Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Two bespectacled men in identical suits and patterned maroon sweaters step onto a wooden floor empty save for a pair of matching chairs with a bottle of water beside each. Standing alongside each other, the two men open the brown paper covered notebooks each are carrying, and, in unison, announce each chapter of their back pages. What follows in Forced Entertainment's interpretation of Hungarian writer Agota Kristof's novel concerning twin boys' experiences while evacuated to their grand-mother's farm during World War Two and beyond is a fascinatingly grotesque look at the brutal extremes survival can take. As performers Robin Arthur and Richard Lowden read their first-person narrative as if unveiling their joint diaries at a spoken-word night, it's as if Gilbert and George had channelled John Wyndham's Midwich Cuckoos and married such an unholy alliance to a bombed-out equivalent of Ivor Cutler's Life in A Scotch Sitt

In the row of billboards on Lothian Road in Edinburgh which act as a conduit to the capital's theatre district, the most striking poster  features an image of two men standing side by side. Shabby suited, bowler-hatted and somewhat officious as they appear, it is the faces that captivate. Both lived-in and of a certain vintage, neither smiling, they are by turns world-weary and wide-eyed, giving everything and nothing away. In the upstairs green room of the Royal Lyceum Theatre that sits on Grindlay Street just past the billboard-constructed conduit, the same two faces peer out from a squishy sofa where it's dressed-down occupants sit side-by-side like bookends. As with the billboard,  the two men look tired yet still brimming with accidentally acquired life. The reason for the latter probably has something to do with the fact that Brian Cox and Bill Paterson have just come out of a strip lit rehearsal room where they've spent all day rehearsing outgoing Royal Lyceum artist

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars "If you don't want to see a man fall," the Proprietor of the out of season Alpine hotel says at one point in David Greig's stately meditation on identity, "look away." Like the play it belongs to, it's a line that works on many levels. The fall the Proprietor refers to stems from the army of intrepid would-be explorers braving the rocks, but it also refers to the plight of the unnamed middle-aged Man found unconscious in the snow but unable to remember anything of himself or how he got there. A young woman, Anna, is dispatched from the British Consulate to find out who the man is, only to fall for his world-weary charm. When another woman, Vivienne, arrives at the hotel, a whole new world opens up about who exactly the Man might be. There is laughter and forgetting aplenty in John Durnin's urbane revival  of Greig's 2005 play, which, in the courtyard of Frances Collier's design, is rendered as a piece of

Dundee Rep Five stars The ceilidh band is already playing as the audience step onto the bare floorboards of Joe Douglas' revival of one of the defining plays of twentieth century Scottish theatre, and the whisky is flowing. Not as a sweetener to encourage the smatterings of audience participation that ripple throughout the show, but as a celebration, both of the play itself and  the spirit of artistic and political resistance it continues to define. First performed in 1973, John McGrath's ribald melding of variety traditions tells the hidden history of how Scotland has been plundered by self-serving capitalists from the Highland Clearances onwards. What could so easily have been rendered as cheeky revivalism becomes in Douglas' heartfelt production for Dundee Rep's Ensemble company a vital statement on the world we live in now and the way very little has changed in terms of who's ruled the roost over the last forty-two years. At times its series o

Joe Douglas was "Minus ten," when a rough-shod fusion of ceilidh and popular drama knitted together as something called The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil began a Highland charge around the nation's village halls in 1973 that would go on to redefine Scottish theatre as we now know it. In the forty-two years since, John McGrath and his 7:84 Theatre Company's melding of music hall and political commentary has become an iconic benchmark of how theatre can fuse radical intent with populist heart in a way that has trickled down to the National Theatre of Scotland's equally seminal production of Black Watch and beyond. McGrath's original production of The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil featured now well known names including John Bett, Bill Paterson and Alex Norton in a cast that also included McGrath's actress wife, Elizabeth MacLennan, her brother David, folk singer Dolina MacLennan and fiddler Allan Ross. The show m

Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh Four stars Marie Jones' tragicomic dissection of cultural colonialism by a predatory Hollywood film shoot in rural Ireland first appeared in Edinburgh in 1999 en route to the West End and Broadway. At that time, the so-called Celtic Tiger which had  reinvigorated the Irish economy and the film industry that went with it so spectacularly was in its final throes of unfettered largesse. More recently Ireland's landscape has provided a suitably fantastical backdrop for Game of Thrones, though the sentimentally inclined sentimentalising of tradition continues to prevail elsewhere. Jones puts her story in the hands of down-on-their-luck film extras Jake and Charlie, played by two actors who proceed to unveil a cast of thousands, from the last surviving veteran of The Quiet Man to the American starlet feeding off the local colour. Through this device, a very serious statement is made about the relationship between art and commerce using an apposite and in

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, September 26th-April 24 th 2016 One of the main legacies of the 2014 Scottish Referendum will be the multitude of images from all sides that document the pains and the passions of one of the country's pivotal political moments of the twenty-first century thus far. With this in mind, it's only fitting that some kind of collective response is gathered. Step up photographers Colin McPherson, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, Sophie Gerrard and Stephen McLaren, who as Document Scotland have pulled together some fifty to seventy-five images of Scotland and its people from the front-line to commemorate the first anniversary of such a seismic event. It is this sort of thing that makes documentary photography so evocative of moments great and small as the human hearts behind those moments are framed in a way that both historicises and mythologises them in the best senses of both words. While a patina of politics is inherent in such an undertakin