Coffee-Table Notes

Muriel Romanes is not retiring. This is something the outgoing artistic director of the female-focused Stellar Quines theatre company wishes to make abundantly clear as she steps down following her forthcoming production of Rebecca Sharp's The Air That Carries The Weight, which opens in Edinburgh this week. As she takes a break from rehearsals of what she describes as more communion than play, Romanes is frank about her reasons behind leaving a company she has led for the best part of two decades. “The temperature doesn't suit me anymore,” she says. “I hit seventy this week, so maybe that's got something to do with it, but I'm also actually really tired of sitting at the computer. It's very stultifying imaginatively , and I think things are changing so much in theatre. I've had such a wonderful time with the company. It's been magnificent, but I need to step away from that. Romanes' decision was also prompted in part by the death of her father.

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars A flat-capped miners choir isn't the most obvious opening gambit for the latest entry in what looks increasingly like a new wave of rock and roll musicals. That's exactly what you get, however, in the South Wales based Theatr na Nog's dramatic love letter to Pontypridd's most famous singing son. This is how it should be, because, despite the mixed messages sent out by the show' rather cumbersome title, Geinor Styles' production of Mike James' script is a more grown up look at life behind the scenes of Jones' rocky road to success than one might initially expect. As the artist formerly known as Tom Woodward moves from singing in his local, the Wheatsheaf Arms, through the cabaret circuit and sharing a London dive with his backing band, Jones also has to face up to life as a parent away from his teenage bride Linda. The all-singing, all-playing cast led by a hip-thrusting Kit Orton as Jones don't make he

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Three stars When Claudius calls for light at the end of the first half of Gordon Barr's new production of Shakespeare's gloomiest tragedy, performed here by MA students from the Classical and Contemporary Text course, he gets darkness instead. It's a darkness that pervades throughout, from a candlelit opening in which Tierney Nolan's female Horatio sits writing at a desk more suited for love letters, to the extended mass suicide note the play evolves into. There's something post-Victorian in such an image, with the long dresses and suits as ornate as the array of hipster moustaches being sported looking positively Wildean in terms of presentation. The array of empty picture frames that hang down just enough for carefully posed apparitions to step into complete the image, even as they flank a giant crucifix draped in scarlet that floats centre-stage. The construction of trunks, baskets and cases that sits at one side

Adam Smith Theatre, Kirkcaldy Three stars “It's a night out to you,” says Allan Stewart's old school comedian Alec Munro to the audience at one point in Ed Curtis' dissection of the not so funny side of showbiz, co-written with Stewart. “It's a career to me.” Given that Stewart is playing alongside his regular real life pantomime foils Andy Gray and Grant Stott as the other two thirds of unreconstructed comedy trio Wee Three, Gus and Rory, it's a line that works on a multitude of levels. Here is a bittersweet backstage drama of back-stabbing ambition in which a now solo Alec is forced to face up to the ghosts of his past, but which is played by a cast so familiar to the pop cultural mainstream that for an audience on intimate terms with their oeuvre they must at times seem indistinguishable from their comic personas. Yet, even as the trio rattle through a set of routines that would knock audiences dead from the Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club to the Lo

Citizen's Theatre, Glasgow Four stars The coffin that sits centre stage at the opening of Northern Stage's new dramatisation of Ted Lewis' grim slice of post-1960s pulp fiction is as symbolic of the demise of northern England's industrial powerhouse as the mountain of bricks behind it. It is also what drags local tough guy made good Jack Carter back from the affluent south to make a prodigal's return to bury his brother Frank. What Jack returns to, as anyone who has seen Mike Hodges' iconic big-screen 1971 adaptation will know, is a murky world of back-street gangsterism that preys on an acquisitive desperation for the good life flogged off as cheap thrills. Booze, home-made porn and bent slot machines are all fair game. By returning to Lewis' book, writer Torben Betts and director Lorne Campbell manage to fill in the blanks the film left out through a last-gasp interior monologue cum confessional that lays bare Jack's own messed-up psychology in

Torben Betts had never seen Get Carter when he was asked to write a stage version for the Newcastle-based Northern Stage company. The award-winning playwright knew that Mike Hodges' iconic 1971 gangster film had starred Michael Caine as an oddly cockney-sounding prodigal returning to a bombed-out Tyneside following the death of his brother, but that was about it. Neither had Betts read Ted Lewis' novel, Jack's Return Home, a gritty first person noir first published a year before the appearance of the film it inspired. Unlike the film, Lewis' novel has Jack Carter return, not to Newcastle, but to an even grimmer northern town close to where he changes trains at Doncaster, which might have been Scunthorpe. Betts and Northern Stage director Lorne Campbell have looked to the book rather than the film for their touring production of Get Carter, which opens at the Citizen's Theatre in Glasgow tonight. In a story rooted in time and place, however, they have opted t

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Three stars It could easily feel like all your Christmases have come at once judging by the opening of Jennifer Dick's production of Shakespeare's original rom-com, performed here by MA students from the RCS' Classical and Contemporary Text course. The fairy-lit tree is in full bloom, the tartan curtains are pulled back and everybody's dressed in fifty shades of tweed in a modern dress take on things that appears to be set among the Highland horsey set with whom Don John's camouflage-clad regiment are decamped. Eleanor Henderson's Beatrice more resembles a land girl as she spars with Duncan Harte's officer-class Benedick over Hogmanay while her cousin Hero and Benedick's sidekick Claudio have a seemingly more straightforward romance. As they eavesdrop in on the machinations they think they're party to, both B and B are unable to see the wood for the trees, the latter played rather splendidly by a cas