Coffee-Table Notes

The Arches, Glasgow Four stars There must be few things more dispiriting for a band if no-one turns out to see them play. But what if the band themselves don't turn up, leaving just the possibly deluded singer to bare his soul? No, this isn't the latest exercise in social engineering by The Fall's Mark E Smith, but is the premise of Bristol-based performer Sam Halmarack's hour-long dissection of pop mythology in miniature. There is no rise or fall here, only the bitter-sweet taste of never making it to cling to for comfort. Somehow, however, by getting the audience to join in on rudimentary glockenspiel, drums and keyboards as instructed by a home-made rehearsal video, Halmarack snatches triumph from adversity in a way that gives the Arches chair-stripped studio theatre the power of a stadium. On one level, surrounded by an array of space-age silver instruments, Halmarack comes over like an electro-pop John Shuttleworth. Yet, in his gold track-suit top and

Stuart Paterson never meant to write Cars and Boys, his new play which opens at Dundee Rep next week in a production by the Rep's artistic director, Philip Howard. The prolific playwright and screenwriter whose numerous Christmas plays are a staple of the festive theatre circuit had been working on another piece, which, by his own admission, “was going nowhere, and this one sort of crept up on me. I was going to the theatre a lot, and not really enjoying it. I saw plenty of ideas there, but what I wanted to do was something that was simple and human, and that wasn't just about words and dialogue, but was more about the sound of words as well.” Cars and Boys tells the story of Catherine Miller, the ageing matriarch of a big-time haulage company who has been calling the shots all of her life. Even after she suffers a stroke and is confined to a hospital bed, it seems, Catherine is determined to take charge of everyone and everything around her. “It's about the li

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

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

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

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