Coffee-Table Notes

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars There aren't many magazines that could be transformed into a jukebox musical. But then, few publications have the lingering iconic status of Jackie, the teenage girl bible born in Dundee, and which changed lives along with hair-styles, hem-lines, hearts and minds. A couple of decades after Cathy and Claire advised their last and the magazine's not quite glossy pages finally folded, Jackie appears to have come of age. Or at least their readers have if the pink fizz sipping audience lapping up every moment of a show that began at the Gardyne Theatre in Dundee before being picked up like a small town hot date and given a make-over for its current tour are anything to go by. The story focuses on Janet Dibley's fifty-something Jackie (natch), who, after being dumped by her husband of twenty years for a younger model is attempting to get back into the dating game. With her younger self escaping from her psyche to advise her and a

All is quiet in Zinnie Harris' house on the south side of Edinburgh. In a leafy suburb on Easter Bank Holiday Monday afternoon this should come as no surprise, but given that Harris has opted to call her adaptation of Aeschylus' ancient Greek epic trilogy, The Oresteia, This Restless House, the quietude is initially disarming. As it is, such a peaceful atmosphere has been key to Harris channeling her creative energies into reinventing an already volatile work for a twenty-first century audience. Not that Harris has chosen to contemporise Aeschylus' family-driven trilogy in an explicitly modern setting, as should be clear when her marathon undertaking opens at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow in co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland next week. Rather, as with some of Harris' increasingly expansive works, This Restless House occupies a historical no man's land that puts women at its heart. For those not already versed in Greek tragedy, Aeschylus'

Zizi Strallen is flying. Onstage at Birmingham Hippodrome, the twenty-five year old actress who has just spent the best part of three hours onstage is soaring above the audience's heads looking as cool, calm and collected as you like. Given that the latest of the multi-talented Strallen sisters to scale the dizzy heights of the acting world has been playing the title role in Sir Cameron Mackintosh's touring remount of Mary Poppins, such seeming nonchalance regarding defying gravity in this way is exactly as it should be. A few hours earlier, sitting alone in the Hippodrome's upstairs bar, Strallen is equally poised, albeit with her hair down and a casual shirt thrown over black vest top and jeans, is all but unrecognisable as the magical nanny first seen in a series of eight children's novels penned by P.L. Travers over a fifty-four year period. Only Strallen's perfectly made up and seemingly permanently amused face which will later animate itself into a far mor

It was May 17 th 1973 when Nina Myskow met David Bowie in Dundee. Myskow was working as a writer on Jackie, the iconic girls pop and fashion magazine that was already one of the most iconic signifiers of the decade. Bowie had just done a show at the Caird Hall as part of the final leg of his Ziggy Stardust tour, and was at his glam-packed peak. When the clock struck midnight at the after-show party in the hotel bar, it was Myskow's birthday, and Bowie bought her a bottle of champagne. “I said thank you very much,” says Myskow today after four decades as tabloid pop columnist and TV critic and personality, “but what I really want is an interview.” Bowie said okay, as it was her birthday, he'd do it, and that she should come and see him at 11am. When she arrived later that morning, Myskow sized up the superstar in front of her. “Can you imagine it?” says Myskow “It was probably the first time anyone in Dundee had ever seen a man in make-up. I looked at him and sa

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars A ticking clock is pretty much the only sound to be heard as the massed ranks of Lung Ha Theatre Company enter what looks like an old-fashioned school-room one by one at the opening of Douglas Maxwell's new play. With the procession itself delivered with masterly deadpan aplomb, what follows concerns the comic consequences of a sponsored silence being held to raise funds for the seriously ill mother of teenage Billie, who is also taking part in the event. It is Billie herself, however, who is unable to keep her mouth shut for more than a few seconds, whereupon her exclusion from the quietude prompts an altogether noisier vow as Billie co-opts new girl Stacey to help cause as much disruption as possible. What follows is a series of extended cartoon-style sketches that overlap, collide into and tumble over each other by way of a loose-knit narrative that puts Billie and Stacey's Wile E. Coyote style attempts at sabotage at its centre. Pi

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One), Edinburgh April 15th-April 17 th 2017 Of all the iconic images of the 1960s, few evoked the grooviness of swinging London more than those by Bridget Riley. Riley's hallucinatory array of black and white Op-art checks and geometric shapes shimmered their way into a two-tone styled mod culture mainstream which, more than half a century on, is as indicative of a moment as much as it was fleeting. Like her paintings, Riley too has kept moving, as this major show of work spanning those fifty years should demonstrate. Centred around Riley's 1966 painting, 'Over', which has been held by the SNGoMA since 1974, this collection of major paintings draws from a back catalogue of rarely seen works. Seen together, they reveal how, just as TV and popular culture morphed from monochrome to technicolour, Riley embarked on a very personal trip, from London to France, Egypt and beyond, absorbing influences as she went. Wi

Marischal College, Aberdeen Four stars As with many cities just now, the centre of Aberdeen currently resembles a building site. However many concrete blocks are thrown up, however, they will never match the silver splendour of the venue for the culmination of this epic-scale community project initiated by the National Theatre of Scotland. Here a platform flanked by symmetrical crane-like constructions forms an outdoor stage in the Quad that mirrors the shades of grey and white of its surroundings, even as a cosmic sculpture hanging down suggests something more celestial above. As the industrial clang of manual labour soundtracks the bustle of a community in flux, a 100-plus troupe of actors, dancers, a large-scale choir and band attempt to tell the story of a city defined by its grim determination as much as its hard exterior. As the action flits across centuries and nations, a criss-crossing collage of triumphs and disasters points up how workers are the foundation of any c