Coffee-Table Notes

Last weekend in a pub in Kent, a couple of hundred burly-looking men and women plus a smattering of fans took part in the twenty-fourth British Wrestlers Reunion. The event, attended by survivors of the 1960s and 1970s golden era of British wrestling rubbed shoulders with fans of an era that was as much showbusiness as sport. A week before, in Portobello Town Hall in Edinburgh, a packed audience watched a younger generation of grunt and grapple stars more influenced by the high-flying antics of the American WWE superstars who began to redefine wrestling for an arena age around the same time British wrestling was taken off television in 1988 by ITV's then head of sport, Greg Dyke. Two shows on at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe look set to trade on the revival of professional wrestling in the UK. While An Audience With Gorgeous George harks back to a pre WWE era through the eyes of a character who arguably kick-started the ongoing pantomimic cartoonification of such w

The Sopranos were very much on Vicky Featherstone and Lee Hall's minds when they bumped into each other at an awards ceremony several years ago. Not HBO's much-lauded New Jersey-based crime family saga that put patriarchal mobsters in the psychiatrist's chair during its eight year run  between 1999 and 2007, but something which charted a gang mentality much closer to home. Featherstone and Hall were actually pondering Alan Warner's novel of the same name that was published a year before the iconic TV show, and which the then artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland and the author of Billy Elliot thought might work well on the stage. Warner's book charts  the life in a day of a teenage female choir who travel down from the nameless port where they live to a city not unlike Edinburgh, where they are scheduled to take part in a choir competition. Once let loose in the big city, the girls embark on a series of booze-fuelled adventures that are by turns hyst

Edinburgh may be full of fame-hungry wannabes right now, though hopefully none are quite as out there as the boy magician in Tonight With Donny Stixx, Philip Ridley's latest assault on popular culture that provides a companion piece of sorts to his 2013 play, Dark Vanilla Jungle. Like that play, Donny Stixx is a solo, performed here with initial cheeky chappie charm by Sean Michael Verey in David Mercatelli's production for the Supporting Wall company. Donny is doing a show. It's not the same sort of show he used to do at children's parties and old people's homes when he would do an excruciating magic act. He's got the attention he's always craved, but only because he took things too far and became a national hate figure. Over a high-octane hour Verey lets the mask slip to reveal a kid on the edge, who attack anyone who dares question his precocious genius. It's furiously performed, with Verey's gradual unravelling going some way to explain the

When Sorcha Groundsell stepped out onto the red carpet for the world premiere of Scott Graham's feature film, Iona, at the closing night gala for this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival, she posed for the paparazzi alongside the film's lead players Ruth Negga and Douglas Henshall like a veteran. In the film itself, Groundsell played a teenage girl who is carried around on her father's back after an accident left her paralysed below the knee. For a seventeen year old from Lewis like Groundsell, it was quite an arrival. With another two short films already under her belt, Groundsell makes her professional stage debut during this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Stain, a new play in which Groundsell is onstage throughout Mark Westbrook's intense drama about a star pupil's relationship with her teacher after she doesn't quite make the grade. “She's a very interesting one,” Groundsell says of her character in Stain. “There's nothing

Traverse Theatre Suspension of disbelief is a wonderful thing. Just ask the woman in the Traverse Theatre audience for the opening performance of the tenth anniversary production of An Oak Tree , Tim Crouch's meditation on truth and artifice performed by Crouch and a different actor at every show. So convinced was the woman by Crouch's impersonation of a bad pub function room hypnotist asking for volunteers that she gamely stepped forward, despite Crouch having already pointed out that he was only pretending to be a hypnotist and on no account should they respond to his request. In a way, this incident is a perfect illustration of what An Oak Tree is dealing with, and Crouch dealt with it beautifully before his actual foil, in this case actress Aoife Duffin, who is appearing elsewhere at the Traverse in the Corn Exchange's production of A Girl is A Half-formed Thing, stepped up from the audience having never seen the script of An Oak Tree until that moment. The story

Royal Lyceum Theatre Four stars There are fewer than ten words spoken in Vox Motus theatre company's resplendent evocation of the effects of grief after a young boy loses his mother. When they come, they're as magnificently mono-syllabic as any teenager finding their voice. There is plenty of sound and vision beyond this in the company's collaboration with the National Theatre of Scotland and the Tianjin Children's Art Theatre of China, as clouds hang heavy over the stage, rumbling lowly before bursting into full-on thunderclaps as young Tommy tries to sleep. When a street light turns into a dragon outside his window inbetween watching his ailing mother die, these mythical creatures soon start turning up everywhere, egging Tommy on like some invisible friend as he takes on the bullies at school and in the local swing-park where a girl shows him magic tricks. As Tommy's anger and confusion looks set to get the better of him, the dragons are always on his back,

Edinburgh International Conference Centre Five stars The last time Quebecois theatrical powerhouse Robert Lepage came to Edinburgh two decades ago, his mesmeric mix of hi-tech visual poetry and story-telling was stopped in its tracks by technical hitches. As his astonishing overdue return makes clear in this European premiere by Lepage's Ex Machina company, technology has finally caught up with this ingenious renaissance man who has long been ahead of his time. The past isn't always what it seems, however, as Lepage begins his two and a bit hours onstage with an anecdote about how the onset of iPhone culture has left him barely able to remember his own number, yet he is still able to recall events in his childhood growing up in Quebec City almost half a century ago. The catalyst for this was being asked to recite a poem to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of seismic events in Quebec's volatile Francophone history that provoked an angry plea for self-determinati