Coffee-Table Notes

King's Theatre Four stars 1948, and a femme fatale is receiving her just desserts in a Los Angeles sanatorium after being convicted in a headline friendly murder. A year later, and the same ice-cool blonde blows into Vancouver, drop-dead gorgeous and with revenge on her mind. So it goes in Stan Douglas' epically staged piece of cinematic theatre, which is part film noir homage, part dissection of post Second World War social engineering, and part technical feat par excellence. The story, as scripted by some-time HBO writer Chris Haddock with hard-boiled baroque flourishes, is stylistically familiar enough, as the play's eponymous heroine flits her way between a decrepit hotel that houses homeless war veterans and the mixed race Hogan's Alley ghetto nearby. As corrupt cops attempt to clean up the black economy which has thrived during war-time, we get a glimpse at the roots of future urban regeneration projects that razed big cities as much as enemy bombs did. All of thi

The Future For Beginners Summerhall Three stars When boy meets girl and things start to get serious, making plans for the future can take many forms. In the case of Jennifer Adams and Matthew Bulgo in Alan Harris, Martin Constantine and composer Harry Blake's lo-fi musical rom-com for the liveartshow company, that means meticulously cataloguing every detail of every single day of their life together in advance. She sings operatic arias and might just be a Russian princess. He plays the ukulele and is into Buddhism and skateboarding. As if such hipster affectations weren't quirky enough, the perfect fantasy life they map out more resembles an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder inspired art project than real life domestic bliss. It is when things go wrong, however, that things get really interesting in a sweet little construction performed with considerable charm that makes for a show that is about the unexpectred surprises which happy ever afters can bring. Run ended. Animal Farm Ass

Royal Lyceum Theatre Four stars The stark, solo trumpet fanfare that opens Luk Perceval's polyphonic cut-up of First World War memoirs sets an anti-triumphalist tone for a bi-lingual piece drawn from Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front and Henri Barbusse's Under Fire as well as contemporary sources. What follows, as nine men and two women dressed in charcoal black suits and white shirts line up on crates placed in front of lamp-lit music stands across the lip of the stage, is an ice-cool piece of European post-modernism that uses the trappings of live art to evoke the horrors of war that arguably begat them. The ensemble speak into microphones in German, French, Flemish and English, weaving counterpointing dispatches from the Belgian frontline around each other while gazing out front in reflection of the archive photographs from the trenches projected behind them. The descriptions of grotesquely dismembered bodies are delivered flatly, as if those recounti

Every Brilliant Thing Summerhall Four stars How life-affirming can you get about suicide? If that’s not an easy question to answer, try asking the hero of Duncan Macmillan's solo play, who probably has it filed away in his list of great things in life that keep you going. The motivation for this was when his mother attempted suicide and he began a list to help remind her of why she should be alive. As performer Jonny Donahoe leads us through all the love, loss and messy twists and turns of our hero's own life, his ever-lengthening list becomes part diary, part totem of survival. Goethe and Daniel Johnson all make an appearance by way of the meticulously numbered epigrams that come to life when Donahoe asks the audience to recount them throughout the course of George Perrin's production for Paines Plough. The audience too become assorted key players in the unfolding drama as they go willingly onstage in what may be the gentlest form of audience participation

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