Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Five women emerge from the blackness of Jamie Vartan's panoramic staging at the start of Lu Kemp's revival of Sue Glover's 1991 play, each dragging a wooden crate attached to a rope behind them. Resembling a quintet of Mother Courages, this is just one of many powerful images in Glover's brutal and unsentimental study of life across the seasons for six women working the land  in nineteenth century rural Scotland. Hired by the gentry and paid a pittance, youngsters Liza and Jenny line up alongside Sara and her teenage daughter Tottie. Maggie works alongside them inbetween tending to her bairns, while ex Bondager Ellen occasionally loosens her corset and comes down from the big house she married into. All have yearnings, be it for Canada or a local farm-hand, and when work turns to play, Tottie's tragedy is inevitable. After more than a decade without a production on home soil, one of the most striking things about Bondagers

Stills, Edinburgh until Sunday. Four stars While the welter of artistic contributions to the one hundred year anniversary of the First World War's opening salvo have been resolutely non-triumphalist, recent events in Palestine and what looks set to be Iraq Part Three suggest little has been learnt in the intervening century. As Remembrance Day looms, this is where this dense and at times overwhelming compendium of war in pieces curated by artist Owen Logan and Kirsten Lloyd of Stills comes in. A sequel of sorts to Logan and Lloyd's previous collaboration on the epic ECONOMY project, which looked at global capitalism in a similarly polemical fashion, the starting point of The King's Peace is selections from Masquerade: Michael Jackson Alive in Nigeria (2001-2005). Logan's satirical photo-essay sees him pick up the mantle – and the white mask – of the late pop icon and travels to Africa, where his mysterious collaborators the Maverick Ejiogbe Twins subsequently p

Little Theatre, Dundee Four stars A quartet of rarely-seen short plays by Tennessee Williams isn't the obvious choice for Dundee Rep Ensemble's fifth annual tour of the city's community venues. In director Irene Macdougall's hands, however, Williams' sad little studies of little lives in everyday crisis are revealed to be as rich in poetry and poignancy as his tempestuous full-length works. Opening with the compendium's title piece, the self-destructive urges of the play's damaged young couple played by Thomas Cotran and Millie Turner are captured in a series of desperate exchanges that sees them finally cling to each other for comfort. Like them, all of Williams' characters create elaborate fictions for themselves in order to survive the madness of the world beyond the bare floorboards and shabby rooms of Leila Kalbassi's set. Punctuated by a melancholy piano score, the plays contain a contemporary currency too that speaks variously about art, addic

Before Sue Glover wrote Bondagers, books on the subject of female farm workers in the nineteenth century seemed to be pretty thin on the ground. Once Glover's play charting six women's travails through the seasons became a hit in Ian Brown's original production for the Traverse Theatre in 1991, however, everything changed. The play's emotional landscape and lyrical largesse tapped into something that audiences lapped up, and Brown's production was revived for bigger theatres and toured to Canada. Suddenly there seemed to be a welter of literature on the subject, while the play itself was recently named as one of the twelve key Scottish plays written between 1970 and 2010. Twenty-three years on since its premiere, and more than a decade since it was last produced on home soil, Bondagers comes home to roost in Lu Kemp's new production at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. Even with such an extended absence, Glover remains close to the play. “It's difficult

Actor, choreographer, theatre-maker Born June 20 1973; died  October 15 2014 Damir Todorovic, who has died aged 41 following a short struggle with cancer, was an actor prepared to go places others feared to tread. This may not have been immediately obvious in a stream of film and TV roles in which the Serbian-born performer's shaved head and sharp East European features saw him frequently play the bad guy. With the Glasgow-based Vanishing Point theatre company in shows such as the award-winning Interiors, The Beggars Opera and Wonderland, however, he created parts that were quietly intense and which, by way of Vanishing Point's devising methods, were born from a place deep within him. It was made even clearer just how far Todorovic was prepared to go in As It Is, a show created by himself in which he strapped himself to a lie detector while being interrogated about his time as a young soldier in the Serbian army during the Balkan conflicts in 1993.  Originally commissioned by

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars While John Byrne's 1960s reinvention of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters plays to packed houses in the Tron's main house, Marcus Roche's bite-size staging of two of the Russian master's miniatures is an all too fitting curtain-raiser. Roche himself opens proceedings as Chekhov, manning the decks with some particularly riotous Russian dance numbers on the stereo before reading brief excerpts from his diaries. These take place shortly after the original production of The Three Sisters has been a massive flop, and Chekhov considers penning funnier fare once more. This leads neatly into Roche's adaptation of the unfinished The Night Before The Trial, in which a man awaits his fate on the eve of being hauled before the court for attempted bigamy and attempted murder. He is subsequently usurped by a young woman in need of medical assistance he'd be happy to administer if only her pesky husband wasn't also on the scene. Played scr

Young Marble Giants The minimal palette of Cardiff trio Young Marble Giants' first and only album, Colossal Youth, remains as spooky and as fragile today as it was when it crept quietly into the post-punk landscape in 1980. The Pop Group Bristol's incendiary troupe of avant-punk insurrectionists return after this year's Celtic Connections show to perform their just repressed We Are Time album in full. Manic dub-funk sloganeering dangerous enough to bring down governments. Vic Godard & Subway Sect Subway Sect's support slot on the Edinburgh Playhouse date of The Clash's May 1977 White Riot tour at Edinburgh Playhouse inspired what would become The Sound of Young Scotland. Godard's re-recordings of his vintage northern soul period can be heard on 1979 Now. The Sexual Objects One of those attending the Edinburgh White Riot date was Davy Henderson, who formed Fire Engines, Win and The Nectarine No 9 before morphing into The SOBs, who ha