Coffee-Table Notes

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Don't be fooled by the stage's resemblance to a railway station waiting room in a particularly sleepy suburban hamlet at the opening of Phillip Breen's new staging of Graham Greene's 1969 novel. As the book's adaptor and former Citz co-artistic director Giles Havergal has proven countless times since it was first seen in the same auditorium almost three decades ago, what follows is the most deceptively subversive dissection of society's mores you're likely to see. In a post-Brexit climate, where free movement is being curtailed and fought-for liberties stripped away, Greene's tale of how retired bank manager Henry Pulling is enlightened into new life by his free-thinking Aunt Augusta is also a darkly prescient if still frothy affair. With Havergal's ingenious conceit of having the text split between four men in suits, Breen's quartet look here somewhere between a surrealist's convention and a cospl

Macrobert Arts Centre, Stirling Four stars It is somehow fitting that Rapture Theatre's touring revival of Edward Albee's explosive 1962 play opens within the grounds of a university campus. George and Martha, the warring couple at the play's heart, after all, live within an old-school academic bubble in which they have to make their own amusement. Over the three and three quarter hours that follow in Michael Emans' production, the games they play almost destroy them, even as they're all that helps them to survive. What is immediately striking as soon as Sara Stewart's blousy Martha and Robin Kingsland's George stumble through their front door is that, beyond the sparring, there is a deep-rooted affection between them. Kingsland plays George with an effete waspishness rising above his crushed intellect, so you get a glimpse of what Martha saw in him before disappointment set in. For all Martha's attention-seeking fury, in Sara Stewart's merc

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Ever since War Horse stole the world's heart, another staging of one of Michael Morpurgo's deeply moral novels was inevitable. Stand up Samuel Adamson's adaptation of the author's 2009 work for young people, which starts off in a London park, where nine year old Lilly remembers spotting wild birds with her football crazy dad. Little does she know she will end up being saved from a tsunami in the wilds of Indonesia by a flatulent elephant called Oona. Somewhere along the way we learn that Lilly's dad was a casualty of the Iraq war, while the hunters who stalk the jungle are as likely to take pot-shots at her as an orangutan named after footballer Frank Lampard. In an expansive staging by co-directors Timothy Sheader and Dale Rooks, both Lilly and Oona are caught in the crossfire of these money-obsessed predators, as their destruction of the natural world is exposed. Beyond such an eco-friendly triumph of right over mi

Dundee, as everyone knows, is on the up. With much of central Dundee having been flattened and turned into a series of building sites over the last couple of years, and with developments such as the forthcoming V&A design museum looming at the dock-side, Tayside's would be European Capital of Culture 2023 is in the throes of reinvention. In response, Dundee-born Andrew Wasylyk takes a wander around his home town in the form of eight impressionistic instrumentals that create a wistful psycho-graphic portrait of a time and place caught somewhere between past, present and future. Such a line of inquiry is a far cry from Mitchell's tenure as front-person of country-tinged alt-pop outfit the Hazey Janes. His stint as bassist with a rejuvenated Idlewild too is not obvious grounding for such a leap. Mitchell has previous form with atmospheric ambience, however, by way of the dreamy electro space pop of Art of Memory Palace, the duo he formed with Raz Ullah to record the

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars As this week marks the twentieth anniversary of the Labour Party's General Election landslide, it is also the perfect time to see Douglas Maxwell's play, which charts a legacy of 1990s sired terminal adolescents who try but sometimes fail to grow up. Into what looks like a waiting room to some possible wonderland steps Chick, a middle-aged prodigal who seems to have slipped through the security blanket of post-university career opportunities and domestic bliss. While his former student playmates Jackson and Gary learnt how to lead a good and useful life, Chick has kept on partying, though he's long since forgotten why. One minute changes everything, however, and the sight of Gary's sixteen year old daughter Audrey in a hospital bed coma awakens a flicker of purpose for Chick. What follows in Matthew Lenton's dream-like production is a slow-burning elegy to loss that sees a disoriented Chick lurch between times and

Giles Havergal thinks it might have been the very first preview of Travels With My Aunt when he thought his new production was doomed. It was 1989, money was tight, and, necessity being the mother of invention, Havergal had opted to make his adaptation of Graham Greene's 1969 novel as economically spare as he could. On the eve of Phillip Breen's revival for the Gorbals-based institution's main stage, things may have come full circle in terms of austerity, but Travels With My Aunt remains both of its time and an evergreen masterpiece which transcends literary fads and fashions. “I'd just got started,” recalls Havergal during a flying visit to Glasgow for the read-through of Breen's production. “I'd just got into the aunt and I was fluttering away doing all my stuff, and I suddenly heard one of the seats in the circle go, and I thought, ohh , somebody can't bear it. Actually, I discovered later it wasn't that, but at that time I thought, oh my God, I'

Of all the plays that looked at World War One as part of the war's 100 year commemoration, arguably the most powerful was The 306: Dawn. Performed in a barn in Perthshire, the National Theatre of Scotland and Perth Theatre's production of Oliver Emanuel's play looked at the experience of some of the 306 men executed for cowardice between 1914 and 1918. This first part of a trilogy of music theatre works used movement and a live score by Gareth Williams performed by the Red Note Ensemble alongside Emanuel's text to dramatise a piece of hidden history that became an elegy to the men. Today, it is recognised that those executed would likely have been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder, and it took the best part of a century for them to receive pardons. Almost a year on, the second part of the trilogy opens this week in very different surroundings, as it focuses on the women behind the men that fell on the front-line. The 306: Day opens in the Station Hotel in