Coffee-Table Notes

It's all the tube strike's fault. The double-deckers are crammed, and a black cab is impossible. In the autumn sunshine, bodies ebb and flow outwards from King's Cross's dilapidated, ever so slightly edgy exterior. Dickensian waifs flake out on red brick and sawdust street corners. An emaciated girl slaps felt-tipped ''business'' cards on telephone box walls. London may be a blur of constant motion, progress personified, but these images, along with a good old-fashioned British strike, only serve to heighten the fact that, however swanky its minimalist facade, London life is still as charmingly grotty as ever. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the gangly figure lolloping down Marylebone High Street. He may be the epitome of dressed down cool in his pinstripe plum-coloured strides and short-sleeved shirt unbuttoned to tropical proportions, but the fact that he played in one of the most influential bands to ever pogo out of Lad

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars The painful litany of shop-soiled Christmas songs that usher in Matthew Bulgo's not entirely festive monologue speak volumes about what follows. Into the void steps Tom, a man on the verge of thirty wearing a hang-dog expression and a permanently misanthropic air. Over the next sixty minutes, Tom rewinds from hungover awkwardness with his newly pregnant girlfriend Nat, to the sheer awfulness of the office party the night before. But, as he leaves Nat alone to travel home for Christmas, Tom goes further, to the loser mates he left behind, to his widowed mum, and most of all to his dead dad who he's slowly but surely starting to resemble. As played by Sion Pritchard in Kate Wasserberg's seasonal revival for the Cardiff-based Dirty Protest company, Tom is an initially dislikeable young pretender, a commitment-phobic man-child scared to face up to his responsibilities, yet who also feels hard done by. Out of such a gently tragi-c

Here's a wheeze and a half: Guinness are/were a wonky pop duo with tentacles in various Edinburgh College of Art-sired bands, including Commie Cars and Edinburgh Leisure. Armed with John Shuttleworth-style toybox keyboards and wilfully rudimentary bass and de(con) structive guitar, throughout 2016 they produced deadpan absurdist vignettes, some of which were possessed with a tragicomic intent worthy of Tony Hancock. After seven months they decided to split up, figuring that was quite long enough for them to have done their bit, thank you very much. Their last gift to the world is this twelve-track album, released solely on YouTube, although there's a download link if you want one, and it really is pure genius. The opening instrumental title track somewhat appositely bumps and grinds its way across the dancefloor like very early Cabaret Voltaire, its primitive drum machine, motorik funk bass and wailing banshee guitar giving few clues to what follows. I'm A Zookeeper (

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four stars Tanked-up show-offs should take care if they do a turn at their works Christmas do this year. If Roddy Doyle's stage play of his 1987 novel made into a hit film by Alan Parker four years later is anything to go by, any would-be pop svengali in the room might sign them up to become lead singer of the hardest working band in Dublin. That's how young hustler Jimmy gets vain-glorious Deco to join his fledgling combo, anyway. Doyle's play, mind you, harks back to a time before karaoke took over the pubs and begat X Factor style TV talent shows on which anyone can be famous for five minutes. Caroline Jay Ranger's touring production of Doyle's West End smash hit takes full advantage of the play's period 1980s setting, as Andrew Linnie's Jimmy navigates his way through a world full of back-street chancers high on glossy pop tunes to manufacture the ultimate party show-band. What Jimmy understands most of all is the sheer dra

Matthew Bulgo is preparing for Christmas. The writer, actor and director has just finished performing in a successful run of Kenny Morgan, Mike Poulton's play about Terence Rattigan seen at the Arcola Theatre in London, and is back home in Cardiff, “gearing down for Christmas,” as he puts it. The next couple of weeks will see Bulgo dragged away from his downtime and taking a train to Edinburgh to see the first night of a revival of his own play, Last Christmas, which opens at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh next week. As the title suggests, Bulgo's one-man play, presented by Welsh new writing theatre company, Dirty Protest, and performed by Sion Pritchard, is set around the festive season, and follows the fortunes of one man taking stock of his life during an already emotionally charged time of year. “It's about a man who has lost his father and become a father in the space of a year,” says Bulgo. “He's travelling home for Christmas, and he's a little ang

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