Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Three stars It's been quite a week for Robert Louis Stevenson at the RCS. Running alongside a devised post-modern take on Jekyll and Hyde, the rarely explored backstage area of the New Athenaeum Theatre became the venue for a look at his Boys Own style response to the 1745 Jacobite uprising like no other. With the audience herded into a room awash with metal platforms, hanging ropes and stainless steel ladders, Graham McLaren's production rips into Stevenson's yarn with hell-for-leather abandon, as an ensemble of fourteen final year students from the BA Acting course jump into David Balfour and Alan Breck's dissident world. That they do this by way of flying ships, upside-down aerial acrobatics and Vicky Manderson's joyous choreography makes McLaren and co's take on things no ordinary adaptation. The ghosts of both Bill Bryden's post-industrial spectacles and Ken Campbell's lysergically charged epic

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Three stars A crazed Mr Hyde straddles his bed-bound creator pleading with him not to kill him off because he's the only interesting character who's sprung to life from Robert Louis Stevenson's gothic tale of duality and barely repressed madness. This is a tellingly knowing nod to the twenty-first century's ongoing fascination with horror. It's there too in Lucien MacDougall and Benedicte Seierup's production, devised with nine final year students from the RCS' BA acting course, in some of the jump-cut film footage that cops its moves from the likes of American Horror Story in terms of its power to shock. With Stevenson here cast as plain old Louis, he is woken from his medicated dream in a hospital ward and tended to by a pyjama-clad chorus who watch enraptured from the sidelines as the main action unfolds. What follows is a psycho-active explosion in Louis' head reminiscent at times of the hallucinoge

Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh Three stars Two nights before Remembrance Sunday, and a woman is onstage surrounded by a hotch-potch of cardboard boxes, each one containing a totem of a remarkable story. She pulls a pair of tacketty boots from one, an ornate ladies hat from another. From one a seemingly endless reel of ticker tape unfurls its hidden messages. These messages and more are relayed in Alice Mary Cooper's evocation of a time capsule from The Great War packed by Dundee postal workers in 1921 and only rediscovered in 2013, a year before the centenary of the war's start. This timing is handy, because, while the actual box, crammed full with letters, photographs and documents, now sits in the McManus Gallery in Dundee, its accompanying instructions that it wasn't to be opened until the centenary allows Cooper's hour-long show and tell to put flesh on the bones of a piece of hidden history that goes beyond mere war stories. Commissioned by Harlow Playhouse

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Three stars In a muddy bog, Robert The Bruce is crowned king of Scots after crushing the English and claiming the throne as his own. As with history, it is Bruce's younger brother Edward you have to keep an eye on in Ben Blow's speculative reimagining of the Bruce boys post-Bannockburn assault on Ireland, produced here by the Edinburgh-based Black Dingo Productions. Like a Shakespearian villain on the make, Gerry Kielty's Edward snipes from the sidelines prior to a power-hungry burst of sibling rivalry that sees him left to his own manipulative devices on Irish soil, intent on creating a kingdom of his own. Once in the wilds with his troops, he encounters Failtrail, a young milkmaid who is forced to sing for him before the two face up to the dehumanising realpolitik of power games and become accidental allies, Director Kolbrun Bjort Sigfusdottir sets all this in the bleakest of landscapes in a meditation on war which sounds at times

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, November 7th-June 26 th Long before the current generation of female Scottish artists started making waves, muscles of joy were being flexed in a way that paved the way for everything that followed. This major show of more than ninety works from familiar names including Joan Eardley and Phoebe Anna Traquair to less well-known but just as significant figures bookends its time-frame from when Fra Newberry became Director of Glasgow School of Art to the year of Anne Redpath's death. In the years between, the doors were opened to women artists in a way that was unprecedented as they seized on new liberties in a way that allowed them to express their art as never before. Not that it was easy, as the exhibition makes clear by framing it in the context of the conditions female artists negotiated as students and practitioners due to their gender. Given that it moves through the age of suffrage to a more seemingly swinging age, the new researc

Citizens Theatre , Glasgow Four stars The light is barely there at the opening of Sam Holcroft's twenty-first century adaptation of Anton Chekhov's slow-burning tip-toe through the seemingly wasted lives of several generations of country folk. As bookish Sonya's diligence at the accounts is disturbed by her uncle Vanya's barely contained frustration at the sheer mundanity of what his life has become, things are exacerbated even more as his city slicker brother in law and Sonya's father is doted on by his glamorous new wife Yelena, who Vanya is besotted with. Only dashing doctor Astrov seems to have any kind of vision for the future, even as he's worshipped by Sonya. Up until he meets Yelena, Astrov's notions of biology are all in the abstract, as he talks at length of insects, pheromones and living wild and free in tribes. Everything else, it seems, is just the end of the line for a bunch of part-time would-be suicides. Stripped to the bones of

King's Theatre , Edinburgh Four stars Freedom and democracy aren't words usually associated with the late Margaret Thatcher, the former UK Prime Minister whose ideology-driven decade in office set the tone of things to come. Those are the exact words, however, which open Moira Buffini's play, which puts Thatcher on stage alongside the Queen as a cut-glass double act showing off the edited highlights of Thatcher's time in office between 1979 and 1990. This makes for quite a history lesson as Buffini imagines a series of meetings between the pair, simply known here as Q and T. As older versions of the two women watch over these formal and frosty exchanges between their younger selves, a world of IRA bombings, royal weddings and the Falklands War is laid bare as Q becomes a quietly radical conscience of the nation. All of this is delivered in Indhu Rubasingham's production, originally seen at the Tricycle Theatre in London prior to this commercial tour, in a