Coffee-Table Notes

No Guts, No Heart, No Glory Sandy's Boxing Gym Four stars Not a punch is thrown in anger in the Common Wealth company's follow-up to Our Glass House, one of the sleeper hits of last year's Fringe. In its real-life show-and-tell played out by a determined quintet of young female Muslim boxers, however, this new piece's depiction of young women empowering themselves enough to find a voice beyond their backgrounds is inspirational. Taking place in Sandy's Gym housed in a community centre in Craigmillar, director Evie Manning and writer Aisha Zia have choreographed a criss-crossing confessional that moves from a training session with punchbag and skipping ropes to climbing in the ring and declaiming like champions. On one level, the young womens' concerns – about themselves, their families and the world that would rather define them in other ways while behaving crazily to each other – are the stuff of any teenage rites of passage. In the context of

Fat Alice Traverse Theatre Three stars When the crack that appears in the ceiling of a woman who's been conducting a ten-year affair with a married man threatens to turn into something bigger, it becomes a metaphor for how easy it is for  entire worlds to come crashing down if you allow them to run to seed. Issues of body image, fear of commitment and the willingness to acquiesce to others all rear their chocolate-fuelled head in Alison Carr's absurdist tragicomedy, the fourth play in the mini season of Traverse Breakfast Plays directed by Traverse associate director Emma Callander as script-in-hand work-in-progress productions. There are contemporary shades of Ionesco in the audacious largesse of Carr's script, which would make a wonderful radio piece while offering some potentially tantalising technical and design choices for any future full stage production. As it stands, Keith Fleming and Meg Fraser spar furiously in a domestic tug of war where comfort

Traverse Theatre Four stars Revolutions don't often start on Monday mornings. For the last three Mondays, however, Theatre Uncut has suggested otherwise in a series of lo-fi presentations of relatively hot-off-the-press bite-size playlets in response to burning issues of the moment. Founded in 2010 by directors Emma Callander and Hannah Price as an open access style operation in response to the Westminster government's cut-driven austerity culture, Theatre Uncut has become an annual fixture of the Traverse bar, where their three programmes were presented as script-in-had works in progress. This year's first session featured five new works, including Anders Lustgarten's The Finger of God, which sees what happens when the National Lottery is sexed up to extreme proportions, and Inua Ellams This is Us, in which direct action against the bedroom tax is the only solution. It is a timely co-opting of someone else's words that made Hayley Squires' piec

Spine Underbelly Five stars When teenage Amy turns up on the doorstep of an old woman with the promise of a room, she opens up the door into a brand new world.  Amy may be chock-full of attitude, but the old woman is no pushover, as she reveals to Amy when she reveals her own attitude founded on old-time Socialism. This is something she put into practice following the enforced closure of her local library, when she and her neighbours liberated all the books. Originally presented as a twenty-minute version in 2012 as part of the Theatre Uncut initiative's hot off the press responses to austerity culture, this hour-long development remains  as touching and as urgent as it ever was. Surrounded by shelf-loads of hard-back tomes, Rosie Wyatt gives a ferocious performance as Amy as she charts her accidental getting of wisdom and the call to arms for people power in action that follows. Where the old lady we never see represents the wisdom, decency and compassion that

When Belgian theatre director Luk Perceval decided he wanted to live and work in Germany, his parents apparently warned him against such a move. The Germans killed their countrymen, they said, so why would he possibly want to live there? This is what the director whose last work to be seen in Edinburgh was his 2004 production of Andromache told Christina Bellingen, the dramaturg of the Thalia Theatre, Hamburg, anyway. Bellingen worked closely with Perceval on Front, an epic, multi-lingual spoken-word polyphony brought to Edinburgh International Festival this week in a co-production between the Thalia and NTGent from Belgium. Front is based in part on All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque's novel published in 1929, which sold more than two and a half million copies in twenty-two different languages over eighteen months. Remarque's book, which was filmed twice in 1930 and 1979, was also burnt by the Nazis when they came to power. Front also draws from Under Fire, w

There's something oddly off-kilter about Stan Douglas being photographed in an ornate, low-lit and state-of-art room in the Haus der Kunst, Munich, where his new exhibition, Mise en Scene, has just opened. For the past hour, the Vancouver-born artist, film-maker and photographer, whose large-scale piece of cinematic theatre, Helen Lawrence, opens as part of Edinburgh International Festival, has been taking part in a panel discussion to talk about the series of elaborately constructed fictions contained in the exhibition. Taken from real life historical events, the assorted images of staged streets scenes, 1950s nightclub portraits and post-revolutionary 1970s hedonism may be steeped in meticulously realised retro imagery culled from film noir and pulp fiction, but they are quietly and deeply political in intent. Which is why Douglas appears as off-kilter as the shadowy 3D image at the far end of the long room where much of the exhibition is housed, and which reimagines the now raz

The Collector Gilded Balloon Three stars What do you do when the only way to earn a living is to work for the enemy? This is the dilemma for Nazir, the hip hop loving translator who provides the heart of Henry Naylor's new play set in Iraq in 2003. Nazir's story is told by way of three cut-up monologues spoken in turn by his partner, Zoya, and the two American army interrogators he translates for. With humanity turning to brutality, Nazir is effectively outed by one of the army captives and made a pariah that changes his and Zoya's lives forever. There is some neat writing in Naylor's timely script, which is given a strong delivery by Ritu Arya, Wiliam Reay and Lesley Harcourt. There are probably more imaginative ways of moving from one monologue to the other than simply turning the lights off as the actors shuffle on and off stage in Naylor's own production An understated power prevails, however, in a piece that highlights the potentially destructive aftermath of l