm not going to do any live w

Dundee Contemporary Arts March 29th-June 15 Permanent transience is a way of being for Navid Nurr, the Dutch/Iranian auteur who takes over DCA with an epic array of work that co-opts the temporary detritus of everyday life into a series of constructions that provoke as much as they play with the material to hand. In what he describes as an ongoing set of 'interimodules', a conflation of 'interim' and 'modules' that defines a state of impermanence beyond easy pigeon-holing, Nurr utilises an array of wheelie bins, water coolers, emergency blankets, slide projectors and the like to make deeply personal expressions riven from a very private world. “The art world is the only place where people listen to someone's personal and private language,” he says.” For his second ever UK solo show, and his largest in a public space to date, Nurr presents key works, including 'When doubt turns into destiny' (1993-2011), a surveillance video in which Nur

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars They may not have been tram related, but the roadworks blocking the bus stop on Lothian Road immediately following this fifty-minute 'rapid response' to the seven-year carry-on that has been the Edinburgh Trams project spoke volumes about the vagaries of civic planners who seemingly give little thought to the everyday consequences of their decisions. Put together by director Joe Douglas via a series of interviews with those in Edinburgh affected one way or another by the major city centre upheavals caused by the tram-works, what is effectively an extended dramatised vox pop is performed by actors Jonathan Holt and Nicola Roy, with musical accompaniment by composer and singer David Paul Jones on piano. In an initially comic but increasingly poignant series of exchanges related by the actors via recordings of the interviews relayed through mobile phone ear-pieces, we hear from the small business people whose livelihoods were a

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars As rom-coms go, Howard Brenton's reimagining of the love affair between twelfth century French philosopher Peter Abelard and his teenage student and nun Heloise d'Argenteuil is cleverer than anything Richard Curtis has ever written. Yet, as the play's title indicates since it was changed from the loftier In Extremis when first seen at Shakespeare's Globe in 2006, despite the prevalence of dialectical and theological arguments between Abelard, Heloise and their pious nemesis, Bernard of Clairvaux, a rom-com is exactly what Brenton has produced. Both Abelard and Heloise are a pair of precocious, constantly questioning firebrand's in John Dove's restaging of his original production for English Touring Theatre. It's as if they are living embodiments of the trees of knowledge that flank the action as the couple come together in secret. While the anti-establishment ideas of both are indulged before they meet, thei

Tim Barrow didn't know much about the 1707 Act of Union between Scotland and England before he decided to write a play about it. The Roslin born actor and writer was living in London, where he was in the throes of producing his low-budget road movie, The Inheritance, when he started to wonder how England and Scotland had come to be part of something called Great Britain. When he started to look into events leading up to the Act which may or may nor be done away with following the forthcoming independence referendum, Barrow was amazed at what he found. “It was so dramatic,” he declares. “It was way more fascinating and complex than I would have thought. There were all these amazing characters and corruption and intrigue in this fast-moving political sphere where all these figures had suddenly come to prominence before falling. You had people like Queen Anne, who was this ageing woman who didn't have an heir, despite having about seventeen pregnancies. You had Daniel Defoe

Claire Goose is used to playing strong but vulnerable women. Up until now, most of these have been on the small screen, be it in the Edinburgh-born actress's breakout role as Nurse Tina Seabrook in Casualty for three years between 1997 and 2000, or her forthcoming role as a woman who witnessed the murder of her mother aged seven in forthcoming mini-series, Undeniable. This week, however, audiences will get to see Goose in the flesh when she stars alongside Les Dennis in the stage adaptation of Peter James' crime thriller novel, The Perfect Murder, which opens at the King's Theatre in Glasgow tomorrow night. In the play, which forms one of James' best-selling Roy Grace series of stories, Goose plays the appositely named Joan Smiley, who has probably been married to her husband Victor just that little bit too long. As both parties decree to get rid of their other half forever, the feeling is clearly mutual. “He's so disappointed in her,” says Goose. “He goe