Coffee-Table Notes

Peter Grimes - Actor, Writer, Adventurer. Born July 16 1966; died October 4 2014. Peter Grimes, who has died aged forty-eight following a long illness, was more than just an actor. He was an adventurer and a seeker, whose empathy, both with the characters he played and with the audiences he played to, reflected his sense of melancholy clowning with a deep-set truth at its heart. This was the case whether appearing as Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, as Shere Khan the tiger in The Jungle Book, as Barrabas, the thief pardoned as Jesus Christ was crucified beside him, or in the title role in an  expansive production of Peer Gynt, Ibsen's classic fantastical romp of self-knowledge. These characters reflected Grimes' own imagination, which was almost certainly too wild to fit into a theatrical mainstream, and it was telling that most of the theatre companies he worked for were similarly maverick operations which embraced the creative freedo

It's half-past three on a Sunday afternoon outside the Olympia Theatre in Dublin's Dame Street, and a scrum of bodies is masquerading as an orderly queue. Despite all appearances to the contrary, the rammy isn't a result of some reality TV teen sensation about to appear in concert on the Olympia stage. It is instead down to the Galway-based Druid theatre company's brand new productions of two very different plays by veteran Irish playwright and another kind of legend, Tom Murphy. Druid's revival of Bailegangaire, which they first presented in 1985, was a mighty enough proposition by itself for this year's Dublin Theatre Festival, which ended this weekend. A tale of a senile old woman telling a story she refuses to finish as her two-grand-daughters navigate their lives around her has become a modern classic. Paired with a new play, Brigit, a prequel of sorts featuring the characters from Bailegangaire thirty years earlier was an even more tantalising prospect.

There's something of a homecoming feel to Tony Cownie's appointment as associate director of Cumbernauld Theatre while artistic director Ed Robson goes on sabbatical for a year sourcing theatre abroad. It was in the former farm cottages situated in the local park, after all, where the director and actor made his professional debut in the late Tom McGrath's play, The Flitting. That was back in 1990, since when Cownie has carved out a successful career as a comic actor with edge, with roles varying from the Porter in Macbeth to an award-winning turn as the troubled Kenny in Mark Thomson's play, A Madman Sings To The Moon. In the mid 1990s, Cownie moved into directing with Liz Lochhead's play, Shanghaied, which was later presented with a second act as Britannia Rules. This led to a fruitful relationship with the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, where he was encouraged by the late Kenny Ireland, and latterly under Thomson, Ireland's successor as artistic directo

Institut Francais, Edinburgh / E.D.S. Gallery, Edinburgh, both until November 1st. Three stars French fancies abound in this group show of work from nine artists – five French, four from Scotland - mixed and matched across two galleries that bridge the gaps between Edinburgh's New Town and the city's West End. This is made explicit in Samantha Boyes' florid constructions, which at first glance look like afternoon tea is being served until you notice the assorted stuffed bird's heads and other wild-life nesting within. This sets an anthropological tone that sees much monkeying around throughout. Where Jacob Kerray's chimps in military drag come on like dressing-up box tinpot dictators, Dix10's pistol-packing infant taking aim at a kids entertainer's dog-shaped balloons in fatal repose gives similarly subversive edge to such  otherwise cutie-pie subjects. Elsewhere, few do this better than Rachel Maclean, whose explorations of national identity by way of da

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars  From beneath a pile of cardboard surrounding a park bench, a middle-aged man comes crawling from the wreckage he calls home. A casualty of the rise and fall of the Linwood dream, when the manufacture of the Hillman Imp put the small Renfewshire town  on the map before the plug was pulled as bigger, shinier cars dazzled the paying public even more, the Man sees in the new millennium with a dram and tells his story. It's a sorry and sadly familiar tale he tells, of how he started on the production line straight from school as a wet-behind-the-ears youth, met his wife and built a life on the back of it, only to be unceremoniously thrown onto the scrap heap as capitalism failed and the dream faded. But it gets worse, as he loses his life-long love and hits the bottle, only to appear at least, to have survived, seriously bruised, but unbowed. At first glance, Paul Coulter's monologue, performed with steely commitment by Vincent Friell in a prod

Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh Three stars If you go down to the woods any night this week, you're in for a big-ish surprise with this new show from Vision Mechanics, which promenades its way after dark en route to some ecologically inclined Shangei-la. With the audience gathered in groups of twenty or so, the show's director and creator Kim Bergsagel and her trusty sidekick lead the throng to an Occupy style camp-site where they introduce us to the wisdom of an enlightened fellow traveller before we're encouraged to eavesdrop on the conversations going on inside the tents. Depending on where you're coming from, these sound either like heated debate or out and out bickering in what looks and sounds like a pastiche of grass-roots activism. With a police bust imminent, we're led down assorted paths, where a film by Robbie Thomson uses shadow puppetry and Ewan Macintyre's eastern-tinged backwoods soundtrack to tell the story of the show's inspiration, Amrit

When Paul Bright's Confessions of A Justified Sinner was first presented by Untitled Projects and the National Theatre of Scotland in 2013, the performance and accompanying exhibition were far from straightforward interpretations of James Hogg's novel, which was presented as a possibly unreliable memoir on the alleged crimes of its narrator, Robert Wringham. Rather, in the hands of director Stewart Laing, playwright Pamela Carter and a network of visual artists and researchers from the 85A collective, Paul Bright's Confessions found actor George Anton relate memories of a legendary stage version of Hogg's book presented in the late 1980s by the maverick figure of radical theatre director  Bright. Anton's monologue was accompanied by scrappy film footage of incidents and rehearsals surrounding Bright's production alongside interviews with Bright's fellow travellers. What emerged from the play alongside the exhibition's meticulously observed archive was a