Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars The accordion-led overture that ushers in Tony Cownie's new version of Carlo Goldoni's eighteenth century comic cut of mistaken identity speaks volumes about what follows. Sure enough, as soon as Angela Darcy's servant Columbina and her nice but dumb mistress Rosaura open their mouths, we're in old-school sit-com land. Separated at birth, twins Zanetto and Tonino arrive separately in Verona for very different reasons. Where Zanetto is a bumbling half-wit who seems to have met his perfect match in Rosaura just as his servant Arlecchino does with Columbina, Tonino is a bum-slapping charmer who has been followed by Beatrice, a Freud-referencing suffragette who just can't help herself. Jessica Hardwick's Beatrice is pursued both by Tonino's man Florindo and by the flamboyant Lelio, played by James Anthony Pearson as a a ginger-wigged fop resembling a creature who looks somewhere between The Joker and Sideshow

The last time Simon Stephens was in Edinburgh, seeing the billboards and advertising hoardings outside the city's Festival Theatre for his award-winning stage adaptation of Mark Haddon's novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time gave him a little swell of pride. For all the phenomonal success of both the book and the play, which has seen Marianne Elliot's National Theatre production of Stephens' version transferring to both the West End and Broadway prior to its current tour which arrives in Edinburgh tonight, it felt a little bit like coming home. “Edinburgh is very special,” says the Stockport-born writer having just watched a new production of childrens' musical Bugsy Malone at the Lyric Hammersmith, where he is an associate artist. “It's the city where I met my wife. I formed my band there, and I lived there for two years, and started writing my first play in a flat above a shop on Broughton Street.” Such attention to detail and forensic

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars 'People Make Glasgow World Class' declaims the bus shelter hoarding just across the bridge that leads to the Gorbals-based Citizens Theatre. Beyond the spin, such a statement could easily form part of Douglas Maxwell's new play. Set beneath a neon-lit reconstruction of artist Stephen O'Neil's real life installation, it becomes a fantastical love letter, not just to the Govanhill neighbourhood it is set in, but to the city itself. For Peter and Demi, the young couple at the play's centre, it is a city full of monsters, where family life is disrupted by a cacophony of police helicopters and howling dogs who add to the din of their crying baby. With sleeplessness at a premium, Peter's terminal adolescence rubs up uncomfortably against the likes of Dharmesh Patel's property developer Raj, who takes Umar Malik's disaffected schoolboy Kuldev under his wing and is the epitome of every big-talking wide-boy who e

Onstage there's a young woman in a white jump-suit having her head shaved by a young man in a leopardskin dress. David Bowie's Rebel Rebel blares out the speakers while a young audience looks on. Even by the standards of the vegetarian cafe/bar/venue that is Mono, this Thursday teatime performance is an eccentric spectacle. The haircut/performance marks the launch of the 2013 edition of live art festival, Buzzcut, which has moved into Mono's speak-easy environs for the first time. If ever proof was needed, Buzzcut's plethora of similarly off-the-wall events demonstrates that the venue's open-minded and inclusive policy goes miles beyond its left-field musical constituency. Seated at a table over snacks, someone is opening up the gatefold sleeve of the vinyl edition of Bowie's new surprise album, The Next Day. The album has just been purchased from Monorail Music, the impeccably stocked record shop housed next to the bar and lovingly co-owned and run by Glasgow m

1. Billy Fury – Wondrous Place When teenager Ronald Wycherly turned up to a Marty Wilde show in the late 1950s with the hope of showing the older singer some of his songs, little did he know that he'd end up not just onstage but on tour with Wilde as he was given an infinitely more mercurial name by showbiz svengali Larry Parnes. Fury didn't really hit paydirt until 1961 with his yearning top ten hit, Halfway To Paradise, but a year earlier his first version of songwriters Jeff Lewis and Bill Giant's understated paean to the transcendent powers of intimate exchanges of the flesh was delivered with quietly knowing ineffable matinee idol cool. Fury recorded the song several times during his fleetingly brief time at the top before the 1960s beat groups took over the world. Fury continued to release records, and played holiday camp rocker Stormy Tempest in David Essex film vehicle, That'll Be The Day before dying at the tragically young age of forty-three in 1983.

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars There may well be a bright golden meadow at the opening of Rodgers and Hammerstein's first, genre-busting Broadway hit from 1943, but Rachel Kavanaugh's touring revival for the Music & Lyrics company and the Royal & Derngate Northampton proves there's a dark heart there too. While hardly Twin Peaks, the small town in what is still regarded here as 'Indian Territory' but which is about to become the state of Oklahoma in this turn of the twentieth century tale based on Lynn Riggs' 1931 play, Green Grow the Lilacs, is riven with conflict beyond the infectious optimism that infects most of its residents. While this is never overdone in Kavanaugh's starry, wide-open production, it's played appealingly straight, despite some of the most infectiously jaunty songs ever penned for musical theatre. The first act beams into view with Ashley Day's twinkly-eyed Curly and Charlotte Wakefield's independ

“Will half an hour be long enough for this?” an affable Douglas Maxwell asks the Herald's photographer following a mid-afternoon interview in the foyer of the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, where one of his two new plays, Fever Dream: Southside, opens this week. “It's just that the schools are off and it's a nightmare for childcare just now.” If this incident alone suggests that Maxwell's world has changed since his work last graced our stages, the subjects of these new pieces confirms it. Maxwell's early works such as Decky Does A Bronco, staged in a swing-park in 2000 by the Grid Iron company, and Our Bad Magnet, which appeared at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow the same year, looked at small town boys, outsiders and terminal adolescents undergoing some kind of rites of passage, usually brought on by tragedy. These themes continued in the computer game based Helmet, Mancub and the epic If Destroyed True, but they were all more than a decade ago now, and more rece