Coffee-Table Notes

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Three stars Has there ever been a better time to declare yourself better red than dead? Try asking The Red Haired Sirens, the flame-locked trio at the heart of this narrative cabaret that imagines a world where its ginger-follicled inhabitants are made second-class citizens and forced to exist as outlaws underground. In the case of Esther, Shelley and the all seeing Madame, this means entertaining themselves at the Scarlet Church, a tellingly named Kit-Kat Klub style after-hours retreat in what is a red light district in more ways than one. Here the ladies hold court by way of song, dance and recitation, all on a strictly red theme as made flesh from the pen of poet Kevin P Gilday. In their private moments, the trio contemplate their lot before working some real live red magic en route to liberation. All of which as delivered by Sarah McCardie, Linda Duncan McLaughlin and Belle Jones can't quite decide if it wants to be a 1970s politically inspired

Emily Atack has been playing a lot of girlfriends lately. The twenty-six year old actress may have first come to prominence breaking geeky schoolboy hearts as sassy Charlotte Hinchcliffe in The Inbetweeners, but more recently she has been seen in the big-screen reboot of classic sit-com, Dad's Army. In the film, Atack plays Daphne, the wartime squeeze of local spiv Private Walker, who, as played by Daniel Mays, manages to get everything on ration. Atack plays girlfriends as well in two upcoming feature films. Iron Sky 2: The Coming Race is a sequel to a Finnish science-fiction comedy about what happens when Nazis from the Moon invade Earth. Atack plays Tyler, the partner of a cult leader played by Tom Green. In Lies We Tell, Atack is gangster's moll Tracey in an action thriller led by Gabriel Byrne, Harvey Keitel and Gina McKee. In her professional stage debut, however, Atack gets to play a far more independent woman in a touring production of Breakfast At Tiffany's t

Blaine L Reininger was on a solo tour with former Josef K singer Paul Haig when he was introduced to ex Velvet Underground chanteuse, Nico. “Nico looked at me,” Reininger remembers, “and says, do I know you? I said no, and Nico said, I didn't think so. That was that, and that's the way it's always been.” As one third of San Francisco-sired post-punk electronic trio Tuxedomoon, Reininger had helped cause a quiet sensation in 1980 with the release of the band's debut album, Half-Mute. The record's low-slung mix of noirish saxophone and violin pulsed instrumentals combined with abrasive vocal-led tracks were an after-hours cocktail of post-modern cabaret sleaze, avant-garde austerity and multi-media poise. Given a record that sounded so alien and so studiedly European, moving to Belgium seemed like a natural move. Here Tuxedomoon became part of an international avant-garde based around record labels, Crammed and Les Disques du Crepescule. They released albums

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars Whether it's politics or theatre, everybody knows it's behind the scenes where the real work gets done. This is something Lynne Parker's production of the late Stewart Parker's 1984 play, revived by Rough Magic for the Tron's Mayfesto season, recognises in abundance. Parker opens her uncle's study of Henry Joy McCracken, the lost hero of the 1798 Irish rebellion, by having her troupe of actors wander onto a stage which has been turned around to reveal a rare glimpse of its wings. In what begins in a safe-house where McCracken and his lover Mary Bodle are holed up after the rebellion, this framing device heightens Stewart Parker's dramatic fantasia, so history is mythologised even as it is being made. Stewart Parker does this by interspersing McCracken and Mary's last night together with delirious reflections presented in the manner of the greats of Irish literature. Key moments are delivered as part pastiche and p

Stills, Edinburgh until July 9 th Four stars The word 'Ideal' (1970) forms the title of a key image by the late American photographer Lewis Baltz in The Prototype Works (1967-76), one of three series of images seen in parallel with two text-based pieces by Carl Andre and a sculptural construction by Charlotte Poseneske. Framed in close-up monochrome as one of ten prints taken from this early selection, the elaborate music-hall turn of a font that beams out from 'Ideal' also points to the false optimism of post World War Two suburbia that never quite delivered. As a prime mover in the New Topographics wave of 1970s landscape photography, Baltz captured the built-in obsolescence of the Californian desert once its untamed public space was co-opted and domesticated by developers across the decades. If The Prototype Works show off worlds already inhabited but destined to be gentrified, fetishised and restyled as 'vintage', the thirty-three images of Park C

When Liz Lochhead and Siobhan Redmond talk about being part of a theatrical family, it doesn't just relate to Thon Man Moliere, Lochhead's new play which Redmond appears in at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh when it opens next week. The theatre family that Scotland's former Makar and one of the country's foremost and most fiercely intelligent of acting talents are talking about is something more personal. Ostensibly a comic study of the seventeenth century French playwright formerly known as Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, Thon Man Moliere finds Lochhead returning to the writer who has arguably been her greatest dramatic influence over the last thirty years. The relationship began when she adapted Moliere's most scathing of satires, Tartuffe, into a ribald rhyming Scots that caused a sensation in 1986 when it first opened on the same stage that Thon Man Moliere will. Since then, two more adaptations have followed. Miseryguts, taken from The Misanthrope, appeared in 20

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars Audiences could be forgiven on Friday night for thinking they'd stumbled into Liberty Hall for real at the opening main stage production of this year's Mayfesto mini-season of politically driven theatre. The speak-easy vibe that punctuates Brian McCardie's searingly intense solo turn as James Connolly, the Edinburgh-born icon of the Easter Rising, when Ireland's free-thinking would-be liberators rose up against English rule a hundred years ago, may have been distracting, but it couldn't take away from the slow-burning power behind McCardie's performance in this self-penned piece. The evening opened with three songs by singer Maeve Mackinnon accompanied by guitarists Fraser Spiers and the show's co-producer for the Fair Pley company in association with trade union Unite, Stephen Wright. After this, McCardie addressed the audience as if they were volunteers poised for battle. Beyond the low-key but impassioned rhetoric