Coffee-Table Notes

The sad passing last week of David MacLennan robbed the theatre world of one of its true gentlemen and artistic pioneers of several decades standing. It also meant that the founder of the A Play, A Pie and A Pint lunchtime theatre phenomenon, founder of Wildcat and co-founder of 7:84 would not be able to witness what has turned out to be his final project. The Great Yes, No, Don't Know, Five Minute Theatre Show was conceived and curated by MacLennan with playwright David Greig as a theatrical look at the forthcoming referendum on Scottish independence. With Greig a Yes supporter and MacLennan having come out for a No vote, it wasn't the most natural of alliances. As the two most diplomatic advocates of their respective causes in the arts, however, mutual respect has been the key to the end result. As the title suggests, Greig and MacLennan's collaboration with the National Theatre of Scotland follows the NTS' previous Five Minute Theatre shows, in which the public a

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It doesn't matter how wilfully potty-mouthed it gets, there's something delightfully and reassuringly old-fashioned about Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx and Jeff Whitty's scurrilous Sesame Street inspired hit puppet musical. This is despite a set of furry characters who not only swear, but have one-night stands, screw each other over and mess up their lives in a manner that would make Kermit The Frog blush. As wide-eyed but unemployed English graduate Princeton moves into the down-at-heel but colourful multi-cultural boulevard of broken dreams that gives the show its title, the monsters that occupy it are either porn-crazed sociopaths, in-the-closet queens, slutty night-club singers or, like Princeton's neighbour Kate, a love-lorn school-teacher. The people aren't much better, not even down on his luck real life child star of kids TV favourite Diff'rent Strokes Gary Coleman, here played by a woman. Cressida Carre's touring r

Rutherglen Town Hall Five stars By opting to reconvene after a decade to perform their 1995 Saint Jack album in full, Davy Henderson's Edinburgh-sired guitar auteurs The Nectarine No 9 proved themselves as maverick as the End Social programme that hosted them to remind the kids where their new pop idols learnt their chops. With the final Nectarines line-up having morphed into the still utterly essential The Sexual Objects, it wasn't that hard to round up the troops to recreate Saint Jack's poundingly dark mix of skewed rock and roll eclectica. Ever the conceptualists, however, Henderson and co don't do things by rote. With the opening screening of silent movie, Death of the Kelly Family, mutating into a Stan Brakhage style abstraction, Douglas MacIntyre strikes up a garage-band bass-line before drummer Ian Holford comes on sporting raincoat and boxer shorts. Holford remains standing to take lead vocals on the magnificently named Couldn't Phone Potatoes as Henderson

During Rachel O'Riordan's all too brief three-year tenure in charge of Perth Theatre before she departed the city's Horsecross Arts organisation to run Sherman Cymru in Cardiff, she enlivened a theatre previously seen as a solid but safe producing house with a series of hard-hitting productions that could compete alongside any other stage in Scotland. As the theatre prepared to close for major refurbishment, O'Riordan also set plans in motion to keep Perth Theatre in the public eye with several off-site initiatives. The first fruits of this is Cross Country Stories, which consists of two forty-five minute solo plays which will tour hotel bars in the region in a pair of up close and personal productions overseen by Kenny Miller. Face, written by by Peter Arnott and performed by Janette Foggo, opens tonight at the Kinross Hotel with its female protagonist opening up to strangers in a way she's not used to Alan Bissett's piece, Jacquoranda, performed

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars The peasants huddling round a hand-cart and wooden ladder at the start of Blue Raincoat Theatre Company's biographical study of pioneering Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagaran may not be revolting, but the dressed-down quintet are clearly keeping a self-consciously stern eye on the audience as they gradually troop in to a suitably heroic soundtrack. As it turns out, director of the Sligo-based company Niall Henry has them frame Jocelyn Clarke's forensically researched script as an arch  facsimile of a rural Soviet theatre group paying homage to their country-man. As the three men and two women strike a series of Meyerhold-inspired poses, this develops into a gloriously deadpan device which they sustain throughout the play's full seventy-five minutes. Following an opening monologue which appears to give a very Russian nod to David Bowie's Space Oddity, the ensemble's suitably collective retelling charts Gagarin's rise from a littl

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Three stars From the moment River City star, stage actress and musician Joyce Falconer shuffles onstage sporting a vivid pink track-suit, Olivia Newton John sweat-band and Chariots of Fire ring-tone, it becomes clear that teamwork is at the heart of the Citz's big-scale community theatre response to the impending Glasgow-based 2014 Commonwealth Games. Falconer is Geraldine, the retiring but never shy janitor whose last day falls on the school sports day that this compendium of sketches, songs and short plays is based around. With Geraldine the linking device, narrator and social glue between each, Falconer also becomes the fifth member of the show's rousing live band led by Michael John McCarthy. From such a starting block on an astro-turf covered stage, we follow the lead-up to the main event through miniature dramas involving toffee-nosed head-masters, anxious parents, competitive dads and a family fending off  bribes from dodgy politicians who off

Tramway, Glasgow Four stars Anyone who ever witnessed the full live experience of dread-locked piper extraordinaire, Martyn Bennett, at the height of his 1990s pomp will know only too well how powerful his fusion of ceilidh and club cultures could be. Bennett's tragic death of cancer in 2005 aged just thirty-three robbed the world of a composer and musician bursting with talent and a lust for life which can't help but cause one to wonder how his work might have developed. Much of Bennett's passion is captured in this new dramatic homage, conceived and directed by Cora Bissett, who also collaborates on Kieran Hurley's script for a co-production between Bissett's Pachamama Productions, Tramway and the Mull-based Comar organisation. As with the show's inspiration, Bissett mixes and matches forms with abandon. Opening speeches to the audience find actors Sandy Grierson, Hannah Donaldson and Gerda Stevenson, respectively playing Bennett, Bennett's wife, Kirsten,