Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Before the opening of Mark Thomson's new production of Bertolt Brecht's late-period masterpiece, seen here in a new translation by Alistair Beaton, the large ensemble cast begin to mill about the auditorium. Dressed down in jeans and hoodies, they chat with the audience as they enter, or else warm up their accordion playing in the box seats above Karen Tennant's expansive set, left wide-open with pianos and a drum kit arranged around a gallows and some pillars. As a plummy-voiced civil service type attempts to foster social engineering in a war-ravaged village, Sarah Swire's rock diva narrator breezes onstage, and the villagers become a multi-tasking musical theatre troupe, playing out the plight of servant girl Grusha, who flees an uprising with her Imelda Marcos-like mistress's forgotten child after pledging herself to soldier Simon. With Grusha's survival dependent on others, her story eventually gives way

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When a white-clad young woman lights a set of candles at the opening of Lucy Porter's sleeper hit of the 2014 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, she ushers us into a very different age of enlightenment to the world history normally allows us privy to. Our hosts, after all, are Polyhymnia, Thalia and Clio, the three founder members of The Fair Intellectual Club, a female-led secret society operating in Edinburgh in the early eighteenth century as a counterpoint to the men only hellfire clubs and salons that proliferated at the time. As our three fiercely intelligent graces engage with each other as much of their brand new world of history, philosophy and big ideas, their intellectual endeavours are only distracted by affairs of the heart, the wild new indulgence of chocolate and a looming matrimony which, as is so often the case, may break up the gang forever. Or not, as the case may be in what looks like a pre-cursor to the free university movemen

Travelling Gallery, Dundee until February 27 th , then touring Scotland Three stars It's appropriate that the opening dates of this seventeen week, seventy-eight venue bus-bound pre-show to the forthcoming V&A Museum of Design Dundee's purpose-built waterfront takeover are where they are. Flanked on one side by the Caird Hall, which once doubled up as a Moscow theatre in John Schlesinger 's 1983 TV film of Alan Bennett's An Englishman Abroad, and Tony and Susie Morrow's statue of DC Thomson's comic favourites Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx on the other, such monumental icons demonstrate exactly how the local could go global in a pre-digital age. Back on the bus, meanwhile, five artists and two studios showcase wares drawn from fashion, textiles, jewellery, gaming and software in an understated array of state-of-art displays. 3D is all the rage throughout, most notably via Anarkik3D Ltd's duo of Ann Marie Shillito and Xiaoqing Cao, whose Cloud

Perth Concert Hall Three stars The stage seems to be taking deep breaths at the start of the Sell A Door company's touring production of Jo Clifford's reimagining of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic split personality tale. If such amplified rumblings sound like they've been dredged up from Quatermass's pit, such allusions to dark futurescapes are all too fitting in Clifford's version, set in an shiny 2020 where all the measures right-wing fundamentalists aspire to have been set quietly in stone, steel and glass. Here cancer specialist Dr Jekyll is a celebrity saviour, a publicity-hungry charity runner who, away from the cameras, can't control his desires. Once he tests his wonder drug on himself, the rush of testosterone turns such everyday abuse into something even more predatory. Jekyll's alter-ego Mr Hyde is like a feral werewolf on heat, at one point humiliating his prey in what looks like a scene from Fifty Shades of Grey rendered as music ha

When the Sell A Door theatre company's touring production of Jo Clifford's futuristic take on Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde opens in Livingston tonight, theatre regulars could be forgiven for doing a double take at the schedules. Clifford's version, after all, arrives just a month before another new version, this time by Morna Pearson, appears in a production by the Lung Ha's company in association with Drake Music Scotland. Both playwrights take radical but very different approaches to Stevenson's classic split personality tale, which has seeped into mass consciousness by way of numerous interpretations of the story on stage, film, radio and television. Where Clifford has reimagined the story in an oppressive futurescape where Dr Jekyll is recast as a high-flying cancer specialist testing a new drug, Pearson has kept her version in a Victorian locale, but has chosen to relocated it to Edinburgh. Here she focuses

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars The black and white portrait daubed on the cupboard door of A.F. Stobbo's carpet factory slab room sums up everything in David Hayman's revival of John Byrne's play that changed so much in Scottish theatre when it was first seen in 1978. Here is the original rebel without a cause who already crashed and burned by the time the play opens in 1957, but who, looking down like a god and painted in a pop art style, points to the cultural revolutions to come for working class wannabes like Spanky and Phil, the fast-talking heroes of Byrne's play. Dean's image is a bridge too between the drab greyness of the cramped slab room and the customised splashes of colour which Spanky and Phil have adorned their work-place with on a set designed by Byrne himself with a sculptor's eye for detail. It's as if his subjects' lives are bursting out of their post-war restraints with a rock and roll abandon born of frustration as muc

King's Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When pipe-smoking Dan Dare-alike Captain Tempest suggests that “It's a trick we might just get away with” in the twenty-fifth anniversary production of Bob Carlton's smash-hit musical, he may be talking about reversing the polarities to save the universe, but it may as well be a mission statement for the show's entire trip. Here, after all, is a play that not only fuses the 1956 science-fiction B-movie reimagining of Shakespeare's The Tempest with a blistering live rock and roll soundtrack, but throws in some hippy-inspired counter-cultural philosophy laced with a soupçon of feminist theory for good measure. None of this may be immediately apparent when Queen's guitar-playing astro-physicist Brian May opens Carlton's Queens Theatre, Hornchurch production with a filmed prologue that sets the tone of comic book kitsch that follows. By the time Joseph Mann's high-kicking robot Aerial has digested Dr Prospero's