Coffee-Table Notes

In a Leith warehouse on a cold Wednesday afternoon, something funny is going on. Just how funny remains to be seen, because, as pantomime favourites Allan Stewart, Andy Gray and Grant Stott have long known, comedy is a very serious business indeed, and when comedy partners fall out, it really is no laughing matter. You can see this when all three are on their feet for rehearsals of Canned Laughter, a brand new play co-written by Ed Curtis with Stewart about Alec (Stewart), Gus (Gray) and Rory (Stott), an imaginary 1970s comedy troupe on the verge of the big time. Such showbiz mythology is familiar territory for Curtis, who had directed Stewart in the title role of Al Jolson in Jolson and Me. Curtis later directed Alan McHugh and Elaine C Smith's Susan Boyle based musical, I Dreamed Dream, in which Gray appeared. Prior to both shows, in 2007 Curtis wrote and directed Never Forget, the Take That jukebox musical which focused on a tribute band trying to get their break. Wit

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars “If we get anymore white people here,” says Little Inez, the sparky kid sister of the male half of Baltimore's first inter-racial teenage couple in this latest touring revival of the 1960s-set John Waters inspired musical, “it'll be a suburb.” Such seemingly throwaway observations speak volumes about where writers Marc O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan's book is coming from in Paul Kerryson's production, which originated at Leicester's Curve Theatre. Adapted from Waters' 1988 commercial breakthrough film and taken from real events, for all it's bubblegum-coloured nostalgia , Hairspray is a show that lays bare the brittle superiority of so-called normal society. That it does so with an all-singing, all-dancing cast led by Freya Sutton as curvy heroine Tracy Turnblad and Tony Maudsley cross-dressing as her mother Edna makes it even better.   Sutton's Tracy is “that chubby Communist” who wants every day to b

Paul Higgins won't be able to make the Glasgow Film Festival screening of Couple in A Hole, the off-kilter thriller he appears in alongside Kate Dickie, and which has already garnered plaudits at festivals abroad. Instead, Higgins will be just across the river, performing in the Citizens' Theatre's new production of Blackbird. David Harrower's troubling dissection of the emotional fallout of an illicit relationship between twelve year old Una and forty year old Ray shows what happens when Una turns up unannounced fifteen years after Ray was sent to prison. Higgins can also be heard shortly in a new radio adaptation of John Wyndham's ecological science-fiction novel, The Kraken Wakes, in which First Minister Nicola Sturgeon makes an unlikely cameo. All of which is in keeping with Higgins' back catalogue as an an actor unafraid to appear both vulnerable and ridiculous, as he did on TV in both The Thick of It and Dennis Kelly's graphic novel styled Utopia.

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four stars The French windows are suitably symmetrical at the opening of Tom Attenborough's handsome-looking touring revival of Noel Coward's superior sit-com, knocked off over a long weekend in 1930. They're certainly better matched than Elyot and Amanda, the former lovers now on the rebound and on honeymoon with brand new spouses. It's telling, however, that the adjoining balconies where chance meetings are inevitable on Lucy Osborne's set more resemble an art deco cruise liner that's fleetingly docked in port than the hotel it actually is. What follows as Tom Chambers' Elyot dallies with Charlotte Ritchie's Sybil while Laura Rogers' alpha female Amanda toys with Richard Teverson's pompous Victor is a riot of wildly choreographed savage love that falls somewhere between passion and politesse in its cut-glass execution. Attenborough's production too presents a company of equals, with Ritchie making a bright an

Michael Head is full of stories. This is something the audience at Oran Mor in Glasgow should find out tomorrow night when Head brings a trio version of his latest venture as Michael Head and the Red Elastic Band to town. There's the one, for instance, about how this prodigiously talented songwriter first fell in love with music beyond his mum and dad's country and western records when he saw Julian Cope's band, The Teardrop Explodes, on a TV show hosted by Factory Records boss, Tony Wilson. “There was a lot of Johnny Cash and Hank Williams in the house,” Head remembers. “I think I was about twenty-five before I heard Revolver, but in 1978, there was this programme Tony Wilson did, and the theme tune got me straight away, 'cos it was Shot By Both Sides by Magazine, and I remember bombing down the stairs, and I was standing there in the living , watching the Teardrop Explodes transfixed transfixed, and my dad said, you like that, don't you. I said, yeah, it'

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Everything is laid bare in John Dove's production of Arthur Miller's all too timely fable of new puritanism and how a divide and rule ideology can damn us all. It happens between the cracks of the bare floorboards of designer Michael Taylor's spartan set. It's there too in the skeletal framework that surrounds it flanked with barren trees. Most of all it's there in the hearts and minds of Miller's small town rural society that's ripped asunder by secrets and lies. Once exposed, the mass hysteria these provoke destroys everyone who claims any kind of moral high-ground. Fear is at the heart of Miller's seventeenth century story in which solitary farmer John Proctor goes to the gallows along with most of Salem after his illicit liaison with Abigail Williams kickstarts a witchhunt. It's a fear of sex, books, dancing and all those things that might enlighten us enough to see through an oppressive regime

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Freedom comes easy to the teenage girl who gives Eva O'Connor's solo play it's title. As performed by O'Connor herself, even sitting at the sewing machine patching up her home-made dresses with jaggedy seams as she does in the opening scene of Hildegard Ryan's production for the Sunday's Child company seems to give her a quiet kind of liberation. That will never be a match for Saoirse's best friend Siobhan, mind, a well-developed wild child who's loved by all the boys. Over fifty-five minutes, O'Connor exposes all of Saoirse's growing pains as she wends her way through 1980s rural Ireland, where sexual enlightenment is a dirty secret more in keeping with Victorian values than the late twentieth century. Sure enough, it's Saorise who falls prey to a temptation that will end her girlhood before it's even begun. First seen in Edinburgh at the tiny Discover 21 theatre in independent arts spac