Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Irish actor Barry McGovern has long proved to be the master of interpreting the twentieth century's most iconic writer, ever since he appeared on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1986 in I'll Go On. This solo adaptation of Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable, was revived for the Edinburgh International Festival in 2013 following a rendition of Beckett's novella, Watt, the previous year. So to hear McGovern read a seventy-five minute selection of Beckett's prose and poetry as the culmination of Uncensored Life, a weekend-long celebration of publisher John Calder, who first introduced the world to Beckett, William Burroughs and many other literary giants, is a thrill indeed. McGovern stands with a folder full of photocopied texts, and begins solemnly, only for Beckett's words to open out their meditations on mortality to reveal a master comedian at work. With work dating back to Beckett's e

Princes St Gardens, Edinburgh Three stars It's nearly thirty years since Bill Bryden cast David Hayman as a radical Jesus processing through the streets of Glasgow for The Holy City, his contemporary television rendering of the Passion. Something of that play's spirit seems to have trickled down into Rob Drummond's own up to the minute version, which sees an authoritarian regime campaigning for a No vote in a forthcoming referendum. Having already reduced crime figures by bringing back the death penalty, political figurehead Herod, his spin doctor McKayfus and police chief Pilate are gunning for charismatic community spokesman and Yes poster boy Jesus. Only when their nemesis is set up on trumped up terrorist charges do Herod and his cronies appear to gain the upper hand. Opening with two uniformed policemen flanking the Ross Bandstand, Suzanne Lofthus' open-air production for the Cutting Edge Theatre Company in association with the Princes Street Easter

 As it's name suggests, the Tectonics festival that runs over a long May weekend in Glasgow taps into the seismic shifts that have occurred across the entire spectrum of experimental music over the last decade. Instigated by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's former Chief Conductor and current Principal Guest Conductor Ilan Volkov, who is currently the Chief Conductor and Musical Director of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, alongside AC Projects' Alasdair Campbell, the man behind the Le Weekend and Counterflows festivals, this second edition of Tectonics pulls together some of the world's leading experimental composers alongside a younger generation of musical free-thinkers   from a world where rock, art and classical music collide. “There are so many strands of music now, and I think it's great to have people from different backgrounds working like this,” Volkov says from Reykjavik, where the Icelandic arm of Tectonics has just opened. “We've been doing this

McLellan Galleries, Glasgow until April 21st Three stars It's the soft-core gloss that sucks you in first in 'Raspberry Poser', the fourteen-minute billboard-size video projection that forms the heart of Jordan Wolfson's life and death fusion of high-end corporate ad-land stylings and provocative animations. A CGI-generated HIV virus bounces around the neighbourhood like an ever-pulsating nail-bomb, multiplying in a regimented choreographic display that ricochets around the chi-chi bathrooms and bedrooms of the privileged to a soundtrack of Beyonce's 'Beautiful Nightmare'. As a flipside to this,  a condom full of chocolate hearts seems to be serving up something sweeter, but possibly more sickly. A cartoon bad boy looking somewhere between Hanna-Barbera doing Dr Seuss and Sergio Aragones reinventing Dennis The Menace for the counter-cultural age asks the viewer if they think he's wealthy or gay, then proceeds to throttle himself or else cut out his innar

The Common Guild, Glasgow until June 7th Three stars in case of emergency, natural disaster, nuclear fall-out or biblical engulfment, Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri is probably a very good man to have on your side. By stocking up on blankets, fire extinguishers, boxes of matches, bottles of water and assorted toiletries, then assembling them in assorted sculptural show-and-tells on silver-blanketed pallets in the town-house corridors of The Common Guild, Kuri takes a practical and possibly life-saving survival kit, then reassembles it in a way that suggests it's an in-storage archive with everything in its place and a place for everything, even as it awaits a situation in which it can be used. Downstairs, alongside the two pallet-based pieces, a row of metal compartments containing folded up and piled up blankets resembles both a charity shop and a call centre store-room, the array of unopened goods on the stairs themselves seem to awaiting the cleaner to arrive. Upst

When Paul Allen's stage version of Brassed Off appeared in 1998, two years after Mark Herman's film about a small Yorkshire community's efforts to win a brass band competition was first released, the Miners Strike that formed the story's backdrop was still a fresh wound on Britain's landscape. Thirty years after a civil war which became a defining moment of Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's calculated assault on trade unions, the play's current revival for a tour which arrives in Edinburgh next week is an all too fitting reminder of one of the late twentieth century's most inglorious eras. The fact that Brassed Off makes its point about how an entire community can be decimated by enforced pit closures through both a romantic comedy and the unifying power of music is testament to the play's staying power. Yorkshire-born Allen, whose work in popular theatre has seen him forge close links with Alan Ayckbourn and the Scarborough-based St

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It may be a tad early in the year for Shakespeare's sunniest rom-com to come blinking into the light, but that hasn't stopped the all-male Propeller company from hitting the road with the frothiest of double bills, with Ed Hall's productions of the Dream and The Comedy of Errors playing the King's on alternate nights. Neither does it stop the array of long-john clad fairies, who drape themselves about a netting-lined stage before a stripey-tighted Robin Goodfellow, as Puck is credited here, bursts out of a box feet first as if from an upside-down toybox come to life. As the cast of fourteen flit between the play's three worlds, what follows resembles a 1980s alternative comedy troupe doing an elaborately choreographed role-play. At first, Joseph Chance's Robin seems to call the shots, click-clacking chaos into the four young lovers all-night exploits with a wooden rattle. Soon it's Darrell Brockis' Oberon