Coffee-Table Notes

A young man plays bat and ball in a messy kitchen at the opening of The History of the World Based on Banalities Johan De Smet and Titus De Voogdt's new play produced by the Koppergeitery company as part of this year's Big in Belgium programme. Without a word being said, notions of velocity and gravity are being proffered up in this most everyday of exercises. When the boy played by De Voogdt starts talking to the audience, about his scientist mother who's lost her bearings through Alzheimer's disease, such a sense of his own isolation sparks up a curiosity that finds voice through a series of free-associating quantum leaps that fall somewhere between alchemy and idealism. Accompanied by a hooded electric guitarist who skulks behind the fridge freezer twanging out some dust-bowl laden dirges, De Voogdt's character acts like he's home alone as he embraces new liberties en route to reclaiming his affinity with his mother from the totems left behind even as she s

In a cluttered Leith Walk rehearsal room it looks a little bit like the end of the world. The Sun may be offering up a rare if welcome shine outside, but for Grid Iron Theatre company, in the midst of rehearsing their new stage version of Shane Jones' cult novel, Light Boxes, for the moment at least, it must remain forever February. For the family played by Melody Grove, Keith Macpherson and Vicki Manderson who plays the couple's daughter, trying to contend with such terminal bleakness isn't easy, and MJ McCarthy's fiddle-led funereal score played live by the cast only seems to make the scene even sadder. “The story of Light Boxes is the story of a town that becomes taken over by February,” explains director and adaptor Finn den Hertog. “Both the month of February and the cult of February, I suppose. February bans flight, and we see how this one particular family from the town deals with that. They get caught up in warfare, their daughter goes missing and we see how t

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