Coffee-Table Notes

The last time Dan Jemmett brought a show to Edinburgh, it was with a politicised version of a Punch and Judy show that he performed on top of Waverley Market. Margaret Thatcher was in the final throes of her reign as UK Prime Minister, and was about to meet her Waterloo in the form of the hated Poll tax. In the spirit of the times, Jemmett cast Punch as a Poll Tax inspector, a bogeyman figure on a par with traffic wardens and unemployment benefit officers. Such contemporisation of a classic seaside puppet show proved to be an inspired move. “It was the first thing I did after I left college,” Jemmett says more than a quarter of a century on as he prepares to bring Shake, his end of the pier take on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, to Edinburgh International Festival. “I just went up there and did it, and I looked up and suddenly there were 200 people there, and when the Poll Tax inspector was hung we got this enormous cheer.” Beyond such political knockabout, Cambridge-born Jemme

If things had gone according to plan, Rula Lenska would be hosting the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest after a storming victory by the UK at this year's event caused this somewhat fractured isle to be host country the following year. As it turned out, the UK entry, You're Not Alone sung by Joe and Jake, finished twenty-fourth out of twenty-six, with Ukraine taking the top slot, with 1944 by Jamala. This also had the honour of being the first song to be sung in Crimean Tartar throughout the contest's entire history. Since then, of course, Britain's place in Europe itself has been turned upside down following the EU referendum and the surprise win by the pro-Leave campaign. Fortunately for Eurovision, Britain and the entire world, Lenska has found her rightful place in a revival of Eurobeat, the interactive late night Eurovision pastiche last seen in Edinburgh in 2007. Featuring new songs by Craig Christie and Andrew Patterson, Eurobeat centres around a fictional Song C

When twenty-nine single mothers living in sheltered housing on an East London estate were given notice to quit after Newham Council agreed to sell the flats to private property developers, it sparked a mini revolution that highlighted the ongoing disgrace of the UK's housing problem in London, Edinburgh and beyond. As the full shame of Newham Council's bully boy tactics is made clear in E15 , the Lung theatre company's verbatim drama drawn from interviews with the women who instigated what became the Focus E15 campaign. Beyond this, it also demonstrates in an infectiously vibrant fashion how a fully politicised sense of community spirit can be galvanised in the face of authoritarian adversity. The audience walk in to a stage full of noise generated by a cast of five flanked by colourful banners in a way that captures the riotous spirit of the sort of old-school protest that is so necessary right now. Co-scripted by Helen Monks and directed by Matt Woodhead, where the p

Cherry Jones never wanted to play Amanda Wingfield, the bruised and brittle matriarch in The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams' semi autobiographical masterpiece that made his name. It was only when former National Theatre of Scotland associate director John Tiffany wooed the veteran stage and screen actress, best known in the UK for her Emmy winning turn as U.S. President Allison Taylor in TV drama, 24, into tackling the part that she discovered there was more to Amanda than meets the eye. “I'd always thought of Amanda as a harridan,” says Jones on a break from re-rehearsing Tiffany's 2013 American Repertory Theatre production for its current Edinburgh International Festival run. “I'd auditioned for Laura about five times in my youth, but I was too big-boned to ever get the part. I'd always seen the play through young people's eyes, but when John Tiffany forced me to sit down with it, I started to realise that here was a woman in desperate straits. “Her

St Patrick's Church, Edinburgh until August 28 Four stars The words 'In Memorium' may be carved above the entrance to the chapel in the Edinburgh Cowgate church once at the centre of the capital's 'Little Ireland', but Roderick Buchanan's new film installation that forms part of Edinburgh Art Festival's Commissions Programme is anything but an elegy. As the film's subject, Irish-born but Edinburgh-based historian Owen Dudley Edwards talks about James Connolly, the Cowgate-sired radical who rose to fame through his role in the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, an entire history is rolled back and has fresh life breathed into it. Over almost two hours of close-up conversation broken up by Brechtian style captions, Dudley Edwards talks about church, state, politics and power in Ireland, Scotland and the bridges between the two. There are thumbnail portraits of Edinburgh and Dublin's psycho-geography past and present and a nod too to Connolly'

King's Theatre Four stars One of the first things that strikes you about EIF's revival of John Tiffany's American Repertory Theater production of Tennessee Williams' defining early play is how warm everyone is to each other. Would-be writer Tom Wingfield may be desperate to get away from the fire escape of the St Louis tenement that made him, but in Michael Esper's portrayal is a long way from the uptight neurotic he's sometimes presented as. Instead, the sparring with his mother Amanda is part and parcel of the day to day knockabout of a supremely dysfunctional but still loving family. This is most defined in Cherry Jones' exquisite portrayal of Amanda, a woman made brittle by disappointment and only too willing to lionise her past, but who now she is alone only wants the best for her very special children. Where Tom is a classic ennui-ridden bookworm, her daughter Laura is fragile in a more troubling way. Even here, however, Kate O'Flynn's

There is something Prospero-like about Kieran Hurley when he sits at a table at the centre of his performing world in Heads Up , the Glasgow-based auteur's story-telling close-up of four very different lives closing in on themselves just as the world is about to end. It's something about the way he conjures up some of the city's eight million criss-crossing stories, the lit candle in front of him the only beacon left for his creations to cling onto. There is something spiritual too going on as Hurley taps out the alchemic pulses of MJ McCarthy's touch sensitive soundscape like a barefoot tabletop prophet overseeing his imaginary creations. The language is raw, the experiences of his characters transcendent. This is the case whether it's the off the rails futures speculator, the potty-mouthed schoolgirl, the coked-up rock star and would-be messiah who finds new life through crashing and burning, and the fast food worker who is reborn. In a show that fleshes out