Coffee-Table Notes

There was a time when the phrase Big Brother meant a whole lot more than an increasingly freakish reality TV show. It is such grotesque legitimisation of surveillance culture as public spectacle, however, which in part fuels Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan new stage version of George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984. Their co-production between the Headlong theatre company, Nottingham Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre arrives in Glasgow this week following suitably mass acclaim for its first run in 2013. While this new version adapts Orwell's novel in full, the starting point for Icke and Macmillan was not the novel itself, which charts Winston Smith's battle with an authoritarian state as he rebels and falls in love with a woman called Julia, but the appendix that follows it. “The appendix really changes your perception of the main story,” Icke says of The Principles of Newspeak, which refers to the novel's ideologically driven minimalist language. “It's a strange p

Royal Lyceum Theatre Four stars “Our reign of terror,” says Pa Ubu at one point in director William Kentridge, writer Jane Taylor and Handspring Puppet Company's reimagining of Alfred Jarry's grotesque fable on power, corruption and lies to post-apartheid South Africa, “was no reign of error.” Wandering the stage like an overgrown baby in grubby vest and Y-fronts, Ubu here is a general on the make, whose liaison with Ma Ubu may look as multi-cultural as it comes, but is one which hides a multitude of sins. Much of this comes out by fusing Jarry's play with real-life testimonies from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in which witnesses laid bare a litany of institutionalised brutality. These testimonies are relayed by puppets, operated by a trio of performers, with English translations provided by the other performers situated in a glass booth beside them. They are visualised even more powerfully in a series of chalky monochrome animations by Kentridge,

When Johannesburg-born artist William Kentridge teamed up with the Handspring Puppet Company to create Ubu and the Truth Commission, the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa that inspired it was a year into proceedings Scripted by Jane Taylor, Kentridge's audacious fusion of Alfred Jarry's piece of proto-absurdist buffoonery and real life transcripts from the Commission opened in Johannesburg in 1997. The show went on to tour South Africa, Europe and America, finishing with a run at the London International Festival of Theatre in 1999. Seventeen years after its premiere, with Handspring now universally acclaimed for their work on War Horse, and with South Africa commemorating twenty years of democracy, Kentridge's revival of Ubu and the Truth Commission closes this year's Edinburgh International Festival theatre programme. While much of South African theatre remains associated with the satirical agit-prop of the likes of the Market Theatre

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