Coffee-Table Notes

The opening of the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow next month has inspired a welter of extra-curricular artistic activity. One of the first out of the traps is Sports Day, a huge community show at the city's Citizens Theatre, which features a compendium of new short pieces penned by major Scottish writers, including Peter Arnott, Linda McLean, Douglas Maxwell and Julia Taudevin, all based around a school sports day. These will be accompanied by a series of new songs written by equally major song-writers and musicians such as Vaselines vocalist Eugene Kelly, Sparrow and the Workshop's Jill O'Sullivan, John Kielty and Claire McKenzie. All this will be linked by a series of scenes featuring River City star Joyce Falconer as the school's janitor. For anyone studying the form, the stats go like this. Sixty non-professional performers drawn from assorted Citizens-based community groups will perform some seventeen new plays accompanied by twelve brand new songs. With only

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It looks like someone's been stranded at the drive-in at the start of the first night of this weekend's bite-size tour through some of American playwright Sam Shepard's little-seen works by Presence Theatre and Actors Touring Company in association with the Belgrade, Coventry. There's some bump n' grind bar-room blues playing, and, in front of a back-lit big-screen, some drifter in a sleeping bag remains comatose throughout the screening of Shirley Clarke's 1981 video of Savage/Love, Shepard's dramatic collaboration with actor/director Joseph Chaikin. As the title suggests, Shepard and Chaikin's twenty-five minute masterpiece, performed to the camera by Chaikin himself with jazz duo accompaniment, is a relentless incantation on the highs and lows of obsessive amour. On video, it becomes both an impressionistic interpretation by Clarke and an essential document of Shepard and Chaikin's fertile collaboration, whic

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars One of the most remarkable things about Liz Lochhead's 1998 play is that, apart from a 2011 version in the Czech Republic, it has never been adapted for film or television. Here, after all, is a funny and utterly serious look at an independent career woman's mid-life struggle with life, love and a biological clock that is ticking ever louder, which arrived onstage just a few short months after Sex and the City was first aired. Throw in a gay best friend, a well-buffed toy boy and an ex husband with a girlfriend half his age, and, in the right hands, it could have made for a fine mini-series at the very least. As it is, Lochhead's edgy comedy concerning thirty-nine year old celebrity Glasgow hairdresser Barbs Marshall has become a stage staple that taps into the contradictions of a free-spirited twenty-first century woman who seemingly has it all with wit, style and some very grown-up humour. Liz Carruthers' new production for Pitloc

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars The newspaper headlines that surround the estranged family in Sudha Bhuchar's new play for Tamasha Theatre Company may scream of how a young Scottish/Pakistani girl was kidnapped by her father, but the truth is infinitely more complex. Drawn from interviews with the real life mother, father and daughter whose faces were seen all over the world in 2006 when just such an incident occurred, Bhuchar's play changes their names to try and explain the back-story to what happened. In Philip Osment's simple but stately production, Farhan and Suzy tell how they met and fell in love in Glasgow, with a teenage Suzy converting to Islam as they marry and have children, including their youngest, Ghazala. As personal and cultural tensions coming to the fore, the marriage falls apart and Farhan returns to Pakistan, with Ghazala moving across continents to be with one parent or the other. This is a sad, emotionally raw story that is laid bare without sentimen

When Sam Shepard came to Glasgow last year to watch the last night of the Citizens Theatre's production of his 1980 play, True West, the presence of someone who was both Hollywood acting royalty and counter-cultural legend packed out the house. With roots in rock and roll, Beat poetry and America's Wild West mythology, here was an underground icon and self-styled literary outlaw who could be nominated for an Oscar for his appearance in The Right Stuff even as he scripted Paris, Texas for fellow traveller, Wim Wenders.  Yet despite such a pedigree which has embraced the hip while flirting with the commercial, Shepard's stage works are rarely seen in these parts. Prior to True West, the last time one of Shepard's plays was seen on a main stage in Scotland was back in 2009, when the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh produced his 1978 piece, Curse of the Starving Class. The arrival of Chorale – A Sam Shepard Roadshow in Edinburgh, then, provides an all too

Perth Concert Hall Three stars On the surface, barely anything is made explicit in Joe Orton's dark 1960s comedy of psycho-sexual menace. Every panting innuendo between Sloane's amoral cuckoo in the nest and the middle-aged brother and sister he flits coldly between, however, promises to spill over from Sunday tabloid mundanity into something bigger with every utterance. Now half a century old, Orton's first full-length play teased the Lord Chamberlain, then in charge of what could and couldn't be said onstage, with a taboo-busting mix of contemporary pop buzzwords and stylised baroque. This ages well in London Classic Theatre's touring revival, which arrived at Perth Festival for a one-night stand on Monday night, setting out its store on a jumble of upside-down brass bed-posts and awkwardly angled wardrobes hiding a multitude of sins. Into this mess steps Paul Dandys' sexually ambivalent Sloane, a psycho-pathic piece of rough trade who manages to wrap both his

When Molly Campbell and her mum Louise Fairlie went to see Tamasha Theatre Company's production of Sudha Buchar's play, My Name Is..., it was an emotional experience. My Name Is..., which tours to the Tron Theatre in Glasgow this weekend as part of the theatre's Mayfesto season, gets behind the sensationalist headlines that  told how, in 2006, the then twelve year old Campbell was apparently snatched from her home on the Isle of Lewis by her father, Sajad, and taken to his native Pakistan. A few days later, Campbell spoke to the world in a press conference to say that, far from being kidnapped, she had gone to Pakistan of her own accord, and would now rather be known as Misbah. Buchar's play, developed over six years after interviewing all three members of the estranged family, aims to set the record straight about a story that wasn't about race or religion, but was more about the painfully familiar fall-out when two people stop being in love, and what happens when