Coffee-Table Notes

In 1972 when Richard Demarco first brought Polish theatre director Tadeusz Kantor and his Cricot 2 company's production of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz's play, The Water Hen, to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, it was described as one critic as 'the least publicised, most talked about event' in town. Forty-three years after Kantor first captured the city's imagination, and a century after his birth, the maestro's legacy lives on in a series of events programmed in response to Poland dubbing 2015 the Year of Kantor. In Edinburgh, the Royal Scottish Academy celebrates the legacy of Kantor's influence with a showing of a recently unearthed and hitherto unseen film of The Water Hen that forms the centrepiece of work culled from the Demarco Archive in The Water Hen: Kantor, Demarco and the Edinburgh Festival. This will be seen alongside documentation of performances from this year's Hidden Door festival by younger Polish and Scottish artists inspired by Kant

Willie Donaldson and Sebastian Horsley were two of a kind. So much, in fact, that it was inevitable that the one-time co-producer of the Beyond the Fringe revue and the dandified artist who cut a decadent dash through Soho society would become friends. For a while, at least, these self-styled – some might say self-invented – gentlemen of leisure found common ground in their mutual love of excess in pretty much everything. When Horsley fell for Donaldson's girlfriend, former topless model Rachel Garley, however, things changed. With the world a less colourful place following Donaldson's passing in 2005 and Horsley's suspected overdose five years later the day after the premier of Tim Fountain's stage version of Horsley's memoirs, the tellingly named Dandy in the Underworld, a new play looks set to continue this free-spirited pair's flirtation with immortality. Willie and Sebastian is Rab C Nesbitt creator Ian Pattison's latest dramatic vehicle for Andy

When Stewart Laing remounts his 'reconstruction' of Paul Bright's Confessions of A Justified Sinner in the Queen's Hall for the Edinburgh International Festival run of what at first glance looks like a piece of solo theatre performed by George Anton, it may look as though the lunatics have taken over the asylum in which the Queens Hall itself plays a significant part. Presented by Laing's Untitled Projects in co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland, Glasgow's Tramway venue and the Edinburgh-based Summerhall, Laing's collaboration with Anton and writer Pamela Carter charts the rise and fall of a radical young theatre director attempting to mount a stage version of James Hogg's iconic 1824 novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of A Justified Sinner. According to Laing and co, Bright's seminal piece of hidden history took place in the unreconstructed landscape of 1980s post-industrial Glasgow. Fusing Carter's text with metic

Enda Walsh has been spending a lot of time in hotel rooms recently. In New York, the Dublin-born playwright has been working with David Bowie on Lazarus, a new musical inspired by the alien character played by Bowie in Nicolas Roeg's 1976 big-screen adaptation of Walter Tevis' novel, The Man Who Fell To Earth. In Galway, Walsh has just premiered A Girl's Bedroom, a twelve minute monologue presented at Galway International Arts Festival as an installation to audiences of five at a time. And somewhere between Dublin, London and Edinburgh, Walsh is preparing for The Last Hotel, a brand new opera co-written with composer Donnacha Dennehy, who Walsh first worked with on a 2012 Galway revival of his 1999 play, Misterman. “I thought it would be good to try something that wasn't so narrative-driven,” Walsh says of The Last Hotel's creative roots. “I was really enjoying doing Misterman, and felt my work was changing, so when Donnacha turned round and said he had this ide

Traverse Theatre In a dead person's living room filled with boxes loaded up on a garish carpet as if awaiting the removal van, Gary McNair tells the story of his grand-father, an unreconstructed Gorbals legend who allegedly made his fortune by betting on England to win the 1966 World Cup Final. Which, according to the way he tells it in A Gambler's Guide to Dying, didn't go down too well with the local hard-men in a neighbourhood where life expectancy is so low that people age in dog years, who saw it as a betrayal. Out of this incident which may or may not have happened, McNair weaves a comic portrait of the man who first introduced him to story-telling, and who almost became a millionaire if he'd lived to tell the tale. Over seventy-five minutes of this big-hearted solo piece, McNair's shaggy-dog story says much about families and how they function. McNair is an engaging presence in Gareth Nicholls' production, underscored beautifully by Michael John

Edinburgh International Conference Centre Five stars It's not immediately apparent that the man in jungle fatigues and army cap who slips onto a stage littered with microphones, speakers and a smorgasbord of hi-tech twenty-first century kit is Simon McBurney. Nor that his jokey demonstrations of sensurround binaural sound inbetween taking pictures of a headphone-clad audience on his iPhone for his children means the show has begun. But then, defining the beginning of time itself is what drives McBurney's mind-expanding exploration of human consciousness in this world premiere of a co-production between McBurney's Complicitie company, Edinburgh International Festival and a host of suitably pan-global partners. Inspired by Romanian writer Petru Popescu's book, Amazon Beaming, The Encounter ostensibly tells the story of National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre, who in 1969 stumbled upon the Mayoruna tribe on the edge of Portugal and Brazil. McIntyre's exp

King's Theatre Four stars When Juliette Binoche steps out onto the stage as the doomed Antigone in Ivo van Hove's quasi-contemporary reimagining of Sophokles' version of the Greek soap opera against images of a barren desert no-man's land, it is not as a revolutionary heroine, however purposely she strides. Rather, as the opening argument between Antigone and her sister Ismene makes clear in Anne Carson's new translation, she is in mourning for her brother Polyneikes, who has been slain in the Theban civil war, while her other brother has been honoured by King Kreon. In a stately, suitably funereal affair, it becomes clear too that in the fall-out of such close to home collateral damage, that this is a family at war with each other and tearing itself apart now their world has been rocked by such a bereavement. The Chorus here are battle-weary survivors, and at times it's as if they're sleep-walking to their own destiny as slow-motion footage of city s