Coffee-Table Notes

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four stars Whatever the facts behind this week's announcement that novelist Harper Lee is set to publish Go Set a Watchman, a novel presumed lost for fifty-five years and featuring a grown-up version of Scout Finch, the narrator of her much-loved debut, there is no better time to stage To Kill A Mockingbird. Especially when it is such a poignantly evocative take on Lee's story as it is here in Timothy Sheader's touring production, which visits Edinburgh and Aberdeen following this week's Glasgow run of a piece originally produced by the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre in London. It opens with twelve actors lining the stage wearing modern dress, reading the opening pages of Lee's novel in their own accents from the books held open before them. As each steps in and out of character, lining either side of Jon Bausor's wide-open set throughout as Luke Potter plays his live acoustic guitar score, this opens out Lee's treatise o

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars Property developers take note. Be careful who you cut deals with, both in business and pleasure, or else you might end up like the hapless pair at the centre of Peter James' best-selling thriller, adapted here by Shaun McKenna and directed by Ian Talbot for a stage version co-produced by James himself. One minute Michael and Mark are making a cool five million, which they've carefully lodged in a Caymans Island account while shooting the breeze concerning Michael's impending nuptials to Tina Hobley's drop-dead gorgeous Ashley. The next, Michael finds himself six feet under in the local forest after an elaborate stag night prank goes tragically awry. Enter James' regular copper in chief Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, who just made the headlines after putting faith in a doting but underwritten Medium rather than foraging for clues the old-fashioned way. With his sidekick DS Branson in tow, Gray O'Brien

When Bob Carlton first devised a late-night rock and roll show with the actors he was working with  in a tent run by a London fringe theatre company, he never thought that its mix of science-fiction, Shakespeare and a live band would have a life beyond its short run. As it is, Return to the Forbidden Planet  is about to embark on a twenty-fifth anniversary tour which touches down in Glasgow next week and Edinburgh shortly afterwards. The latest outing of this commercial smash-hit may be commemorating its Olivier Award winning West End run, but it already had a colourful life, first at the London Bubble Theatre, then later at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, when Carlton revived it in 1984. “I never thought it would go on so long,” says Carlton today of a show inspired by 1950s sci-fi film, Forbidden Planet, which was inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest. “I went to do a show at the Bubble, which was then being run by Glen Walford, and once we'd done the main show, we started

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh until April 26th Four stars 'Live in Ponte', declaims the mantra on a poster depicting some glossy urban paradise, 'and never go out.'  For the  54-storey circular folly that still towers over Johannesburg's skyline and which was originally built in 1976 to house South Africa's white elite, alas, things didn't quite work out like that. By the time South African photographer Mikhael Subotsky and British artist Patrick Waterhouse came calling, the concrete monstrosity was largely occupied by black residents who moved in following the collapse of apartheid, although many had subsequently been evicted by predatory property developers. The result of Subotsky and Waterhouse's five year study in this international collaboration between the SNPG, Le Bal, Paris and FoMu Antwerp is an expansive piece of impressionistic photo-journalism that combines archive and found material alongside fresh images and texts documentin

When Harper Lee's novel To Kill A Mockingbird was reported to have been banned from GCSE reading lists in England and Wales last year alongside other works by American writers at the behest of UK Education Secretary Michael Gove, there was an understandable outcry. Here, after all, was an iconic and much-loved Pulitzer Prize winner which, since its publication in 1960, has become a modern classic. As Regent's Park Theatre set off on a tour of Timothy Sheader's hit west end staging of the novel which takes in three Scottish cities, what the incident highlighted was just how much of a bond readers who grew up with To Kill A Mockingbird maintain with it throughout their adult life. “I watched what Michael Gove was saying,” says Sheader, “and he said that he wanted more of Charles Dickens, who I think is wonderful and writes great universal stories and creates wonderful characters, but they're not really about life in the same way that To Kill A Mockingbird is or in the way

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars In a windowless high-rise built where the Sun no longer shines, the entire world seems to be closing in on Jane and Mac, the listless couple at the centre of this short opera penned by real life partners, playwright Zinnie Harris and composer John Harris. The concrete landscape they've created for Jane and Mac is grey and empty, their lives barren of feeling as each struggles with their own private ennui. When a small weed appears beneath the lino, having seemingly grown up through breeze-block like some Ballardian bean-stalk, it's flash of green suggests a life beyond the four walls for them both. When what turns out to be an apple tree keeps growing back, refusing to be pruned, its persistence awakens in Jane and Mac a desire which transcends beyond the numbness, even as they self-medicate their way to oblivion, Commissioned and presented by the Aberdeen-based Sound festival of new music and adapted from Zinnie Harris' short play, this

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Three stars When what looks like a bunch of black and grey clad technicians huddle around a bank of home-made electronic instruments at the centre of an otherwise bare stage to make assorted retro-futurist beeps and bloops worthy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the penny drops that sound and fury will most likely be at the heart of the Filter company's seventy-five minute truncation of Shakespeare's Scottish play. As it is, this follow-up to the company's take on the far frothier Twelfth Night, which toured to the Citizens last year, is an oddly restrained affair, in which any eerieness in the collectively created co-production with Bristol's Tobacco Factory comes from Tom Haines' soundtrack. Here an ever rolling set of witches culled from the cast of seven become the show's house band, ghosts in the machine both driving and manipulating the action as they tune in on it like some diabolical branch of the Stasi or GCHQ. Poppy Miller'