Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When a family is so poor  that they abandon their hungry children in the forest, you know things have become pretty desperate. This isn't some contemporary tale of austerity culture and food banks, however, but is the Brothers Grimm's much loved story of Hansel and Gretel, as told here by the Cardiff-based Theatre Iolo for the Tron's Commonwealth-supported Home Nations Festival 2014. One of two Grimm Tales first reimagined by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy and dramatised by Tim Supple in 1993, Iolo's take on them is as dark as Duffy's writing is sharp. With a cast of five scampering their way around a set of artfully arranged door and picture frames, Kevin Lewis' production is underscored by live banjo and guitar playing that adds to the moody intimacy of the show. Both stories are brutal, as is made clear when Hansel and Gretel shoves the Witch into the fire before pocketing all her precious wares and making a prodigal's retu

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Liz Lochhead's impressionistic homage to Edwin Morgan, her friend, fellow poet and predecessor as Scotland's Makar, first appeared in 2011 as part if that year's Glasgay! festival. Three years on, as the centrepiece of the Tron's Commonwealth-supported Home Nations Festival 2014 of poetic drama, director Andy Arnold has put the life and work of this major artist on a world stage. It begins and ends with Morgan's Life Force personified as a dynamic and fearless figure at odds with Morgan's quietly mischievous public persona, before moving into the care home where he spent his final years. Here Morgan holds court, unveiling his past to his Biographer in a tumble of anecdote and dreams peopled by lovers and dangerous liaisons in Glasgow parks after dark. Drawn in part from Beyond The Last Dragon, James McGonigal's published study of Morgan, Lochhead's play weaves together a touching but unsentimental study of a complex and c

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Three darkly dressed women sit on benches in a crypt-like room at the start of Lynne Parker's staging of Seamus Heaney's majestic version of what is probably the best-known Old English epic narrative poem to survive the centuries. With the trio's contemplations underscored by a whispered chorale, the women could well be Shakespeare's Witches in retreat, seeking sanctuary or enlightenment or else in mourning in the gloom. The wooden pillars that flank them are shattered and exposed, with little shards of debris frozen in mid-air as  if hanging from a Fluxus-inspired peace tree. When the women start talking, the tale they pass between them, of Beowulf's heroic slaying of the monster, Grendel, and his even more monstrous mother after she seeks revenge, is related calmly and without rancour now the battle is over. While this basic story is simple enough, it comes accompanied by a cast of characters as myriad as those in Game of Thrones,

Olwen Fouere had never read James Joyce's epic novel, Finnegan's Wake, before she adapted it for riverrun, her Dublin Theatre Festival hit which arrives at the Traverse Theatre for an Edinburgh Festival Fringe run next week. Being where she's from, the maverick Irish actress and director had of course dipped into what is often regarded as an impenetrable text over the years. Only when she read the last page of the book out loud to celebrate the Joyce-based Bloomsday festival while on holiday with friends, however, did she have any notion to transform it into a piece of theatre. “It was really one of those moments,” she says now, “that the tongues of fire descended, and  I felt this vibration around the room, and it had this extraordinary communicative effect. I knew then that this would be my next piece, the voice of the river. I started from the idea that she from dissolved into the ocean, and worked backwards from there.” At one point Fouere planned to only perform the la

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars The giant map of Scotland tilted centre-stage above the audience at the start of Richard Baron's timely revival of Stephen Greenhorn's road movie for the stage not only shows off some of the country's lesser-travelled pastures as the play travels from Motherwell to Thurso. It also puts a roof on an entire world, with designer Adrian Rees' wooden construction below doubling up as sports shop, Traveller camp, ceilidh hall and ferry. In and out of this weave Alex and Brian, a pair of small-town boys who go on the run and on the road with a surfboard beloved by Alex's psychopathic boss, Binks. With Alex as overheated as the Lada that belongs to Brian's brother, and Brian trying to get beyond the guide-book clichés, the pair hook up with assorted free-spirits who take them out of their comfort zone en route to somewhere else, all the while with Binks in hot pursuit. The end result is one of the most significant pieces of post-mod

In a downtown restaurant in Milan, a group of actors are celebrating the first performance of their new show. As one might expect for a musical version of Herman Hesse's Buddhist novel, Siddhartha, the cast for what is an an unashamedly commercial mix of Bollywood and pop video theatrics are young, beautiful and bursting with post-show energy. Earlier that evening, the young stars gave a dynamic performance of Siddhartha – The Musical at a huge theatre complex in front of an invited audience of friends, family and assorted co-producers of the show, including representatives of the New York-based Broadway Asia International. Such serious interest in the play bodes well for Siddhartha – The Musical's Edinburgh showcase, which opens at the end of the month as part of the Assembly Rooms Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme, putting an international spotlight on something which has already wowed audiences in Italy and beyond. Overseeing the post-show festivities with equal measures o

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars As with all the best soap operas, it's fitting that the pub should be at the centre of Gareth Nicholls' staging of Dylan Thomas' seminal radio play concerning the bustle of life in a day in the imaginary hamlet of Llareggub. Presented as part of the Tron's Home Nations Festival of poetic drama that forms part of the Commonwealth Games' arts programme, Nicholls takes full advantage of the Tron Community Company's resources to put quaking flesh on the rich bones of Thomas' big, rambunctious symphony of inner yearning, shattered dreams and hidden hopes that the play evolves into. With the narrator's lines split three ways between the bar staff of Charlotte Lane's wood-lined howf, the rest of the townsfolk either prop up the bar or else sit in repose at a floor of tables until they spring into life to lay bare their hearts desires. At one point in what at times looks and sounds like the physical evocation of a sau