Coffee-Table Notes

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars “You have to be lost if you want to find yourself,” Stuart Paterson's abandoned brother and sister are told midway through his festive stage version of the Brothers Grimm's classic tale. These are wise words indeed, especially as Hansel and Gretel have found themselves stranded in the woods with no way back home. Just how seriously they can take such seemingly sage advice when given by a circus clown called Uncle Shoes whose baggy pants are constantly falling down around his ankles, however, is debatable. The circus itself isn't quite what it seems, as Uncle Shoes and his fellow performers are under the spell of caravan-dwelling witch La Stregamama, whose main priority is feeding up her new arrivals to satisfy her sweet tooth. Only when Gretel inspires her cowed captors to rise up against her does her power fade. Dominic Hill's production takes an already dark story and ramps it up to the max in a vivid re-telling of Pate

“I was brought up in Ferguslie Park,” remembers painter and playwright John Byrne of his Paisley boyhood growing up in the rough and tumble of one of the Renfrewshire town's estates, “and I remember thanking God when we moved there, because I knew then that I had all the things I needed for whatever it was that I wanted to do.” What Byrne proceeded to do was translate his experiences as a working class kid steeped in 1950s pop culture and with ideas above his station into one of the most celebrated plays of the late twentieth century. The Slab Boys spent a day in the life of Phil McCann and Spanky Farrell, a couple of likely lads with dreams of being an artist and a pop star, but who were stuck mixing paint in the slab room of a carpet factory based on A,F. Stoddart's actual premises where Byrne himself had worked. Over two acts of matinee idol patter mixed in with a colourful local slang, Phil and Spanky became rebels without a cause other than the possibility of a lumbe

What is initially most striking about this retrospective overview of the late Katy Dove's paintings and animations that arrives at the DCA eighteen months after her passing is just how much life bursts from everything on show. From the images of children dancing alongside strips of material that hang outside the main galleries like stills from the drama workshop montage in swinging sixties Brit-flick Georgy Girl, to the kaleidoscopic shadows of her own hands and legs in what turned out to be her final film, Meaning in Action (2013), there is little stillness anywhere in Dove's work. Pastel-coloured shapes and patterns culled from the unconscious in a series of automatic paintings are gradually given form and definition enough to create a world in constant motion en route to an idyll. This is especially evident in Melodia (2002), a four and a half minute film in which Dove takes a watercolour landscape by her grandfather and breathes swirling life into its skies, seas and oth

Cooper Gallery, Dundee until December 16 th Four stars The unisex toilet door tucked away in the corner of the entrance to Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design may not be part of the first Chapter of the Cooper Gallery's sprawling two-part voyage through feminist art since the 1970s. It nevertheless illustrates a progression of sorts in gender identity which many of the artists on show here have paved the way for. With a title taken from Hannah Arendt, the show brings together work and archival material from nineteen artists that spans generations in a way that makes explicit the umbilical link between art and activism across the years. On the stairs, the seminal film of post-punk artist Linder's meat-dress and dildo-sporting 1984 performance at the Hacienda with her band Ludus is beamed onto the wall. Upstairs, work by other key figures including Annabel Nicolson, Georgina Starr and Su Richardson respectively involve a performance with a sewing machine, croc

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars Ebenezer Scrooge is the quintessential Charles Dickens character, wheeled out once a year like fairy lights to brighten up the neighbourhood. Watching Philip Rham's vivid and well-rounded interpretation of the mealy-mouthed old skinflint in Richard Baron's seasonal revival of Leslie Bricusse's rollicking feel-good musical, it is clear he is also a man of our times, and a perfect representation of the state we're in now. Scrooge, after all, is an emotionally damaged loan shark who has made his fortune on the backs of the poor, and who exploits austerity as an excuse to pay his staff below minimum wage while hiking up interest on his pay-day loans. The bustling street scene that opens the show having been ushered in by projections of falling snowflakes, however, is as inclusively cosy as the Christmas card brought to life that Adrian Rees' set so resembles. Even Scrooge's creepy presence can't dim such an image as h

 Clarke Peters is sitting on a beach in Rhodes. In half an hour's time the sun will set and the actor and writer whose profile has rocketed in the last year via his portrayal of righteous cop Lester Freamon in David Simon's sleeper hit TV drama, The Wire, will have spent another day in paradise. This time last week, Peters was in Edinburgh directing a very different kind of TV star, Denise Van Outen, in her Jackie Clune scripted solo show, Blondes, and expounding about a new wave of musical theatre on The Culture Show. Somewhere in-between the two, Peters has managed to fit in two days filming on a new big screen version of Gulliver's Travels with Jack Black. Peters will be jetting back to Edinburgh this weekend, however, for two very special mid-morning Question and Answer sessions, designed specifically with Wire fans in mind. That these are set to take place in The Underbelly's biggest space, The Udderbelly, is testament to just how much The Wire - the fiv

One of Lee Breuer’s sons was about three years old when the American theatre director started work on his version of JM Barrie’s Peter And Wendy with the New York-based Mabou Mines company. At that time, Mabou Mines were only playing the first act of the show that arrives in its full form as the last major component of the Edinburgh International Festival’s drama programme at the beginning of September. By the time Breuer introduced a second act, some five years into the play’s development, another son had arrived and was again three years old at the time Peter And Wendy was being rehearsed. Rather than becoming an attention-seeking distraction from the work at hand, the presence of Breuer’s infant children opened his eyes to what would become a crucial factor in his new take on Peter Pan. “It became deeply personal,” he says in his tough-guy New York drawl. “From having my sons around, it dawned on me that Peter wasn’t the nine-year-old that JM