Coffee-Table Notes

Joseph Chaikin, actor and director; born September 16, 1935; died June 22, 2003 Joseph Chaikin, who has died aged sixty-seven, was a beautiful dreamer. Right up to his death, when the weak heart he had suffered from since childhood finally failed, this purest and most visionary of theatre directors was still questing after truth in the strangest of places. Even after a year of creative activity that would have sapped the energy of men half his age, especially one struck near dumb with aphasia, Joe, always Joe, was auditioning for a new production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. That it never made it to completion is a strangely fitting swansong, because Joe never liked things to be too set in stone. He preferred the bloodrush creativity of rehearsals, and, if things ever slipped into formula, he'd likely as not mess everything up before moving on to something else, as he did with The Open Theatre, the legendary troupe he led, only to disband when it looked like they might go ma

When director Stephen Daldry was awarded a Herald Angel for his debut feature film after it premiered at Edinburgh Film Festival in 2000, it was one of the first of many plaudits for what was a relatively modest production. Given what has happened to the film since, it also showed the considerable foresight of those behind the awards. Billy Elliot, after all, went on to become an international phenomenon, with the Herald Angels' championing of the film recognised when this newspaper's name was displayed on billboards across the globe. But Daldry and writer Lee Hall's tale of a working class boy who discovers the transcendent power of dance in the thick of the civil war that was the 1980s Miners Strike went further, scooping a multitude of awards, including three BAFTAS. Five years after the film was released, this seemingly local story was given fresh life with the arrival of Billy Elliot the Musical, reuniting Daldry, Hall and choreographer Peter Darling, as they got bac

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When Gavin Jon Wright's hapless Spud embarks on his Class A-fuelled job interview in front of red drapes at the opening of Gareth Nicholls' main-stage revival of Harry Gibson's 1994 adaptation of Irvine Welsh's iconic novel, it's a telling pointer to everything that follows. Like the play, there is no filter in the mad rush of tragi-comic truth that Spud blurts out. This is a signifier too that this isn't a play in the conventional sense, but is a series of loose-knit routines that only make full sense when lifted off the page and delivered in a full-on Leith Walk demotic framed by designer Max Jones' strip-lit breezeblock wasteland. While ostensibly the story of 1980s dole queue junky Renton and his drug buddies, there is less of a gang mentality here than in Danny Boyle's film version, which Gibson's script pre-dated by two years. Nicholls' staging of the series of solos, duologues and ensemble-based

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars There's a serial killer on the loose in Theatre Jezebel's revival of Keith Huff's hard-boiled noir, first seen on Broadway in 2007, and he's eating everyone alive. For frontline cops Denny and Joey, the murderer's presence right under their noses is the final nail in the coffin of a partnership that dates back to childhood. Even now, in a lamp-lit room at a long table flanked by two rows of buckets, they joke that they're like 1970s TV heartthrobs Starsky and Hutch, except Denny and Joey's double act has long since stopped being funny. Dressed in identical sweatpants and hoodies in Mary McCluskey's darkly brooding production, Andy Clark and Robert Jack invest Denny and Joey with a captivating intensity as old loyalties are corrupted at both a personal and professional level for both men. Blighted by personal demons and unspoken tensions that threaten to blow up in their faces, as the pair switch between their vers

Edward Albee – Born March 12 1928; died September 16 2016 . When Edward Albee, who has died aged eighty-eight, wrote a play, it was usually a wilful provocation that arguably came from deep within his own experience. While best known for the dramatic explosion of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which seeped into popular consciousness by way of Mike Nicholls' film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Albee was anything but a one-trick-pony. This was evident in his three decade-spanning Pulitzer Prize wins, for A Delicate Balance in 1967, Seascape in 1975 and Three Tall Women in 1994. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had been initially selected by the 1962 drama jury, but was over-ruled by the Pulitzer advisory committee, who opted not to make any drama award that year. Given that the play won a Tony and ran on Broadway for over a year prior to the film version, one suspects Albee wasn't overly concerned, as he kept his distance from the theatrical establi

Dundee Rep Three stars It's a man's world alright in the Globe Theatre's 1960s inspired take on Shakespeare's proto rom-com, set largely inside designer Katie Sykes' rainbow-bordered box resembling an after-hours open mic dive bar. Here Valentine and Proteus are a couple of small town boys in stuffy old Verona, wanting to make the scene in the far groovier Milan. With his guitar on his back, Guy Hughes' Valentine hits the road, while Dharmesh Patel's Proteus remains hopelessly devoted to Leah Brotherhood's Julia. With Valentine forced into a dance-off over Aruhan Galieva's society girl Sylvia, Proteus follows his main man to the big city, while Julia dons Bob Dylan cap and suede jacket to inveigle her androgynous way into the gang. Nick Bagnall's production sees love letters sent as seven-inch singles before the would-be couples flirt with promiscuity and cross-dressing in a youthful rites of passage that traces an entire decade's wo

Edinburgh Playhouse Four stars The stage is all dressed up as a 1960s dancehall occupied by tuxedo-clad crooners at the opening of Joe Penhall and Ray Davies' musical history of the early days of Davies' seminal band, The Kinks. By the end, however, the hysteria of Madison Square Garden has whipped a nostalgia-seeking audience into a suitable frenzy. Inbetween in Edward Hall's touring production of a show first seen at Hampstead Theatre in 2014, the Muswell Hill born Davies brothers take on the world, crash, burn and come out fighting to produce a now classic canon of pre-punk music hall social realist vignettes. Penhall's necessarily dot-to-dot script lays bare a tale of back street ambition, tortured genius and warring siblings, with sensitive songwriter Ray and his wild child kid brother Dave initially flanked by a living room full of sisters who rather handily double up as a swinging op-art chorus line. As the band square up to money men in London and New Yor