Coffee-Table Notes

GOMA until May 25th 2015/Glasgow School of Art until January 25th 2015 Five stars It's only too fitting that programme image for the first of these two shows that form part of the Glasgow-wide Alasdair Gray season, lovingly and meticulously put together by Sorcha Dallas to mark Glasgow's original renaissance man's eightieth year, is a compass. For both the GOMA show it heralds and its accompanying GSA show join the dots between those who influenced this poppiest of classicists and those who followed in his wake, with Gray both wide-eyed bridge and beacon between the two. So at GOMA we move from Durer's crucifixions, Blake's judgements and Aubrey Beardsley's erotic politesse to Japanese figurative art, line drawings by David Hockney, the vintage poetics of Adrian Wiszniewski and Chad McCail's poster-size take on wisdom and experience. The umbilical links between these and Gray's own works are made plain, yet remain tantalisingly fresh even as the join is

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars It's Christmas Eve in Edinburgh New Town, and in the ornate interior of legal power couple Cameron and Lara's Georgian des-res, the fire is roaring, the wine is uncorked and their beloved dog Max is frolicking in the garden. Set to a classical music soundtrack, the scene is almost too perfect in Orla O'Loughlin's production of Iain Finlay Macleod's new play, as if lifted from the pages of some high society magazine. Enter John, an intruder from the opposite end of the social spectrum, whose rude intrusion and kidnap of Max sees the veneer of respectability rapidly unravel as Lara at least shows her true colours. The name of the game for what follows is survival, as John first becomes trapped, only to use his animal mentality to turn the tables on his captors. As played by John Bett and Barbara Rafferty as Cameron and Lara, and Keith Fleming as John, the heightened grotesquerie in the cartoon class war that foll

1 Thirty-five years ago tonight, on December 8th 1979, I went along to an under-eighteens matinee gig in a shabby basement club in a run-down street in Liverpool city centre. I was fifteen, the band I went to see was called Joy Division and the club was called Eric's. To say the experience was life-changing is an understatement. Eric's was situated at one end of Mathew Street, and was already legendary for birthing a colourful post-punk underground made up of bands with ridiculous names such as Echo and the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes. Both these bands were signed to Zoo records, run by two young men from an office at the other end of the street, over the road from Probe Records, a social hub where all the Eric's crowd hung out. A couple of years before on the same street in an old warehouse transformed into an arts lab and cafe called the Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun, maverick theatre director Ken Campbell premiered a twel

When Iain Finlay Macleod moved part time to the Stockbridge district on the cusp of Edinburgh New Town, it was as far spiritually from the playwright, novelist and tweed-maker's Lewis birth-place as it was geographically. Macleod had decamped to the capital to take up his post as the 2013 Institute of Advanced Studies for the Humanities (IASH) Edinburgh University/Traverse Theatre Fellow, and the original plan was to write something loosely based around the nineteenth century Enlightenment which begat the thinking of David Hume and Adam Smith. Yet, s he spent more time in the area, Macleod became increasingly drawn towards the not always enlightened world of the legal profession. Then, when a friend told him a story about someone looking after a dog which subsequently died, forcing its minder to put its body in a suitcase to take it across town to the vet's on the underground, it became something else again. The result of such a disparate set of inspirations is The Devil Master

Cumbernauld Theatre Four stars “Don't go messing with cosmos,” says the operator of a celestial helpline to big bad Abanazer in Tony Cownie's pocket-sized take on this most magical of pantomime favourites, “or the cosmos will mess with you.” This is something Abanazer eventually learns to his cost  as he manipulates peasant boy Aladdin into leading him to the magic lamp and the genie that will sate his greed. Lovestruck Aladdin, meanwhile, has his sights set on the beautiful Princess Jasmine, even if it means trampolining his way over the palace walls with his best pal Karif to get her. A bored king is the initial impetus for the yarn to unravel, as his loyal subjects scramble around in desperation to find one more story to keep him interested. Only when the oldest and wisest member of the tribe lays bare a tale closer to his heart than he lets on does the gang leap into the dressing up box to act it out. As dramaturged by Ed Robson and Roderick Stewart, this makes the most of

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Five stars Don't be fooled by the pasty-faced jug-band who strike up a jaunty version of Silent Night as a curtain-raiser to Dominic Hill's seasonal look at Charles' Dickens' festive classic. Aside from an audience sing-along to The Twelve Days of Christmas and Ebeneezer Scrooge's closing conversion, that's pretty much as cheery as things get. Such over-riding solemnity is by no means to the show's detriment, however, as Hill and his creative team take full advantage of Neil Bartlett's marvellously pared-down script. Fused throughout with an epigrammatic musicality that allows for much playfulness, it allows an inherent theatricality to burst onto the stage with an ensemble cast of eight led by a pop-eyed Cliff Burnett as the old miser himself. From the off, even the quill-scratching labours of Scrooge's employees are choreographed to perfection by movement directors Benedicte Seierup and Lucien MacDougall before things vee

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Be careful not to quaff too many flagons of frobscottle before going to see the Royal Lyceum Company's festive take on Roald Dahl's over-sized yarn about a kindly but flatulent giant. If you do indulge in the make-believe beverage, Andrew Panton's production of David Wood's stage version might well end up with so much whizzpopping, as Dahl would have it, that it could resemble an exercise in odorama, not to mention adding assorted off-kilter pumps and parps to Claire McKenzie's already energetic live soundtrack. Wood opens up Dahl's pages by way of a magician's birthday party no-show, which inspires young Sophie to put herself centre-stage as she acts out her favourite present along with her pals, while also giving her mum and dad the starring roles. On a life-size wooden doll's house flanked by little fluffy clouds designed by Becky Minto, Robyn Milne's Sophie transports her puppet self into the clutches of