Coffee-Table Notes

When Stephen Mallatratt's stage version of Susan Hill's gothic horror novel, The Woman in Black, arrives in Edinburgh this week en route to Glasgow as part of the show's latest tour, Robin Herford's production marks a twenty-five year West End run second only to Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap in terms of longevity. “It's quite bizarre,” says Herford, who has been with the show from the start, ever since he commissioned Mallatratt to write it while running the Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round in Scarborough. “Normally a show only goes out on tour once its finished its run in the West End, but because the Fortune where we are in London is such a tiny theatre with only four hundred seats, this is the sort of thing that we can continue to take on.” The play itself opens with an old man called Arthur Kipps alone in a Victorian theatre, where he is joined by a young actor he has hired to help perform events that have haunted him for decades. Over the next t

When the 1927 company won a Herald Angel in 2007 for their debut show, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, its spooky mix of cut-glass spoken-word vignettes, pasty-faced vintage-styled cabaret and atmosphere-soaked animation was one of the major hits of that year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Eight years on, the company co-founded in 2005 by writer, director and performer Suzanne Andrade with animator and illustrator Paul Barritt look set to return to Edinburgh this August. Rather than appear on the Fringe, however, the company will form part of Fergus Linehan's inaugural programme as director of Edinburgh International Festival with their collaboration with Australian enfant terrible Barrie Kosky on a version of Mozart's The Magic Flute. This week, however sees 1927 transfer their most recent show, Golem, to the West End following a successful outing at the Young Vic, who co-produced the show with the Salzburg Festival and Theatre de la Ville in Paris. Based

Dundee Rep Four stars The knives and pretty much everything else are out in this radical reboot of what is probably Shakespeare's bloodiest tragedy, in which a Roman general returns home to a leaderless state, only to have his human trophy Tamora, Queen of the Goths, take control as she marries into royalty and ushers in an increasingly pointless series of tit for tat killings. In outgoing Dundee Rep director Philip Howard's version, brought stunningly to life by director and designer Stewart Laing, 'Rome' becomes the sort of voguish open-plan restaurant beloved of European cities and fans of urban regeneration. Into this environment, built magnificently into Dundee Rep's rarely used Bonar Hall space, the audience become the hungry diners sat at long wooden tables witnessing a political system in meltdown as a portraits of former demagogues line the wall. As assorted kitchen staff from all factions neck shots and dance on tables to JD Twitch's pumping tech

Edinburgh Playhouse Three stars When the giant halo cum crown that's been hanging above the stage since the start of this latest touring revival of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1971 musical starts to slowly descend midway through the second act, it looks less like symbolism and more like a spaceship beaming down to earth. Up until then Bob Tomson and Bill Kenwright's production has been a hit and miss compendium of once self-consciously groovy happy-clappy numbers such as What's The Buzz and the appealingly evergreen strains of Everything's Alright and I Don't Know How To Love Him, all good songs if here sounding somewhat strained in their delivery. This soundtracks what here looks like a celestial bromance between Glenn Carter's Jesus Christ and Tim Rogers as Judas Iscariot. Both of the leads are in fine form, even if any revolutionary tendencies Jesus might have are muted by an angelic image offset by both Rogers and a surprisingly nasty Ponti

When a young William Shakespeare wrote his early play Titus Andronicus, he probably didn't envisage what was a blood-soaked revenge tragedy coming to the boil several centuries later with the whole of Rome a restaurant and his lead character its masterchef. This is exactly what Dundee Rep's outgoing co-artistic director Philip Howard and director and designer have done, however, in an audacious sounding version adapted by Howard which opens at the Rep this week. One of Shakespeare's lesser-spotted works, Titus Andronicus' tale of a Roman general who returns home from war to sort out the country has often been dismissed by scholars as shock-seeking juvenalia which latched onto the then trend for such works by his older peers. Howard and Laing, however, beg to differ in a version that aims to get to the play's possibly skewered heart. “What's regarded as the problem with the play is the violence,” Howard explains, “but that's a red herring, because, lik

Eden Court Theatre, Inverness Three stars The sound of twittering gulls flying high over St Kilda that ushers in the first revival of Sue Glover's eighteenth century set play on home soil in almost three decades is a significant pointer to what follows in Liz Carruthers' production, as three women attempt to spread their wings and fly free. While Isabel is the virginal wife of newly arrived minister Aneas and Oona the Gaelic speaking local, at the play's centre is Rachel Chiesley, aka Lady Grange, the furious wild child exiled by a high-falutin' and hypocritical husband who couldn't control her more singular ways. Like St Kilda, Lady Grange is abandoned, but rather than look on her imposed exile as some kind of retreat, she is a walking confrontation, a stranded Miranda in rags whipping up her own tempest from the neck of a bottle. With her airs and graces barely contained by the rough-shod chair made by Oona that allows her to indulge a sense of superiorit

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars In a virtual world, what does it take to change the universe? Such dilemmas are put under the microscope in this devised exploration of lives in orbit from the Curious Directive company, revived here following an Edinburgh Festival Fringe run for the Edinburgh International Science Festival in association with the Norfolk and Norwich Festival and Watford Palace Theatre. Set in the year 2029, the space race has set its sights on Mars, with couples in particular being favoured in a billion dollar project backed by an Indian philanthropist. But Imke has lost her partner Oscar en route to the red planet, and Imke's sister Maartje must be hauled from the depths of her own researches to save Imke's sanity. The great-grandsons of Russian space pioneer Sergei Korolev, meanwhile, are on their own rocket-fuelled road trip to recreate the stratospheric thrill of it all by any means necessary. Jack Lowe's production immerses its cast