Coffee-Table Notes

Summerhall, Edinburgh Three stars Once upon a cold war, the space race was everything to America and Russia. In a world dictated by firsts, it was America who made it to the moon and back. It was Russia, however, that set the bar, firing the first man into space as well as the collective imagination of a world who saw possibilities beyond the Soviet experiment. Beyond the heroics, there were other, less sung stories, as Francis Gallop makes clear in his new play that forms part of the theatre programme of Edinburgh International Science Festival, who co-commissioned it. Here, Gallop zones in on the hidden genius of Sergei Korolev, the engineer who pretty much invented the Soviet space programme, albeit in a near samizdat fashion following his imprisonment in a gulag. Meanwhile, in an Italian high-rise, Lucia and her brother build a home-made space-tracking system, which records what they believe to be a generation of prototype cosmonauts, whose doomed missions have been seeming

Linking Bridget Jones to Theresa May takes quite a leap, but somehow David Leddy has just done it. The Glasgow-based writer and director has been talking about Coriolanus Vanishes, his new solo show presented by Leddy's own Fire Exit company in co-production with the Tron Theatre, Glasgow. In particular he's been talking about people in powerful jobs who are able to present an unflappable public image even through they might be falling apart inside. “I remember when the first Bridget Jones came out,” says Leddy, “and thinking it was really funny that all these high-functioning people were crying in the toilets. I was twenty-one years old, and presumed that sort of thing didn't happen when you were an adult in jobs like that. All these years later I know that's not true, and I know these things don't just stop, even for someone like Theresa May. I might disagree with what she stands for, but of course Theresa May cries in toilets.” Whether anyone cries in the to

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars For too long now, football has been perceived to be just a boy's game. This wasn't always the case, as this dynamic little play co-written by Sabrina Mahfouz and Hollie McNish makes clear. It opens in the boot room, where wannabe women's team players Mickey and Keeley are preparing to try out for the national squad. Both are determined to make the grade for very different but equally personal reasons. Both too have their distractions, but they also have their heroines guiding them on. These come in the form of Carrie Boustead and Lily Parr. Back in 1881, Boustead was a Scottish woman of colour who kept goal for several teams. Flash forward to 1921, and Parr is a star player scoring goals in front of thousands. Both were pioneers, but with the outlawing of female football, they've been airbrushed out of history. As Caroline Bryant's production for the women-centred Futures Theatre flips between time-zones, Mickey and Ke

It's kind of appropriate that it's taken the Secret Goldfish sixteen years to record a new album. For a band whose effusive garage-band punk pop has roots in post-Postcard C86 outfit Fizzbombs as much as 1960s girl-band bubblegum, this long-awaited follow-up to their Aqua-Pet and Mink Riots albums, with B-side and out-takes collection Jet Streams inbetween, is a coming of age of sorts. Not that there's anything remotely sulky or world-weary in this fresh-as-a-daisy ten-song set from a band tellingly named after an imaginary tome name-checked in The Catcher in the Rye , J.D. Salinger's iconic novel of adolescent angst. Penned in the main by singer Katy McCullars and guitarist John Morose, with bass player Steven McSeveney and drummer Paul Turnbull providing ballast, roots are acknowledged by way of covers of Vic Godard and Edwyn Collins and an opening track written with Sexual Objects main-stays Davy Henderson and Simon Smeeton. The end result heralds the warmest r

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Three stars The question mark is everything in the title of Caryl Churchill's 2006 play, in which two gay lovers take on the world they might just be running. Not that anything is made too explicit here in a punishing forty-five minute ride around the psycho-sexual impetus behind the desperate need for power enough to shore up a void of self-loathing and a terror of anything resembling affection. As Kevin Lennon's Sam and Sandy Grierson's Guy swagger around the Citizens' Circle Studio while the audience enter to a minimal techno soundtrack and bathed beneath swirling spotlights, this is certainly the case with Sam's more aggressive half of the partnership. Necking beer too fast and with a punchbag hanging within reach, he is the boss, and is clearly in charge of the punishment that is doled out to help keep him there, be it in Vietnam or any other war that blew up in his face. Guy is more passive, a too eager to please civil servant

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Neil Cooper Three stars When a shaven-headed teenage boy wearing braces starts ranting about how foreigners are coming over here and stealing all our jobs, the ignorant fury of such a statement mid-way through Tanika Gupta's stage version of Meera Syal's 1996 novel, sounds chillingly of the moment. Such is the knee-jerk response of Little England to disenfranchisement and difference, it seems, whatever decade we're in. Up until that point, thirteen year old Meena has led a noisy if fairly sheltered life growing up amidst the bustle of her Indian family in the red-brick Midlands mining village of Tollington. Slade are on the radio, and boys are the imaginary stuff of the letters she sends in song to teenage agony aunts Cathy and Claire in Jackie magazine. If only she could be blonde like her wild child pal Anita, then she wouldn't have to wrap her cardigan around her head as if it were a wig. On one level this sounds as much a co

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars It's half an hour before a suited and booted Britannia turns the power on at the start of the National Theatre of Great Britain's meditation on the life and times of the UK in a post-Brexit world. Down the street from the Citizens Theatre, opposite the Mosque, a man with a pukka English accent explains to a young Asian man how the pelican crossing works. Both seem amused by such a seemingly alien means of controlling traffic flow. As Article 50 is finally activated, such an incident seems to offer hope beyond the confusion expressed in the patchwork of voices in the NToGB's play, woven together by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy and director Rufus Norris from 300 hours of interviews with voters from Britain's nations and regions. As Britannia pulls together six other similarly sober-looking ciphers to give them voice, the population's everyday fears are punctuated by the platitudes and promises drawn from the real-life poli