Coffee-Table Notes

Mull Theatre Three stars On the vague off-chance that anyone has woken up in Utopia this morning, it might be worth visiting the fictional town in Chris Lee's new play for Mull Theatre to find out the extent to which such Shangri-las can be spoilt. Loosely based on Andorra, by German writer and contemporary of Bertolt Brecht, Max Frisch, Lee gives this epic yarn a contemporary spin that goes way beyond his source's analogies to his own era's cultural prejudices to capture something utterly current. Ushered in with the sort of triumphalist fervour  that would make a VisitScotland ad look understated, Alasdair McCrone's production sets Lee's play in a walled city which, while looking like an ancient Greek ruin, also oddly resembles McCaig's Tower in Oban. Here a former war journalist drowns his sorrows while his adopted daughter Anissah, seemingly an interloper from a land regarded with suspicion, works the local bar. Forever close to her brother Johan, played by

SSE Hydro, Glasgow Four stars Given that it was the over 60s demographic that swung the victory for the No camp in this week's Scottish independence referendum, it's something of a surprise that Scotland's most curmudgeonly OAP double act, Jack and Victor, didn't lay their cards on the table last night in the first of their twenty-one night stadium-sized stage version of Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill's scurilous TV sit-com. In the end politics didn't matter  much in a show that started off simply enough as a series of routines were played out across Navid's open all hours corner shop and the legendary Clansman bar where Gavin Mitchell's bar-man Boabby held court to Winston, Tam, Isa and Navid. Once we're ushered into Jack and Victor's front room, however, things take a turn for the meta, as Kiernan and Hemphill take full advantage of the live arena for a series of self-referential gags that resemble something Pirandello might hav

The Arches, Glasgow Three stars “By taking away my choice,” Marcus Roche soft-soaps his audience at one point, “you've given me my freedom.” Such sentiments may sound like they've been crafted by the snake-oil salesman this writer, director, performer and self-starting multi-tasker extraordinaire resembles. Given that Roche was actually preparing to flog off his vote for today's Scottish independence referendum as he toadied up to us with such gloriously contrary platitudes, however, he's pretty much on the money whatever the result. Of course, as with the real-life ebay shyster who attempted to sell his vote online, no back-handers were actually pocketed in Roche's one-night only extrapolation of just how much money talks when politics is involved.  Darting from laptop to lectern beneath two opposing flags of convenience in his contribution to the Arches' Early Days Referendum Festival, Roche does his bit for internationalism by way of soundbites from French a

Tramway, Glasgow, Sept 26th-28th When the Arika organisation took a side-step from curating experimental music festivals in a now booming scene they laid the groundwork for with their Instal and Kill Your Timid Notion events, the more holistically inclined series of themed Episodes they embarked on seemed to chime with a renewed hunger for ideas and seditious thought. While Episodes still featured performances and screenings, they were consciously not made the centrepiece of events that involved discussions and debates which questioned the relationship between artist and audience, and indeed the structures of such events themselves. In Episodes 4 and 5, Arika concentrated on the musical and political liberation expressed by the black community through jazz, and a similar state of transcendence found for the Queer and Trans community through the House Ballroom scene. Episode 6 in part fuses both experiences in Make A Way Out of No Way, which over three days looks beyond the nuclear fami

Summerhall, Edinburgh until September 26th Three stars They could be pages torn from an art-zine, an architect's portfolio or a sketch-pad given to pre-schools on a rainy day, such is the playful but matter-of-fact show-and-don't-tellness of French avant-savant Claude Closky's new series of pen-and-ink miniatures. Spread across four rooms in ascending or descending numerical order depending on which way you go at it, a series of black ball-point pen lines mark out assorted patterns on white paper sheets that fade into the background of barely-there clip-frames or matching white wooden ones that form a kind of camouflage in which even the bare floorboards seem to be in on the act. The lines themselves sit side-by-side by Closky, or form squares, curves and triangles that could have been inked on using an old-school Spirograph set or else Etch-a-Sketched into being to make up end-of term games of Noughts and Crosses, Battleships and Hang the Man.  The percentages themselves,

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars Sixty-two years is a frightfully long time to keep a secret. Where Agatha Christie's evergreen whodunnit is concerned, however, keeping schtumm has transformed an inter-audience conspiracy into a global institution which not even social media and the internet has betrayed. With this in mind, there will be no spoiler alerts in what follows, except to say that, in its depiction of how cruelly children can be treated, this touring production that first flew its London coop two years ago looks oddly current. Set in a mansion turned guest house just opened by the increasingly furtive Mollie and Giles Ralston, these refugees from the big city find themselves fully booked with a house full of guests seeking shelter from the storm, all of whom come clad in regulation dark overcoat, muffler and face-concealing fedoras. A murder has been committed in town, and, according to the game Sergeant Trotter, who skis into this TripAdvisor nightmare

One could be forgiven for thinking that Brian Ferguson has just seen a ghost. As he takes a lunchtime break from rehearsals for Dominic Hill's new production of Hamlet, the actor playing the title role looks suitably haunted and not a little drained from the experience. “It's so big to do,” a breathless Ferguson reflects. “I didn't really know, as a part, what it actually meant. Obviously every actor knows the name Hamlet and the character of Hamlet, but I wasn't very well versed in the play. I haven't seen many productions of Hamlet, so that kind of cracking it open has been mind-boggling, really, to get the opportunity to crawl around inside it has been incredible.” Ferguson won't be drawn on Hill's approach to the play, nor to what his own interpretation of Hamlet may end up as. All he'll admit to at this stage is that, as the publicity photograph of him backed into a corner sporting a contemporary dark suit on the show's flyers suggest, “It's