Coffee-Table Notes

Like all great film noirs, there's nothing black and white about Helen Lawrence, the post World War Two 'cinematic stage production' put together by Canadian artist, photographer and film-maker Stan Douglas in collaboration with screen-writer Chris Haddock. What there is on both stage and screen in this international co-production is a set of familiar noir-based iconography that shows off an altogether bigger if somewhat shadowy picture of life after, rather than during, wartime. “Post-war periods are real periods of flux,” says Douglas, “and I wanted to look at how governments deal with the issue. In Canada, A lot of war veterans came back to Vancouver, and there was a real housing problem. People were living in huts because they had nowhere else to go. Also, there was a lot of corruption. Everyone was a little bit crooked, but after the war that wasn't going to be tolerated. It was a local symptom of a global condition.” Helen Lawrence is set between Vancouver's i

Generically speaking, Contemporary Classical is a gloriously contrary phrase that covers a multitude of bases. Few evoke the idea of bestowing a playful gravitas on new music better than the Kronos Quartet, the San Francisco-based string ensemble founded by violinist David Harrington in Seattle, Washington in 1973. Having commissioned and performed more than 750 works over the last forty years by major composers including Arvo Part, John Adams, Steve Reich and Terry Riley, Kronos have also worked with the likes of Bjork, Tom Waits, David Bowie and Nelly Furtado. For their two EIF 2014 programmes, Harrington and the musicians that make up the current Quartet of John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola) and Sunny Yang (cello) expand the bridges between pop cultural tropes they navigate so exquisitely even further. One programme features a double bill of work by minimalist maestro Philip Glass, whose String Quartet No 6 can be heard alongside Music From The Fountain and Requiem For A Dream

The last time a production of Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie,appeared at Dundee Rep, the part of the story's semi-autobiographical narrator and doomed runaway poet Tom was played by a young actor called David Tennant. That was back in 1996, since when things have panned out rather well for the Bathgate-born star of stage, TV and film. Whether such a weighty shadow puts any pressure on the cast of Jemima Levick's new Dundee production, however, remains to be seen. Whatever happens, as Levick resumes her role as the Rep's co-artistic director following ten months on maternity leave,it is clear that Williams' first successful play, which first appeared in 1944, remains close to Levick's heart. She first directed  The Glass Menagerie back in 2008, after all, in a production at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh. Six years on, as she explains of her revisitation to the St Louis tenement where the dysfunctional Wingfield clan of Tom, his painfully shy

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars The low rumble that pierces the dimly-lit auditorium that looks onto a firmly locked down stage curtain reveals nothing of what follows in  Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan's thrilling and already acclaimed new stage version of George Orwell's dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Things start quietly enough in this co-production between Headlong, Nottingham Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre, with Orwell's Everyman hero, Winston Smith, seeming to be part of a book group analysing some weighty and rediscovered memoir dating from before the world may or may not have changed for the better. As Matthew Spencer's terminally bemused looking Winston is shunted into a world he doesn't recognise inbetween erasing people from history in the Ministry of Truth, his private revolution comes through three words scrawled on a scrap of paper that prove to be the most dangerous of all. The psychological battle that ensues isn't just with the

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