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Stella Feehily - This May Hurt A Bit

When theatre director Max Stafford-Clark suffered a massive stroke in 2006, his artistic and personal partner, playwright Stella Feehily, became the theatrical firebrand and former artistic director of the Traverse Theatre's full-time carer. Eight years on, the accidental result of this is This May Hurt A Bit, an angry, funny and utterly humane dissection of the NHS in light of the Westminster coalition government's ongoing attempt to destroy one of the UK's greatest assets. “We used the NHS regularly,” says Feehily, whose play arrives at the Traverse next week in a production by a recovered Stafford-Clark for Out of Joint, the company he co-founded in 1998. “We had the patient experience, the near death experience and the chaos experience. We've seen the food, the bad, and not the ugly, but pretty close, but I would never have thought about writing a play about the NHS without that experience.” This May Hurt A Bit charts the experience of an elderly patient

Never Try This At Home

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars Now the 1970s have been tarnished forever by the behaviour, alleged or otherwise, of some of the era's biggest show-business stars, it's as hard to satirise its excesses as it is to know how to replace all the endless retro Bank Holiday telly shows it spawned. Yet that's exactly what the Told By An Idiot company attempt to do in a show that reimagines the custard pie throwing anarchy of Saturday morning children's TV as the accident waiting to happen it probably was. It starts with our host Niall Ashdown setting up a student union vibe with the framing device of gathering the surviving presenters of a Tiswas-like show called Shushi, which came to an abrupt end in 1979 when its sole female presenter attempted suicide live on air. As a series of live rewinds reveal a culture of casual misogyny, cultural stereotyping and egomania, Ashdown interviews each of Shushi's alumni in turn, including its female survivor. As

Union

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It takes a thunder-crash to do away with the giant projected Union Jack that fills the stage at the opening of Tim Barrow's new play concerning the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland. Whether such a powerful symbol is any indicator of how the Act may or may not be similarly washed away following the independence referendum this coming September remains to be seen. Either way, Barrow's ambitious piece of imagined history makes for a rollicking political romp involving poet Allan Ramsay, spy turned novelist Daniel Defoe and a roll-call of low-lifes and high-flyers from Edinburgh and London. It's the way these two worlds rub up against each other sexually and politically that makes Mark Thomson's production so thrilling. With dynamic use of Andrzej Goulding's video design and Philip Pinsky's harpsichord-led underscore, things work best when the exchanges among the ten-strong ensemble are at their most

Black Coffee

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

Sketches for Albinos – fireworks and the dead city radio (mini50)

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

Never Try This At Home - Told By An Idiot Get Messy

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

A Slow Air

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