Coffee-Table Notes

John 'Hoppy' Hopkins – photographer, writer, activist Born August 15 1937; died January 30 2015 John 'Hoppy' Hopkins, who has died aged seventy-seven, was a key figure of the UK's 1960s counter-culture. This was the case whether documenting critical events of the era including the 1965 International Poetry Incarnation at a packed Royal Albert Hall, as co-founder of underground bible International Times and its short-lived spiritual home of the UFO Club, or else instigating the London Free School, a community-based adult education initiative which led to the founding of the Notting Hill Carnival. As a photographer, Hopkins was in the thick of the action, whether playing records at UFO or being busted for cannabis possession. The latter event led to a high-profile trial that amplified the schisms that existed between generations, and prompted a full page ad in the Times newspaper funded by Paul McCartney and featuring messages of support from the likes of Georg

Five years ago, playwright and director Nicola McCartney was about to travel to Russia, where over the previous seven years she had established a series of new playwriting initiatives in a country still best known for its weighty theatrical legacy rather than contemporary theatre. Before she left, David MacLennan, the now late founder of A Play, Pie and A Pint, suggested to McCartney that she should see if there was any scope in looking at writers to take part in MacLennan's pioneering series of lunchtime plays at Oran Mor in Glasgow. In association with the National Theatre of Scotland, PPP had previously hosted seasons of plays from China, the middle east and Latin America, and McCartney had already worked with a generation of writers who styled themselves as part of the Novii Drama or New Drama wave of artists who broke the boundaries of old-school social realism as well as political taboos. The eventual result of this is a season curated by McCartney of three play

When Phill Jupitus takes the stage of Edinburgh Festival Theatre in a couple of weeks clad in Leiderhosen and Swastika armband to play deluded Nazi playwright Franz Liebkind in Mel Brooks' stage musical of his film, The Producers, it will be a far cry from Jupitus' original stage persona of post-punk word-smith Porky the Poet as he can get. By his own admission, however, Jupitus' turn as the author of goose-stepping smash hit, Springtime For Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden, is something he fell into. Jupitus was only cast after Ross Noble, who will play Franz for the Glasgow dates, was unavailable for the first ten weeks of the tour. “I'm very much wearing the number twelve shirt,” Jupitus says on a break from rehearsals. “Ross signed up to it first, but then he couldn't do the opening few weeks, so they asked me instead. I've never been in rehearsals for the start of something before. I've always stepped into it once it's been

Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh Three stars Whether intentional or not, playing former Jimmy Savile's Old Record Club favourite, Young Girl, by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, in the build up to the start of Andy McGregor's production of his own new play for the Sleeping Warrior Theatre Company gives what follows a creepier edge than the play's title suggests. Here, after all, is a full-on twenty-first century romance, in which teenage dreamers Suzie and Gary hook up, not at the youth club disco, but through Facebook, that all pervasive global village where cyber-stalking can lead to all kinds of trouble. Where Suzie's posts gush about sentimental TV shows and the delights of Simply Red, Gary quotes Kerouac, puts up seriously arty selfies and claims to dig Beethoven. The trouble is, in an online world where you can be anyone you want to be, it's hard to spot who's faking it unless 'friends' meet in the flesh. Which, following an excess of

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars The oh-so-tasteful wine bar jazz guitar version of Making Whoopee that ushers in this touring revival of Phoebe Waller-Bridge's solo play gives nary a hint of the psycho-sexual head-rip that follows over the next sixty-five minutes. Nor indeed does the opening scene, in which our eponymous heroine messes up a job interview with an instinctively inappropriate display. This is just the start, however, of a no-half-measures roller-coaster ride through Fleabag's emotionally scarred world, in which she defines herself through sex, be it through masturbating to online porn or else sleeping with any man that comes her way. Either way, it reminds her she's alive even though she doesn't feel a thing. As things gradually unravel while she either crushes or else pushes away anyone who attempts to get close to her, beyond Maddie Rice's jolly hockey-sticks delivery and the unfettered ridiculousness of Fleabag's guinea pig

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars What does it mean to be love sick? Lucy Prebble's award-winning play, first seen at the Royal National Theatre in 2012, explores this painful question through two couples confined in very different ways by clinical drug trials in a medical testing centre run by a tellingly named pharmaceutical company. Connie and Tristan arrive as strangers, but within hours find themselves attracted to each other in a way that might just be chemically enhanced. Lorna and Toby, meanwhile, are the doctors overseeing Connie and Tristan's trial, and whose uneasy shared history dictates everything that follows. As Connie and Tristan's terminal flirtation eventually spills over, so Lorna and Toby come to redefine their relationship through a series of double bluffs which have devastating consequences for them all. The inner landscape Prebble explores in this fascinating dramatic analysis of chemistry, biology and sheer physical and mental desire is

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars The scales of justice hang heavy in stark black and white on the gauze through which the murder jury sit in the shadows at the start of this touring revival of Reginald Rose's post courtroom classic, first seen as a television play before being made iconic in Sidney Lumet's big screen debut in 1957. Christopher Haydon's production, first produced by Birmingham Rep before becoming a West End hit, casts Tom Conti as the anonymous Juror 8, initially the sole dissenter of a pack intent on sending a young boy of colour to his death in what initially seems a cut and dried case. As the facts are gradually revealed over the next two riveting hours, they also lay bare an assortment of everyday prejudices and knee-jerk notions of law and order fuelled by ignorance, fear and self-loathing. It's not hard to recognise contemporary universal parallels in Rose's play, which burns with claustrophobic heat in the shabby room of Mi