Coffee-Table Notes

James I: The Key Will Keep The Lock Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars The giant sword stabbed into the stage throughout this first part of Rona Munro's trilogy of fifteenth century Scottish history plays looks like a statement of intent, both in the ambition of Laurie Sansom's production, and in the grandiloquent sweep of what follows the rabble-rousing song that opens it. Here we find James I thrust back into his kingdom after eighteen years in the shadow of a bullying Henry V, who taunts and teases his captive, while James would rather defend his note-book full of verse than lead a country into battle. Once a dying Henry marries off James to his cousin Joan, however, he is forced to becomes one of the lads, not just for his country's sake, but to impress his girl the way any boy would. With the stage surrounded by a bank of seats where a section of the audience sit either side of James' throne, Sansom's production for the National Theatre of Scotland, Nationa

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars The crackle of a wind-up gramophone at the opening of this epic evocation of war's mighty blast can only hint at what follows over the next two and a half hours in this world premiere of Vladimir Pankov's production for his tellingly named SounDrama Studio. In Paris, 1913, a group of poets, painters and free-thinking aesthetes are gathered for Christmas. With storm clouds already gathering, some see the impending conflict as a a disaster, some as a necessary cleansing, others as an inspirational romance. It is English painter George, however, who is killed on the frontline, causing his poet friend Vladimir's intense mourning. In order to heal, a radical psychiatrist has George's friends and family role-play Homer's Iliad in order to get to the root of their own pain. While all this sounds ennui-laden enough, it is in the telling that makes Pankov's co-production with Chekhov International Theatre Festival, based on Richar

Grid Iron Theatre Company have had the keys for number twenty-three Charlotte Square for a couple of weeks now. Judging by the pile of wires, lights and other technical debris holding the front door of the once plush town-house turned a now deserted private bank open, however, it's not quite home yet. As the Edinburgh-based pioneers of site-specific theatre prepare for their latest show, Letters Home, the presence of assorted production managers liaising with their team, designers sprawled on the floor marking out costume patterns and a technical team holding a quick catch-up meeting in the building's large front room, there's never a dull moment in the company's temporary residence. A collaboration with Edinburgh International Book Festival, who are similarly in the throes of moving into an array of tents in Charlotte Square Gardens, Letters Home moves into three other addresses in the neighbourhood to present a quartet of dramatised short stories by diverse writers un

When the First World War exploded into action one hundred years ago, the roar of bombs and gunfire inspired the Dadaist art movement to respond in a similarly noisy fashion. Without ever being explicit, there is something of this in The War, in which Russian director, composer and performer Vladimir Pankov and his fancifully named SounDrama Studio explore the consequences of war through the eyes of young aesthetes holidaying in Paris during Christmas 1913. “These are a group of young people with ideas,” says Pankov, who opened The War as part of Edinburgh International Festival's Theatre this weekend. “What I wanted to explore and emphasise here is the idea of how war influences individuals, whether young and artistic like those in the play,or older people, and to find out what reasons they find to go and fight in something so catastrophic.” What is crucial here, however, is how Volkov tells this story.  As the name implies, Pankov's approach is led by sound and music, with The

Uh-oh. Julie's in the news again. Julie Burchill, that is, the one-time hip young gun-slinger on a punky 1970s NME turned self-styled 1980s cocaine-caked queen of the Groucho club, whose barbed and bitchy opinions on anything and everything still has the knack of offending readers on both right and left. Then there are the public spats with assorted ex husbands and fellow female columnists, the flirtations with lesbianism, the sex-soaked novels, the pro Israeli provocations and the seemingly endless power to annoy. Burchill's latest brush with the media hand that still sometimes feeds her comes with a plethora of high-profile speculation that she may or may not have been offered £300,000 to take part in the annual circus of Celebrity Big Brother. Such speculation arrived just as Burchill was announced as the new agony aunt for one time lad's mag bible, Loaded magazine. Given the seeming decline in both parties fortunes, this seems a curiously apt if inherently odd alliance.

Cuckooed - Traverse Theatre Four stars When Mark Thomas' best mate and comrade in arms in exposing international arms dealers turned out to be a spy, the result was this very personal show which remains hilariously foresnsic in its exposure of dodgy corporate practices. On a filing cabinet lined set, Thomas regales the audience with his assorted adventures on the frontline with his usual blokeish charm, about how he and his mate Martin took a coach-load of arms dealers for a ride, then shows a film of an Indonesian general who admits to torturing prisoners on camera. Thomas' tactics are both hilarious and provocative, but where his duplicity is righteous, Martin's becomes increasingly heart-breaking as footage of other campaigners and close friends is shown on screens that slide out of the filing cabinets as the penny slowly starts to drop. Emma Callander's production navigates Thomas through what in other hands might end up a dense tale of paranoia,

Horizontal Collaboration Traverse Theatre Four stars The audience becomes the public gallery in Horizontal Collaboration, David Leddy's latest set of dark imaginings for his Fire Exit company. Four actors who sit at a long table with laptops lined up in front of them are the judges. With a different cast for each performance – sometimes all men, sometimes all women, sometimes a mix of both – the quartet read the words on the screen for the first time as they take on the roles of United Nations lawyers at a tribunal in an un-named African state. The story they unveil is of Judith K, the widow of an assassinated warlord who is accused of having sex with an enemy soldier is one of institutionalised misogyny in a volatile country where women in power are barely tolerated. With the actors as much in the dark as the audience, the mixing and matching of genders may or may not be crucial to how the text is both delivered and perceived depending on their reactions. With an