Coffee-Table Notes

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars It's an interesting time for the enterprising Sell A Door company to be reviving Alan Bennett's boy's school smash hit a decade after it first appeared before going on to global acclaim on stage and screen. In a post Yewtree environment when barely a day passes without reports of establishment-based indiscretions with minors, having a maverick teacher who touches up his teenage pupils on the back of his motorbike at a play's centre probably means something different today to how it did back then. Not that Bennett's 1980s-set play, in which Richard Hope's literature loving English master Hector prepares his very own crème de la crème for Oxbridge entrance exams, aims to shock. It is so pithily written, in fact, that Hector's downfall, when it comes, is treated with almost apologetic understatement. Kate Saxon's production heightens things from the off, with Hector's motorbike hanging at the centr

CCA, Glasgow, April 4th-May 17 th Donating body parts after death has long been a staple of the scientific world. Yet, despite occasional conceptual appropriations of blood and guts, art hasn't attracted a similarly civic-minded set of card-carrying citizens. Christine Borland and Brody Condon's 'Circles of Focus' project may go some way to change that, as the pair show off the fruits of their long-term researches in the shape of pit-fired ceramic sculptures, performance documentation and legal paperwork which will also function as a proposal to potential body donors who the artists have worked with over the past two years. “The work with clay began after spending time with a local experimental archaeologist in Orkney focused on the reconstruction of Neolithic pots, and later with similar jar coffin experts in Korea,” explains Condon, whose previous collaboration with Borland, 'Daughters of Decayed Tradesmen', was seen at the 2013 Edinburgh Art Festival. “

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh until May 25 th Four stars Revolutionary spirit in abundance pervades throughout this compendium of eighteen contemporary Brazilian artists, many of whom have been rarely seen outside their volatile homeland since the 1950s which some of the earliest works on show date from. It's all too telling in the downstairs gallery that each of the ten black cubes scattered around the centre of the room that make up Antonio Dias' 'Cabecas' ('Heads') (1968) have a slot in the top. While they look as if they're awaiting a kiddy-sized bus party, they also have the air of stolen ballot boxes put into a more fun environment that redefines politics as playtime. Elsewhere the bits and pieces of the show are denuded completely, with Jac Leirner's 'Vago 51' ('Vacant 51') (2008) a plastic bag not only flattened on the wall behind glass, but its innards gutted, rendering it useless other than the remaining handle which

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four stars When a rather serious looking man comes out from behind a solitary blue curtain into an old-school wood-panelled BBC sound studio wearing just a vest, socks and undershorts, only his stately gait suggests he's about to become King of England during one of the most volatile periods of twentieth century history. Exposed in this way at the start of Roxana Silbert's revival of David Seidler's play, it really is a case of emperor's new clothes as a bustle of servants burl about the man known to his intimates as Bertie, dressing and feeding him while he looks on with bemused surrender. When Bertie opens his mouth he's left even more vulnerable by a terminal stammer that renders his already stilted social graces even more disempowered. By flatly refusing to doff his cap to such stuffiness, vulgarian Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue is the only person who can help the future King George VI find his voice and give him the au

Michael Green - Actor, producer, curator, theatre-maker Born January 21 1957; died February 10 2015 Michael Green, who has died in a car crash aged fifty-eight, was a theatrical visionary, whose fearless radicalism pretty much reinvented the theatre scene in Calgary, Canada with One Yellow Rabbit, the company he co-founded in 1982, and was co-artistic director of. Working with like-minded free spirits, Green and One Yellow Rabbit introduced a hitherto rarely seen wildness to a previously staid Calgary scene, whether playing a Nazi colonel in Ilsa, Queen of the Nazi Love Camp or an alien abductee in Alien Bait. Both of these shows, as well as other One Yellow Rabbit creations such as Doing Leonard Cohen and Somalia Yellow, toured to Scotland, playing either the Tron Theatre in Glasgow or the Traverse in Edinburgh, where the company's audacious mix of absurdist counter-cultural vaudeville found fans and friends among each theatre's artistic leadership. Green blazed a

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