Coffee-Table Notes

Churchill Theatre Five stars The creaks and strains of the Churchill Theatre's wonderfully traditional interior are all too appropriate an environment to house Samuel Beckett's portrait of the artist as an old man, in which his eponymous hero shuffles through his back pages to unearth a life lost. As played by Barry McGovern in long term collaborator Michael Colgan production for the pair's newly constituted Clare Street theatre company, it is a rare and exceptional masterclass in translating the human condition in all its tragi-comic glory. Arguably the greatest living male performer of Beckett's work, McGovern slopes on, his white hair illuminated by the sole light above him and heightened even more by an otherwise black painted stage. Through the doorway can be glimpsed a brass bed where Krapp lays his head in a terminal state of aloneness. As he goes through his time-honoured set of rituals – a glass of water, a banana, a near fatal fall, another banana – it

Traverse Theatre Four stars “It's a monstrous world, and it's not enough,” howls an agonised Robyn midway through Zinnie Harris' new play, co-produced by the Traverse Theatre with Edinburgh International Festival. It begins on a beach that might be an island, and where Robyn is asking her partner Helen if she's okay. The pair have been washed ashore following a serious boating accident, and are possibly still in shock. This is nothing, however, to what eventually transpires in an isolated landscape where not even destiny-changing moths survive. There is a stillness running through Orla O'Loughlin's elegant production, despite the torrent of words flowing from Robyn's mouth in an attempt to understand what may or may not be happening. What initially starts out looking like an everyday tale of extreme domestic survival takes an emotional and stylistic lurch, so it becomes a pilgrimage of sorts to a painfully recent past in an attempt to rebuild a l

Two versions of Adam Kashmiri stand onstage in Adam , Frances Poet's eponymous biographical play of this young man's remarkable life. One, played by Neshla Caplan, is a version of the girl he used to be back home in Egypt. The other is Adam here, now and living in Scotland as the man he later became. In Poet's script for Cora Bissett's National Theatre of Scotland production, we follow Adam, from his resistance to being forced into girly dresses to first love in the clothes shop he works in, risking everything in the misogynist society he grew up in. All this is played out against a backdrop of Adam's arrival in Glasgow as an asylum seeker, while the failed Egyptian revolution blazes on his TV screen. What becomes clear as Adam discovers an online community just like him is, not only how open he is about everything he's been through, but how remarkably sane he has remained throughout it all. Kashmiry plays himself with a chirpiness that is accentuated even

The Studio, Edinburgh International Festival  Four stars The words 'YES' and 'NO' flash up in turn on a screen at the back of the stage. The array of guitars, speakers and a laptop in front of it suggest an intimate gig of a grassroots persuasion. Whether any of this is still in place by the end of Turner Prize winning polymath Martin Creed's three week late night run remains to be seen. Creed, as he is at pains to point out, doesn't want to repeat himself in any way. In the spirit of such good intentions, no spoiler alerts are required here, for a show which effectively does what it says on the tin, but which finds its eccentric auteur questioning his every action. “I made some notes,” Creed says, after breezing on with two large jotters under his arm. He looks somewhere between a 1970s social studies lecturer and the same era's edition of Donald Sutherland. “But whatever the opposite of taking notes is, I don't want that.” Over the next eight

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh International Festival  Four stars “It's an internal matter,” says a spiv-like local official as his town is over-run by rhinoceroses in Zinnie Harris' reimagining of Eugene Ionesco's 1959 absurdist classic. “It'll blow over.” Such are the famous last words of easily corruptible civic mandarins the world over, as laissez-faire small town ways give way to mob rule by noisy grotesques who only travel in packs. Such a scenario is all too recognisable on our doorsteps in a post Brexit, post Trump age. Imagine, then, how close to home it must be just now in a volatile Turkey, where director Murat Daltaban's DOT Theatre company, who are co-producing the show with the Royal Lyceum, are based. Things begin playfully enough, with Robert Jack's local intellectual waster Berenger hooking up with Steven McNicoll's pompous clever-clogs Jean in the square. As the town-folk go about their business, it is clear that Berenger i

Churchill Theatre, Edinburgh International Festival  Four stars When the audience of six are led on the short walk from the Church Hill Theatre foyer to the studio space at the back of the building, it isn't entirely clear where they're going. The worlds they're about to be plunged into over the next forty-five minutes, however, are an infinitely more frightening trip into the unknown. Vox Motus' re-telling of Caroline Brothers' 2012 novel follows the harrowing journey of Kabir and Aryan, two brothers from Afghanistan, who flee their country for refuge in England by way of Greece, Italy and France. It is a hazardous and often life-threatening journey, which thousands upon thousands of refugees are attempting right now. In Vox Motus' retelling, directors Candice Edmunds and Jamie Harrison, working with writer Oliver Emanuel, designer and model-maker Rebecca Hamilton and lighting designer Simon Wilkinson have created an intimate and troubling experience.

In 2015, The Sexual Objects released the greatest album that no-one ever heard. Marshmallow was a swoonsome collection of garage band glam and crunchy instrumental homages to left-field guitar icons of yore. By rights, the record's rifftastic technicolour compendium should have set the world alight and scooped every award in town. Except, this was a concept dreamt up by Sexual Object in chief and former Fire Engine Davy Henderson, who, along with fellow SOBS Simon Smeeton, Graham Wann, Douglas MacIntyre and Ian Holford, opted to release Marshmallow in a limited edition of one. Auctioned on ebay, the highest bidder for the band's second full length opus also gained full exclusive rights to any re-release until the twelfth of never (which, as any Donny Osmond fan knows, that's a long long time). After fifty-three bids, Marshmallow was sold for a cool £4,213. All was quiet until last month, when the successful bidder was revealed to be the elusive team behind Triassic Tusk Re