Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars When Gary Owen's explosive state of the nations address that reimagined Greek tragedy in twenty-first century Cardiff was first seen in Edinburgh during the final week of the 2015 Festival Fringe, its hoodie-wearing protagonist evoked the spirit of broken Britain with a sound and fury that left others standing. Here Iphigenia was reborn as Effie, a binge-drinking, one-night standing emotional and physical fireball in a woman's body, who had nothing to lose except her benefits because everything's been closed down.   Six months on, and Rachel O'Riordan's production for the Cardiff-based Sherman Cymru company looks even more vital as it goes out on a tour which needs to be seen as far and widely as possible. While Owen's monologue, delivered with machine-gun ferocity by a fearlessly wonderful Sophie Melville, is in part a call to arms, that it achieves this with a wit and a rich poetic life-force makes it even mor

1 Last week, the touring stage production of Footloose The Musical arrived in town for a week-long run at Edinburgh Playhouse. For those who may not know Footloose, the stage version is based on a 1984 film of the same name starring Kevin Bacon. Bacon plays Ren McCormack, a fun-loving Chicago teenager who is packed off to the small town of Bomont. Once in Bomont, as this is a teen movie, young Ren of course falls for the local bad girl, falling foul of the local authorities as he goes. The main obstacle that fun-loving Ren come up against, alas, is the fact that due to external pressure, the local city council has banned dancing and rock music. The last time a real life incident similar to this occurred in Glasgow in 1977, when the city's local authority banned what they deemed to be Punk Rock gigs, and – just as in Footloose, in which Ren and his pals were forced to travel a hundred miles to a country bar to dance to rock and roll – Glaswegian punk rockers had to

Dundee Rep Three stars There was anything but silence in court among the school party attending Tuesday night's performance of Agatha Christie's own stage version of her 1933 short story. Given that the teenage crowd were possibly encountering Christie's merciless take on murder mystery thrillers for the first time, and that a seemingly staid old staple had just double-bluffed its way to a shock ending that no-one with prior knowledge of the story could possibly have predicted, such a hubbub came with very good reason. Revived here for an expanded version of Dundee Rep's ensemble company by director Kenny Miller, Christie's yarn opens in the battleship grey office of Sir Wilfred Robarts. Robarts is charged with defending young Leonard Vole, a feckless charmer accused of murdering an older woman for her fortune. Possessed with a little boy lost demeanour and Irene Macdougall's Teutonic ice-maiden Romaine for a wife, Ewan Donald's Leonard has Sir W

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars There are lesbians in Agatha Christie shows on TV, a randy taxi driver fond of cockney rhyming slang is laying out the patio, and a Croatian prostitute with psychic tendencies is feeling strange vibrations. All of which barely scratches the surface in terms of how far you can go with a murder mystery yarn in Shaun McKenna's stage version of Peter James' best-selling novella, published in 2010. Here we find IT consultant and classic pulp fiction obsessive Victor Smiley plotting a very bitter end for his other half, Joan, with hooker Kamila. Joan, meanwhile, has plans of her own with buff cabbie Don. Only when James' rookie detective Roy Grace lands on Kamila's doorstep to investigate another case do things start to come undone. James and McKenna may aspire in part for a latter-day take on Joe Orton's black comedy, Loot, by way of Noel Coward's more spectrally inclined Blithe Spirit in Ian Talbot's producti

Sophie Melville was on a train on Valentine's Day when she started reading about what UK Secretary of State for Health Jeremy Hunt was doing to the NHS. After negotiations broke down between the Westminster government and the British Medical Association, Hunt had decided to impose contracts on junior doctors without any further discussion. It was perhaps no coincidence that the Swansea born actress was in London to perform Iphigenia in Splott, Gary Owen's devastating reimagining of Greek tragedy in working class Cardiff, where the cuts caused by imposed austerity are biting deep. Travelling through umpteen districts of London both rich and poor, Melville grew angry enough to try and capture the Secretary of State for Health's attention with a tweet. 'I'm inviting you to see #Iphigenia in Splott @NationalTheatre this week,” she wrote to Hunt's account. 'Come learn what the #NHSmeans to the majority.' And the result? “He didn't bloody co

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars It's all so civilised at the start of Vanishing Point's latest study of the world through a lens darkly. A master of ceremonies introduces the night, and points out how what is about to follow was prompted by a photograph by Canadian artist Jeff Wall, and how his image of domestic destruction was inspired by a painting by Delacroix. After introducing actors Elicia Daly, Pauline Goldsmith and Barnaby Power, the MC stands behind one of two video cameras that film the next seventy-five minutes, which is beamed onto a screen above the stage that distances the live action below. The actors sit on the red sofa and chairs in what looks like an elegant looking chat show set, and they talk. In something resembling a dinner party gone increasingly wrong, they talk of online videos and pictures of Bataclan and Syria, and how such images may or may not have affected them. As the talk goes on, meticulously constructed criss-crossing conversations be

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When the lights go out on twenty-something Una mid-way through David Harrower's taboo-busting psycho-drama, she's left alone in a room full of domestic debris. The painful silence and eventual cry for help that follows make it feel like this is the second time she's been deserted by Ray, the man now known as Peter who she went on the run with fifteen years before. That was when he was forty and she was twelve. In the gulf between the couple's two meetings, lives have been lived, torn apart and just possibly rebuilt. In the play's 100 minute duration, played without an interval, those lives are exposed in all their fragility before being turned upside down once more. A decade after it premiered at Edinburgh International Festival, the emotional cache of Harrower's play becomes more powerful with its every reading. As this new production by Gareth Nicholls – no stranger to intense two-handers following his production