Coffee-Table Notes

When Amanda Gaughan first read Conor McPherson's play, The Weir, she was so shaken by its contents that she knew she had to direct it. The end result of what sounds like a quasi spiritual experience as much as a physical one is Gaughan's new production of the play, which opens at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh this week. Set in a west of Ireland pub populated by a smattering of regulars, The Weir steps into a very male world of boozy bravado and unspoken bonds that are opened up by the arrival of a female stranger called Valerie. Over the course of one night, as each man tries to outdo each other with supernatural yarns designed to both impress and scare the incomer, everybody's lives are quietly rocked by what eventually unfolds. And that's it. No grand gestures or epic sweeps of dramatic tricks, dance routines or live video feeds, just five people in a pub, talking. Which makes you wander what shook Gaughan up so much when she read it. “It's got so much

It came as no real surprise when it was announced that David Bowie would be co-writing a play set to open in New York. Here, after all, was a pop star – an artist – whose entire career had been one of theatrical reinvention, as he took on a different guise for each new record that looked increasingly tailor-made for the video age. When it was announced that, rather than go down the crowd-pleasing jukebox musical route a la Abba's Mamma Mia! or Queen's We Will Rock You, this new work called Lazarus would see Bowie collaborating with playwright Enda Walsh and director Ivo van Hove, it sounded a tantalisingly serious proposition. Both Walsh and Van Hove are Edinburgh stalwarts , with Walsh having carved out an international career from his Fringe debut, Disco Pigs, in 1997, to writing the libretto for opera The Last Hotel, which appeared at last year's Edinburgh International Festival. Van Hove's production of Antigone, starring Juliette Binoche, appeared in the sam

When Piers Haggard received notice that he was to be awarded an OBE in the New Year's Honours List, the veteran theatre, film and television director might well have presumed it to be for his achievements on stage and screen. Haggard, after all, was the man who steered Dennis Potter's mould-breaking 1978 TV drama series, Pennies From Heaven, to international acclaim. By that time, Haggard had also directed cult folk horror flick, The Blood on Satan's Claw, and would go on to oversee the 1979 mini series of Nigel Kneale's seminal Quatermass saga. This followed a checkered theatre career, which began for Haggard at the Royal Court under George Devine, and led to stints at Dundee Rep and the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow before Haggard joined the newly founded National Theatre under Laurence Olivier. Haggard went on to work with Liza Minnelli on an American TV special, and more recently directed Vanessa Redgrave in an onscreen adaptation of Rosamunde Pilcher's novel,

I'd vaguely noticed the picture of a poke of chips floating about an event post on my Facebook feed for a while before it really caught my eye. For a couple of days, ever since it was posted at one minute to midnight on Hogmanay 2015, I'd half-registered the words The Glasgow Effect accompanying the picture. At the time, the words didn't really mean anything, certainly not in the way they do now, so wasn't really something to concern myself with. When I eventually clicked onto the post, I was first bemused, then confused by what I read. There are a ton of event invitations that pop up on social media over the course of the day, but this one seemed to be written in some opaque bureaucrat-speak, and didn't seem to refer to an event at all. Which is fine if that's what you're into, and the name Ellie Harrison rang a bell, right enough, but I was too distracted by other things to pay it much attention. Only when a friend private messaged me with the words

Edinburgh Playhouse Four stars There's something deeply moving when the Von Trapp family take flight from the Nazis at the end of at Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's evergreen musical, featuring a book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. It’s not just the power of every song that's gone before, but the sheer seriousness of their plight that makes one wonder what it must have been like when audiences first witnessed it in 1959, just twenty years after the end of World War Two. The liberating force behind the show's sentiment, of course, is free-spirited singing nun Maria Rainer, played in Martin Connor's new touring production for Bill Kenwright by Lucy O'Byrne. Once Maria leaves the convent and becomes governess to not so merry widower Captain von Trapp's brood, emancipation from their regimented lives comes through progressive schooling, creative play and the power of song. Maria even cuts up her bedroom curtains into frocks and inadvert

It's mid November, and in a cluttered upstairs rehearsal room in the Gorbals, Vanishing Point theatre company are sat around a long table talking earnestly about their forthcoming production of their new show, The Destroyed Room. The co-production with Battersea Arts Centre opens at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow at the end of February prior to dates in London and Edinburgh, but in November at the end of a week of development, what is advertised as being a show about voyeurism and witnessing things through and beyond a TV screen has yet to find out what it is. The rehearsal room set-up itself, however, gives early hints of what The Destroyed Room may or may not end up as. As actors Elicia Daly, Pauline Goldsmith and Barnaby Power, designer Kai Fischer and four others talk, with the all-seeing eye of director Matthew Lenton at the table's head, it gradually becomes apparent that, among the flight cases and speakers that litter the floor, four video cameras mounted on tripods st

Norwegian guitarist Haftor Medboe has been a low-key fixture of Edinburgh's jazz scene for some years now, having released seven albums in various guises and with different collaborators over the last decade. These include Places and Spaces, recorded in 2012 with a quartet that included Anneke Kampman, vocalist with spectral electronicists, Conquering Animal Sound. This latest outing sees Medboe lead a trio of pianist Espen Eriksen and trumpeter Gunnar Halle. Both of Medboe's countrymen come with an impressive international pedigree as both band-leaders and side-men on a host of recordings. This makes for a crisp and starkly melodic alliance for a set of seven original pieces. Composed by Medboe with the distance exile brings with it, each one taps into his Nordic roots with an ornate chamber jazz that leaves plenty of space to contemplate the view. Recorded the day after the trio's live appearance at the 2015 Edinburgh Jazz Festival , the album ebbs and flows from th