Coffee-Table Notes

Former Royal High School, Edinburgh Four stars “The state does not commit terrorist acts.” So says Mr Fox, the thrusting home secretary of an un-named European government in Jo Clifford's attempt to cut through a make-believe sham of so-called democracy. Clifford does this by making the situation critical, so both powers are divided, not by political parties, but along gender lines. Even here, alas, while the carefully styled She appears to be strong and stable, it is the spin doctoring duo of Ms Warp and Ms Webb who pull the strings. As Saskia Ashdown's She pulls off her blonde wig and kicks her power heels away, Clifford strips back the public image to get to the messed-up human within. As the new woman-only authority attempts to court the youth vote as well as their weaker male contemporaries, She is in pieces over her estranged activist daughter. While older members of the House are haunted by ghosts, Andrew Cameron's Mr Fox unwinds by exploring the limits of r

Andrew Dallmeyer – Playwright, actor, director Born St Boswell's, January 10 1945; died May 21, Edinburgh Andrew Dallmeyer, who has died aged 72 following a battle with Motor Neurone Disease, was a fiercely individual artist. This was the case both as a writer of an estimated 78 plays, many of which remain unpublished, or as an actor, whose expressive facial tics and looming physicality made him a natural for the range of grotesques and downbeat absurdists he specialised in. This was mirrored in his writing, which similarly set him beyond the mainstream as a seemingly wilful and at times eccentric outsider. This was the case whether playing the title role in the original 1980s production of Liz Lochhead's Scots version of Moliere's play, Tartuffe, at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, or writing about kindred spirits including Salvador Dali in his play, Hello Dali (1982), and Thomas de Quincey in Opium Eater (1984). The latter went on to win a BAFTA Scotland

When Leith Theatre opens its doors as this year's home of the Hidden Door arts festival today, festival director David Martin believes it will be twenty-five years to the day since anyone last performed here. This was only discovered by accident when sound artist Dave House was researching a new work designed to mark what he calls the venue's 'melancholy-yet-beautiful state of disrepair'. Working in situ, House will use field recordings and environmental sound in an attempt to evoke the past, present and future of the building for a piece that will run throughout Hidden Door's ten-day duration. Some of these sounds might well emanate from what happened two days into the festival get-in, when volunteers gutting the main hall discovered what lay beyond the black drapes and what turned out to be a false black proscenium arch. Once this was ripped away, it revealed a far more ornate surround that came complete with a crest at its the centre. This is just one of th

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars When an eighteen year old girl sweeps into town with the world seemingly at her feet, the only opposition she faces is from a middle-aged white man who enjoys laying down the law. Plus ca change, it seems, ever since Mary, Queen of Scots was forced to square up to John Knox over a series of meetings that took place in Edinburgh between 1561 and 1563. Linda McLean's new play imagines these showdowns through the prism of Rona Morison's fiercely intelligent Mary, a dancing queen who isn't afraid to put her head on the block. Backing her up in David Greig's swish and suitably chic looking production are a fabulous entourage of six other Marys, who shimmy alongside the teen queen like a 1960s girl group. More than a mere chorus, they become different facets of Mary's inner self, giving her strength as she goes. By contrast, Jamie Sives' Knox is a mansplaining absolutist resembling the most rabid of internet trolls.

The last time Emma Rice spoke to the Herald was in 2015, when she was overseeing a tour of her audacious staging of Daphne du Maurier's novel, Rebecca, with the Cornwall-based Kneehigh theatre company. While she was then artistic director of Kneehigh, with whom she had begun her theatre career as an actress, her appointment as incoming director of Shakespeare's Globe had recently been announced. As successor to Dominic Dromgoole, hopes for Rice's tenure, which she took up at the beginning of 2016, were high. Less than two years on, and with a touring revival of Rice's Kneehigh production of mediaeval romance Tristan and Yseult arriving at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow next week, Rice has already announced that she will be leaving the Globe in spring 2018. That announcement came after Rice had only been in post for a few months, and followed concerns from the theatre's board regarding some of her artistic choices. This appeared to be in relation to her introduct

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars Poor Jake. One minute he and his band, Test Card, are the in sound of 1998, the next he's playing a shaker on a Belle and Sebastian B-side and doing a dog food commercial. For the last fifteen years he's been stuck in the Sisyphean hell of his similarly past-its-sell-by-date recording studio, working on an endlessly unfinished album by a band called Dawnings, who are stuck in a sound booth repeating themselves ad nauseum. When Jake's waster hanger-on Nick uploads a long-lost slice of brain-pummelling techno called Kill Them All, Jake looks set to make the big time for all the wrong reasons. Louise Quinn's knowing piece of gig theatre puts a novel twist on an all too familiar rock and roll take on Faustian self-destruction. In Quinn's world, brought to claustrophobic life in Ben Harrison's increasingly fantastical production, it isn't the star chasing band who sell their souls to the devil, but the lowly sound enginee

The Common Guild, Glasgow until July 9 Three stars All that glitters is not necessarily gold in this first solo show in Scotland by Steven Claydon, a former member of avant-electro sleaze merchants Add N to (X), and a more recent shortlistee for the 2016 Hepworth Prize for Sculpture. Here, Claydon's new (or are they?) constructions question notions of authenticity and value, be it through a shrine to dead teeth, a similarly worshipful array of multi-coloured gas canisters, or numerous subversions of ethnographic fetishism which illustrate what Claydon calls 'cultural cannibalism'. Chain-store 'African' heads devour gold-painted packets of pills, as if sanctioned by private medicine millionaires who would hike up the prices of life saving drugs by a thousand per cent. Shredded bank notes - a much more efficient way of dealing with money to burn - are framed as a dappled decorative back-drop. Crocodiles grow out of carved canoes, saved from some biblical flood.