Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars When a middle-aged man walks onstage in his underwear, puts on a pair of bright scarlet shoes and declares himself the reincarnation of Judy Garland, evidence may suggest otherwise, but it's a provocative opening nevertheless to Lee Mattinson's solo outing about one man's belated coming to terms with who he is. The man in his underwear is Francis, a spoon-playing romantic in search of true love as he moves through the back-street club scene that becomes his own yellow brick road en route to salvation fronting a local community choir. Just as Francis finds a sense of belonging, alas, a one-night encounter with a building-site worker he obsesses over before being hit with a restraining order leaves him diagnosed with Aids. Such a life and death litany is related in florid terms in Mattinson's script, which references the mundane everyday minutiae of Francis' existence in a way which resembles an Alan Bennett monologue. Jennifer

Dundee Rep Four stars When a Morningside-accented Judas gives a two-part definition of the word 'politics' in Matthew Hurt's ecclesiastical solo vehicle for Simon Callow, the applause provoked by its second half suggests more than a hint of recognition in its description  of politicians as annoying insects in need of swatting. When Judas, seated at the centre of an otherwise empty row of chairs awaiting the Last Supper, goes on to describe the faithful rump of his former messiah's followers as “masochists with a fetish for disappointment,” the silence that follows is equally telling. By this time Callow has already introduced us to many of the people who shaped Jesus or where shaped by him in a version of the gospel seen from a dozen points of view. Using a variety of largely northern accents beside a pile of chairs, we first of all meet Jesus' mother, Mary, and his brother, James. In Callow's hands these become plain-talking Yorkshire folk, the apostles are ha

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars It is the ghosts who are left standing at the end of Dominic Hill's brooding new production of Shakespeare's tragedy, which puts a bespectacled Brian Ferguson centre-stage as the Danish Prince in angry search for closure following his father's murder. With the back of the battleship grey stage lined with reel to reel tape recorders in what appears to be an abandoned and possibly haunted house where the party never stops, Hamlet and his pals attempt to capture the voice of his father's spirit by way of a BBC Radiophonic Workshop style soundtrack worthy of 1970s horror thriller, The Legend of Hell House. Leading the charge in all this is Ferguson, who plays Hamlet as a dour-faced pistol-packing wind-up merchant trying out different versions of himself. One minute he has an old-school cassette deck slung across his shoulder, interviewing Peter Guinness' Claudius and Roberta Taylor's Gertrude like an on-the-spot reporter, the nex

An Tober, Tobermory, Isle of Mull Until September 27th Four stars The Scotch mist that wafts around Duart Castle at the opening of Rachel Maclean's new film speaks volumes about where she's coming from in what looks like a major leap towards something even more ambitious than her previous work in this major commission for the Mull-based Comar organisation. Films such as LolCats and Over The Rainbow became pop cultural cut-ups featuring green-screen footage resembling Lady Gaga and Katy Perry video stylings in which Maclean played a multitude of day-glo Cos-playing creatures lip-synching dialogue sampled and rearranged from a similarly eclectic array of film and TV sources to create her own fantastical narratives. Following her three-screen epic dissection of broken Britain in the Oliver-sampling Happy and Glorious, however, The Weepers sees Maclean put flesh and blood on her dressing-up box multi-tracking as she directs real live actors in a bricks-and-mortar setting. Not that

When Brett Bailey's Third World Bunfight company presented Exhibit B as part of the 2014 Edinburgh International Festival, the show's twenty-first century reimagining of colonial era human zoos, when black Africans were shown in front of their white thrill-seeking masters as novelty artefacts to gaze on, garnered a slew of five-star reviews. As someone who gave Exhibit B a five star review in this magazine, I was aware before I saw the show's series of tableau vivant of the accusations of racism that had been levelled against Bailey, a white South African artist. These accusations came from protesters in various countries where Exhibit B had been seen, as well as in Britain, where it was set to transfer from Edinburgh to the Barbican's Vaults space in London this week. Today's announcement by the Barbican that their week-long showing of Exhibit B has been cancelled following protests on the first night that saw the road outside the venue blocked comes following an o

John Byrne hates exposition. In his own writing in now classic works   such as The Slab Boys and Tutti Frutti, his characters talk in baroque   flourishes of pop cultural patois that ricochet between them. In his   new version of Chekhov play, Three Sisters, however, which opens next   week at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow before embarking on a national   tour, tackling such rich but exposition-laden source material hasn't   been easy. “I love Chekhov,” Byrne says over a Cappuccino in Edinburgh's Filmhouse   cafe, “but you can only capture about a third of it, because it's   Russian. I thought The Seagull particularly was all exposition, all   that 'I dress in black because of my father's death' sort of thing,   which we're so unused to, characters describing themselves and saying   what's happening to them. So I wouldn't normally like that, but all   life is in Chekhov's plays. “I chose an old literal translation of Three Sisters by some woman I  

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Wannabe gangsters take note. It's unlikely that anyone will ever be able to take you seriously again after DC Jackson's scurrilous comedy set in the mankiest of Ayrshire pig-farms. Here, would-be good fellas Dominic and Skootch are holed up with tabloid hack Bruce as the mother of all shoot-outs accidentally ensues. When smooth-talking MacPherson turns up, his patter is just a curtain-raiser to what happens when emigre Ulster Loyalist Johnny Glendenning finally shows face. If this sounds like standard sub-Hollywood tough guy fare, Jackson's play is delivered with such potty-mouthed filter-free glee as it piles up the bodycount that it becomes both shocking and hilarious. While it is a study too of West Coast of Scotland machismo and the perceived glamour of being part of a gang, Jackson’s dialogue is peppered throughout with the geekiest of pop cultural detritus. Computer games, mobile phone apps, the restorative powers of Aswad, B