Coffee-Table Notes

It seemed like there weren't many books dealing with a contemporary immigrant's experience before Khaled Hosseini's debut novel, The Kite Runner, was published in 2003. It was this quality that first attracted playwright Matthew Spangler to adapt Hosseini's tale of two boyhood friends – Amir  and Hassan -  growing up in Afghanistan against a backdrop of war for the stage. With both men living in the same Californian neighbourhood, Hosseini and Spangler met up for coffee, with the end result being Spangler's adaptation of The Kite Runner, currently on a UK tour in a co-production by Nottingham Playhouse and Liverpool Playhouse, and which arrives in Edinburgh next week. “I first read the book in 2005,” says Spangler, “and a lot of it is set locally to me, in the area where the family in the novel move to. The first attraction to me was that it was a book about the immigrant's experience, but it's a book about many things. It's a love story, a father-son st

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Long before anyone invented the make-believe Glasgow miracle, Robert Colquhoun and Robert Macbryde were creating a set of artistic mythologies that set the tone for much that followed. Kilmarnock born and Glasgow School of Art trained, as painters and lovers the two Roberts blazed a drink-sodden trail through bohemian London that saw them hailed as boy wonders before being spoilt by bad behaviour and sidelined by the more voguish face of abstract expressionism. Few have identified the talents of Glasgow's original artistic double act more than John Byrne, whose original 1992 romp through their messy lives has here been condensed into a suitably wild two-man version in Andy Arnold's production for the Tron in association with the Glasgay! festival. The bare back-side of a sprawled-out Macbryde being painted by his partner-in-crime at the top of the show sets the tone for the tempestuous and emotionally naked roller-coaster ride that follows. As t

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars The dramatic and musical cacophony that dovetails the two acts of Graham Linehan's audacious adaptation of William Rose's classic Ealing comedy speaks volumes about the post World War Two little Britain occupied by the disparate gang of get-rich-quick villains at the play's heart. By posing as a string quartet, the charming Professor Marcus and his coterie of crooks made up of a cross-dressing major, a pill-popping teddy-boy, a muscle-headed sidekick and a European psychopath may appear respectable in the eyes of Marcus' new land-lady, Mrs Wilberforce. Yet, as with the revolving set that allows the audience in to Mrs Wilberforce's crumbling King's Cross pile in Richard Baron's slickly realised revival, it's easy to see beyond the polite facade towards something messier and more complex. While Mrs Wilberforce is spotting Nazi spies in the newsagent, the dog-eat-dog aspirations of Marcus and co points to a crueller fut

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars A shot in the dark and the shrill scream that begin J.B. Priestley's philosophical thriller don't tell the full story of something possessed with the airs and graces of a hokey drawing-room whodunnit, but which ends up as a tortured treatise on human nature's power to deceive. These attention-grabbing noises off are themselves a theatrical double bluff, as they open out onto a post dinner party scene where the ladies of the extended Caplan clan are making small talk. A cigarette box seems to carry more weight than anyone is letting on, and only when the gentlemen enter does revelation upon revelation pile up alongside the much missed figure of the late Martin Caplan. Martin was the social glue and a whole lot more besides of a publishing set steeped in the well turned out veneer of its own fiction. Sex, drugs, love and money are all in the mix, be it straight, gay, between husbands, wives and other part-time lovers. If only they'd mana

When the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow announced earlier this year that the centrepiece of the theatre's  seventieth anniversary Spring season in 2015 would be a new production of John Byrne's play, The Slab Boys, it confirmed excited whispers which had been circulating for some time. The Slab Boys, after all, has become a bona fide modern classic since it premiered at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in 1978. The fact that it will be directed by David Hayman, who had directed the original production of the play that redefined Scottish theatre thirty-six years ago gave the news an extra frisson. After blazing a trail as part of the legendary 1970s Citz ensemble, The Slab Boys will be Hayman's second return to his theatrical alma mater under its current artistic director Dominic Hill's tenure, following his barn-storming turn in the title role of Hill's production of King Lear. Today's exclusive announcement in the Herald confirms that the remainder of the Citz

Paisley Arts Centre Four stars When self-absorbed actor Miles turns up at an isolated farmhouse in search of a story, he gets more than he bargained for when he's taken in by Morgan and Angus who live there.  Both Second World War veterans, these life-long friends play out their lives in early 1970s Ontario, working the land as they keep old and uncomfortable memories at bay. Miles' arrival awakens something in a damaged Angus that can't be placated anymore by baking bread, counting stars and listening to Morgan's possibly unreliable tales of how they got to where they are. Inspired by real-life events that led to The Farm Show, a defining moment in Canadian theatre,  Michael Healey's 1999 play taps into a rich seam of dramatic and social history even as it pokes fun at the try-too-hard earnestness that springs from Miles and his big city ways. Out of this comes a tender meditation on how stories can enlighten even the most shattered minds. Alasdair McCrone's to

Dundee Rep Four stars Ever feel like you've been cheated? John Lydon's famous phrase springs to mind in Selma Dimitrijevic's production of her new version of Gogol's nineteenth century comedy, penned here with Mikhail Durnenkov. This isn't just because of the Sex Pistols t-shirt sported by one of the key players in the elaborate sting that follows from an unholy alliance between con-men. It is the way too that Dimitrijevic and her all-female ensemble play with artifice and gender in a way that itself is a stylistic gamble. Yet, as each character enters the locker-room to play macho games, it pays dividends even as the gang hustle their victim into suspending their own disbelief. Initially nothing is hidden in this co-production between Greyscale and Dundee Rep Ensemble in association with Northern Stage and Stellar Quines. Once the sextet of players have put on charity shop suits and waistcoats, they pick up instruments to become a junkyard dance-band before a playg