Coffee-Table Notes

Queens Hall, Edinburgh Five stars Sophie Ellis-Bextor has come a long way since her first Edinburgh appearance fronting short-lived indie band TheAudience at La Belle Angele in 1998. While the intervening years have seen her epitomise T4-friendly disco diva electro-pop, this year's Wanderlust album has found her pretty much coming full circle in an eclectic collaboration with Mercury nominated singer/song-writer Ed Harcourt. Harcourt is at the keyboards as part of the black-clad sextet that accompany Ellis-Bextor on the current leg of the tour to support the album, as they were earlier in the year at Oran Mor in Glasgow. In what is effectively a two-act show, the stage is bathed in red as Ellis-Bextor enters in matching mini-dress to open with the eastern-tinged movie theme melodrama of Birth of An Empire before moving through a conceptual pot-pourri of off-kilter ballads, woozy Cold War waltzes and epic chorales. Some charming between-song banter covers tour bus Conga injuries and

Things change when you get older. Just look at Tomorrow, the latest theatrical meditation from Vanishing Point, which plays its only Scottish dates at Tramway from this weekend following its premiere in Brighton and follow-up dates in Brazil. In the company's Glasgow rehearsal room, a largely youngish cast from Scotland, England, Russia and Brazil convene under director Matthew Lenton's guidance to go through a scene in what, despite only makeshift scenery, conjures up the slightly derelict feel of an old people's home. As the cast assemble, their natural ebullience seems to slow as they ease into character. When they cover their faces with tight-fitting latex rubber masks, the transformation is complete. Only when one or other of them breaks into their natural stride do things jar. Otherwise, it's as if time itself has caught up with them in an instant. “I was interested in doing something about care,” says Lenton. “I had this image of having a cast in their eighties o

Cumbernauld Theatre Four stars A sulky teenager dressed in black sprawls aloft the raised platform of his bunk-bed, going through his photo album on his ipad, which projects enlargements onto a big screen on the other side of the room. Everyone's in there; his mum, his best mates, one of his kind-of girlfriend's selfies. Most significantly are the portraits of the boy's dad, who died the week before, and his uncle, who his mum just married. As the boy lays bare his plans to stab his uncle in revenge for the killing of his dad, it becomes clear that he is a contemporary version of Hamlet, and that the pictures projected in his room are of his mum Gertrude, his best pal Horatio and his squeeze Ophelia. Then there's his uncle, Claudius, who he calls Uncle C. This is a neat trick in Iain Heggie's fresh look at the bard, performed with youthful confidence by Sean Purden Brown in Heggie's own production for Subway Theatre Company in association with Sico Productions.

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