Coffee-Table Notes

When Stef Smith met Johnny McKnight, the playwright who first made her name scripting international hit, Roadkill, and the co-founder of the Random Accomplice company had quite a few things in common. Most of these, they discovered, were musical, and while their ongoing debate regarding the musical merits of Madonna looks set to run and run, their mutual fondness of Cher has already borne fruit. This comes in the shape of And the Beat Goes On, Smith's new play for Random Accomplice which is about to open at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow in a co-production with Perth's Horsecross organisation. “Mine and Johnny's entire friendship was founded on a mutual love of Cher,” Smith confesses. “I remember saying to somebody at the time that I don't think I'd ever met another Cher fan before. My love of her comes from when I was a child and my mum used to play all her albums, and I guess something stuck. There's something there as well about Cher being a strong independen

Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh Three stars On a patch of leaf-sodden earth, a young man sits on a wooden chair, his eyes bound as if blinded by a blast from some bomb-powered war. As it is, the man who will go on to become the world's first eco-warrior has temporarily lost his sight in an accident at a saw-mill in his birth-place in nineteenth century Dunbar. Over the fifty minutes of Andrew Dallmeyer's interior monologue, Muir's spidey-senses are a-tingle as his sensory antennae becomes more sensitive to a natural world of sound rather than vision. As he notices the flow of rivers and the noises around him, the epiphany that engulfs him once he regains his sight prompts him to get back to nature and devote himself to a world beyond the all-encroaching industrial revolution. Originally seen at Oran Mor in 2011 as part of the Glasgow venue's A Play, A Pie and A Pint season of lunchtime theatre, Dallmeyer's play is revived here in a new production by Paul Brothe

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars What happens when your heroes lose, proving themselves to be not as invincible as you once thought they were? At an impressionable age the effects can be traumatic enough to last a life-time, as was clearly the case when a six year old Jamie Wood watched a brattish John McEnroe beat Swedish demi-god Bjorn Borg in the 1981 Wimbledon men's singles final, robbing Bjorg of a sixth victory. As Wood's hour-long solo show isn't ashamed to confess, he's been dealing with the emotional fall-out of such a tragedy ever since. It begins with Wood sitting cross-legged on the floor playing catch with the audience and some tennis balls that match his green attire. Such meditations usher in Wood's very personal psycho-drama, which he gets the audience to act out in order to purge it from his being. Investing his performance with a mix of pathos and self-deprecatory humour, Wood manages to transform his inner turmoil into a comic ball

When Roxana Silbert decided to direct a new production of writer David Seidler's original stage version of The King's Speech, it was something of a calculated risk. Originally written in 2007 before being picked up by director Tom Hooper at the suggestion of his mother and turned into a hit film starring Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush, Seidler's drama about the relationship between King George VI and the Australian speech therapist who cured the monarch's stammer led a short if distinguished life when it premiered on the West End in 2012. Then, the play's original producers were happy to admit that their show had been staged too soon after the film, which was still prevalent in the minds of many audiences. Three years on, Silbert's new co-production between Birmingham Rep, the theatre she is artistic director of, and Chichester Festival Theatre, would appear to have acquired just enough distance from both as it arrives in Glasgow as part of its national tour ne

Royal Conservatoire Scotland, Glasgow Three stars The knives are out from the off in Mark Saunders' all-female version of Shakespeare's inter-familial political tragedy, performed by students from the MA Classical and Contemporary Text course. With Lear's throne set atop a chess-board flooring, as he courts the favour of each of his three daughters in full view of his extended entourage, he inadvertently sets in motion a series of physical, political and emotional conflicts which will rip apart an already divided kingdom. Step forward Claire Winkleblack's Edmund, a floppy-haired dandy who takes advantage of both Goneril and Regan, adding an erotic frisson to the ongoing round of corruption and double bluffs that fuel the power-crazed schemes of each. Out in the wilds,meanwhile, is where Lear, Edmund's brother Edgar and their blinded father find out what really matters. While Kristin Morris' Lear is a wild-haired demagogue surrounded by a tunic-clad

Dundee Rep Four stars “Whatever you say,” says Ricci McLeod's lovestruck groom Edward to his disapproving mother Agnes on the eve of his big flash wedding to his sweetheart Olivia in David Ireland's soap opera style reboot of Federico Garcia Lorca's classic tragedy, “say nothing.” Edward's advice to Agnes is all too telling in Jenny Sealey's slow-burning production, a collaboration between Dundee Rep, Derby Theatre and the Sealey-led Graeae company. Edward's old mum Agnes, after all, is deaf, dependent on her boy to help her communicate with the world and deeply jealous of Olivia, though not necessarily in that order. The fact that in their tight-knit city neighbourhood, Olivia, and pretty much everyone else, is connected to the gangster who shot dead Agnes' husband and her other son probably has something to do with it too. Oh, and she's disabled. As for Olivia, she has other fish to fry in the shape of her irrepressible ex, Lee. With surtitl

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars While howling at the moon fuelled by a bottle of cheap cider probably isn't an uncommon pursuit for men of a certain age, few have maybe done it with quite so much venom or articulacy as Sean Doran, the bruised, battered but ultimately unbowed hero of Pearse Elliot's solo play. As performed by Ciaran Nolan in Tony Devlin's production for the West Belfast based Brassneck Theatre Company, Sean's litany of life, death and loss at every level is transformed from what could merely be bleak into something altogether more appealing as it becomes leavened by a gallows humour that falls somewhere between Runyonesque and Commedia dell'arte. On one level, Sean's bench-bound reverie through which walk, run or lollop a cast of characters christened with street-smart nick-names who have barely survived the Northern Irish Troubles - “the black and white years” as Sean immortalises it – is as specific as it gets to a West Belfast housing