Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars Two teenagers meet at college. In a gloriously gawky, awkwardly unromantic fashion, he asks her out to Nando's. She returns the favour, but quite rightly won't take any of his nonsense. With their affair played out in plain sight of their disapproving families, the star-crossed young lovers carry on regardless. Coming from a tight-knit inner city Pakistani community that's as prone to gangland bullying and brutal misogyny as any insular society, Caneze and Sully must face ever higher stakes in Emteaz Hussain's punchy and street-smart riff on Romeo and Juliet for Tamasha and the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry. There are beatings, mad dashes to airports and suspicious reconciliations in Esther Richardson's fast-moving production, played out by just two actors on designer Sara Perks' stacked up shanty town of a set as Caneze and Sully go on the run. As their world closes in on the couple, with all the hormonal mess of conflict

Tramway, Glasgow until June 7 th Four stars It's significant that a curtain of rainbow-coloured strips form the entrance to Tramway 5 for the looped screening of German-born artist Grace Shwindt's feature-length film dissecting the ideological legacy of post Second World War Germany's strand of left-wing activism. It not only suggests an element of pageantry to the choreographed spectacle it unveils, but offers up a set of multi-hued futures beyond the black, white and red of old idealism. Utilising eleven dancers and filmed over five weeks in a walled set transplanted onto parkland with the bright lights of the city just beyond, Schwindt weaves together choreography, social history and an interview with a taxi driver activist influenced by Germany's volatile 1960s and 1970s history to create a multi-layered performance that questions notions of freedom on both an individual and collective basis. Seemingly hemmed into the room, the dancers recite the taxi dr

Until June 7 th Four stars With more than 430 graduates showing off their wares in the vast expanse of ECA, it's impossible to give anything but a cursory overview of the event in such limited space as is allowed here. One can only follow one's nose and try not to be too overwhelmed by the vast array of fresh talent bursting from every pore of the building. Wit is always a winner, and William Spendlove (or William Spendlove & Bros Painters & Decorators if you please) has it in spades in his waggishly industrious line in small works that include a pair of sandles and a vivid polo neck jumper wrapped around a frame with a Picasso tote bag hung rakishly on its arm. The upside-down legs of Rosaleigh Harvey-Otway photographed in theatre auditoriums and other spaces offer glimpses into equally topsy-turvy worlds, while both Mel Wilson and Douglas Allison seem to be operating in similar all-angles day-glo territories. John Nowak's music-inspired canvasses throb wit

When Laurie Sansom brought his production of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to the Assembly Hall on the Mound as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2009, Muriel Spark's tale of a mercurial Edinburgh school mistress opened up a world of possibilities for the then artistic director of the Royal & Derngate theatres in Northampton. Nearly six years on, the now artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland follows up his mighty production of Rona Munro's epic historical trilogy The James Plays at the 2014 Edinburgh International Festival with another, less well-known work by Spark. The Driver's Seat is is a novella that first appeared in 1970, and is here adapted by Sansom himself for its first appearance onstage. Like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Driver's Seat looks at an impeccably singular woman. Where Jean Brodie confines herself within the school walls, Lise, the heroine of The Driver's Seat, is a woman in constant motion as she drives t

Dundee Rep Five stars It is a bleak and austere house that Pip and Estella find themselves in at the opening and close of Jemima Levick's production of Charles Dickens' classic treatise on class, power and the perils of having ideas above one's station. Using Jo Clifford's original 1987 adaptation which has continually regenerated over the last three decades, Levick has utilised the script's rich and brutal poetry to create a magnificent and stately piece of darkly comic gothica that retains its period lyricism while becoming a profoundly pertinent play for today. As a role-call of grotesques step through the walls of empty picture frames where still lives were once captured on Becky Minto's set, Pip is thrust from a poor provincial existence to the mysterious wonders of Miss Havisham's loveless parlour before being whisked off to London where he learns the ways of the world. “If they do cut your throat,” says lawyer's clerk Wemmick to Pip

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars The last time Douglas Maxwell developed a play with students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland it finished up as Fever Dream: Southside, this year's main-stage professional offering at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow. Whether this picaresque metaphysical fantasia will go the same way following Matthew Lenton's production performed in the Tron's bijou Changing House space by an ensemble of final year BA Acting students remains to be seen, but there are similarities. Lenton's production finds Charlie 'Chick' Sonata slumped unconscious, a hip-flask by his side. Around him carouse the flotsam and jetsam of a life carelessly lived, a mixture of now domesticated drinking buddies, old flames and accidental angels who seem to have embarked with Chick on some celestial bender. Sat round a hospital bed where teenage Audrey lays unconscious, Chick's life flashes across his eyes as he is lurched Scrooge-like across a life-l

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars “We have a parliamentary democracy for a reason,” says the once thrusting but now cancer-ridden right-wing atheist academic in the second act of Mike Bartlett's epic expose of a Britain on the verge of collapse. “The people can't be trusted.” Hearing those words in the heat of the anti-capitalist Occupy protests when the play was first seen in 2011 is one thing. Hearing them just a few grim weeks after the Conservative Party's Westminster victory in this May's UK General Election sounds chillingly pertinent. This is especially the case in a production performed by a large ensemble about to graduate from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's BA Acting course. An entire nation may be having bad dreams at the start of Ben Harrison's production, but in the midst of a criss-crossing array of increasingly troubled lives in motion, hope comes along in the form of John, a park-side anti-war preacher resembling a leftover from Spe