Coffee-Table Notes

When the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh announced the resignation of its artistic director Mark Thomson last week after twelve years at the helm, there were some who thought Thomson's decision was in response to Scotland's arts funding quango Creative Scotland's potentially damaging seventeen per cent cut in the theatre's regular funding. Here, after all, was one of the country's leading rep companies who, as this season's productions of Brian Friel's Faith Healer, Tony Cownie's new take on Goldoni's The Venetian Twins and Thomson's own boisterous production of Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle have proved, is at the top of its game. This was confirmed by the news that the Royal Lyceum has been nominated for a record breaking seventeen awards at this year's Critics Awards For Theatre in Scotland. The announcement too of the theatre's fiftieth anniversary season as a producing company has also set the country's theatre scene

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When the bell rings to mark the beginning and end of Winnie's day in Andy Arnold's exquisite revival of Samuel Beckett's classic piece of existential vaudeville, it's urgent peals may suggest closing time on some kind of gladitorial struggle, but her enforced stillness says otherwise. Such contradictions of hope and despair are at the heart of Beckett's work, and, buried to her waist in the sand as if the victim of some urchins prank while sleeping, Karen Dunbar's Winnie is an equally mercurial creature. One minute she's all smiles, rummaging through the bag beside her for an assortment of beauty aides to help keep up appearances. The next she's fondling a revolver, waxing lyrical on what the day may or may not bring. Her partner in crime Willie, meanwhile, all but ignores her, hiding from the sun behind a newspaper as he throws out monosyllabic non-sequiters. The assorted rituals constructed from domestic min

Beyond his iconic movie roles, Al Pacino is a consummate man of the theatre. His 1996 documentary, Looking For Richard, explored Shakespeare's Richard III, a role Pacino played on Broadway in 1979. Pacino had already won a Tony award a decade earlier for his career-launching performance in Don Peterson's play, Does A Tiger Wear A Necktie? More recently Pacino played Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and appeared in a revival of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. Mamet wrote China Doll, which has just been on Broadway, especially for Pacino. It was while appearing in a 1983 revival of Mamet's American Buffalo that Pacino first thought about filming a play that had lived with him since his early days at New York's legendary Actor's Studio. The Local Stigmatic was an early work by poet and doyen of London's 1960s counter-cultural underground, Heathcote Williams, and was first performed at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 1966 in a double bill with The

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Three stars It's a mad world for Kirsty, the young woman at the centre of Fiona Geddes' solo play, revived following its Edinburgh Festival Fringe run for a series of dates to tie in with Mental Health Awareness Week. One minute she's quoting French novelist Marguerite Duras regarding the unhinged proclivities of mums everywhere, the next she's rewinding her own back pages beside the seaside or else taking a phone call from her own mother to prove Duras' point. Somewhere inbetween she's taking second and third opinions from a conveyor belt of doctors regarding the nature of schizophrenia, an illness she's so au fait with that she even wore the t-shirt. As performed by Geddes herself in Jessica Beck's production for the fledgling Kidder company, the end result is a quasi stand-up tale of ordinary madness and the hand-me-down legacy left in its wake. Barely still for a second beside a chair perched on a low angled platform

The decision by City of Edinburgh Council to give Watford based pub chain JD Wetherspoon planning permission to convert the historic music venue and former cinema most recently known as The Picture House into a 'superpub' on Lothian Road is a huge blow to Edinburgh's live music scene. Based on CEC officers recommendations, this decision marked the end of a saga which has left a much needed mid-scale music venue boarded up sionce December 2013 after JD Wetherspoon bought it from HMV. The decision was passed by CEC's Planning Committee's Development Management Sub Committee by six votes to four, with Councillor Eric Milligan, who is also head of the Licensing Board, abstaining. Four members of the fifteen-strong committee were absent. Given the significance of the issue, which prompted almost 13,500 people to sign a petition organised by the Save The Picture House campaign, this result was disappointing to many. The impact of the Picture House's closure in

When in 1994 Robert David MacDonald staged Into That Darkness, Gitta Sereny's study of Nazi extermination camp commandant Franz Stangl, it was twenty years since the Austrian born writer's book was first published. The book itself had resulted from some sixty hours of interviews with Stangl, in which he eventually admitted his guilt before suffering a heart attack nineteen hours later. MacDonald's production was staged under the title In Quest of Conscience at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, where with Giles Havergal and Philip Prowse he was the theatre's co-artistic director. The playwright, translator, adaptor and international polymath himself played Stangl opposite Roberta Taylor as Sereny. Another twenty years on, and the Citz has restored the book's original title for a new look at MacDonald's version of Sereny's book which opens this week in a production by Gareth Nicholls. This time out Blythe Duff takes on the role of Sereny, with Cliff Burn

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars In a run-down seaside down where Tesco has left the local fishing industry bereft, teenage Blue sits chained to her mobile phone, desperate for the seemingly grown up world beyond to let her into the party. While her brightly-dressed peers follow their hormones, Blue dreams up a world of her own, where mermaids live in harmony beneath the sea, untouched by the wars that rage above them. One, however, becomes smitten with a drowning prince and the allure of the shiny world above. It can't be understated just how gorgeous, how poignant and how downright radical Polly Teale's twenty-first century reboot of Hans Christian Andersen's classic tale of The Little Mermaid is in her own touring production for Shared Experience and Nottingham Playhouse. Set against a backdrop of peer-group pressure and privilege, of Royal weddings and media scrums, of anti war marches and beach bodied airbrushed perfection, its not hard to spot the real