Coffee-Table Notes

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars Now that actor David Suchet has completed his stint in the title role of Agatha Christie's Belgian detective Hercule Poirot on TV, if the powers that be ever consider repeating the exercise, they could do worse than put Robert Powell behind the master sleuth's inscrutable moustache. In the Agatha Christie Theatre Company's touring look at the grand mistress of crime's first ever play, Powell plays Poirot with a raised eyebrow and a deadly sense of fun that works a treat. When top-notch physicist Sir Claud Amory is murdered in a house full of guests where he has also invited Poirot to reveal who stole his secret formula, a labyrinthine world of blackmail and international spy rings is uncovered, even as those gathered pass the incriminating after dinner coffee cups around quicker than a magician. Written and set twelve years after World War One, the country-house conspiracy the play exposes may come equipped with impecc

Three stars Matthew Collings has become a quietly ubiquitous presence in Edinburgh's off-piste electronische live diaspora over the last couple of years. This latest release in the composer and sound artist's Sketches for Albinos guise was forged and recorded during snatched moments during time spent in Iceland, and comes on 12” vinyl with a photographic book. The seven tracks make for a curiously domestic-sounding affair, with the treated guitar and breathy, just-out-of-bed vocal of the opening 'I Have So Many Things I've Always Wanted' seemingly pulsed along by trolls playing a toy orchestra. The crudely cut-n'-pasted drum clatter of 'I Think We Grew Again' comes on like a lo-fi John Barry and a frosty rather than chilled take on The Orb's 'Little Fluffy Clouds' Beyond the drone, snatches of conversations dip in and out of view, A woman describes herself opening the door and stepping into the sunshine. Toddlers sing some

When Told By An Idiot director Paul Hunter told writer Carl Grose that he'd appeared on 1970s Saturday morning TV madhouse Tiswas when he was eight years old, Grose thought he'd struck gold. The pair had decided to do a show based around the curious phenomenon of shows such as Tiswas which, while ostensibly made for children, were steeped in some very grown-up shades of anarchy in a way that made them cult viewing for students even as some parents changed channels to the BBC's altogether safer world of Noel Edmonds and Swap Shop. Hunter, alas, had come out of the experience unscarred. “I thought initially we were going to making a show about our director exorcising his demons,” says Grose, “but as it turned out, he was mates with someone who's dad was a cameraman or something like that, and he said he remembers being in the cage and having water thrown over him, but after that it all gets a bit hazy, which was really rather frustrating for me.” There is an ex

PalaceTheatre, Kilmarnock Four stars There's a deep-set poignancy in David Harrower's own production of his play about a brother and sister's reconciliation that feels more fully realised than when it was first produced in 2011. This may or may not have something to do with the fact that Harrower's revival for Borderline Theatre Company is touring the country in a way it hasn't done before, but either way it captures a splintered sense of intimacy that seems to sum up the state of a nation in flux, whereby the personal and the political and the local and the global are bound together. Athol and Morna may have both been brought up in Edinburgh, but even beyond their fourteen year estrangement, they are worlds apart. Where Morna gets by cleaning rich people's houses inbetween bringing up her son, Joshua, Athol runs his own construction business from his Renfrewshire living room opposite the house where the Glasgow Airport terrorists holed up prior t

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