Coffee-Table Notes

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars Never let a drunk on a train try to be your best mate when you're reading Plato. If in any doubt of the potential consequences, check out what happens to poor Guy Haines, who, once accosted by terminal dipso Charles Bruno on a homeward-bound express, is catapulted into a life or death situation which could destroy his world. What Haines presumes to be hypothetical bantz in order to allow him to marry his new love Anne, Bruno takes seriously, and now Haines must pay the price. Craig Warner's stage version of Patricia Highsmith's novel gives much of the wide-screen embellishments of Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 film version a wide berth in a script first seen on the West End in 2013. Anthony Banks' touring production gets to the story's dark amoral heart, even as it sets out its store in the assorted dream homes behind the sliding doors that make up a set by David Woodhead that looks to Jasper Johns as much as Edward Hopper.

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars T here are two devastating moments in this Cameron Mackintosh-produced touring revival of composer Claude-Michel Schonberg and lyricist Alain Boublil’s Madame Butterfly inspired musical epic that charts the human fallout of the Vietnam War. Three if you count the tellingly unhappy ending. The first comes at the start of the second act, with the use of film footage of Vietnamese street children conceived by American fathers. Accompanied onstage by a group of the play’s statesman-like ex-servicemen singing their hearts out to assuage their guilt, the scene has a similar power to the sort of overblown 1980s charity record it resembles. The second moment comes when Kim, the young Vietnamese woman who fell for brooding GI Chris three years before, bearing their son in his absence, meets Chris’ American wife, Ellen. Touchingly played by Sooha Kim and Zoe Doano, for a few minutes they are the only two people onstage. It’s a rare moment of intim

Rona Munro is snowed in. Laid low in the Borders, the writer of works ranging from the James Plays trilogy for the National Theatre of Scotland, Ladybird Ladybird for Ken Loach, and Dr Who for pretty much everyone is talking about the new production of her 1990 play, Bold Girls, which opens at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow this week. Beyond all that, but very much on her doorstep, Munro reckons a foot’s worth of snow fell overnight. “It’s pretty spectacular,” she says. “Everyone’s got the feeling that something apocalyptic just happened, but in a good way, because everyone’s talking to each other.” As an illustration of how solidarity can be born from adversity, it embodies both Munro’s own sense of community spirit, and the sort of grassroots collectivism she channelled into Bold Girls. Set in Belfast during the Northern Irish Troubles, Munro’s play focuses on three women, whose husbands are either in prison or have been killed in the crossfire of the conflict. When a t

Aberdeen Arts Centre can’t get rid of Derek Anderson. This should become clear when the curtain goes up on his production of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s musical, Company, next month. Featuring an array of West End musical theatre veterans rarely sighted this far north, Anderson’s third show at Aberdeen Arts Centre following productions of Cabaret and The Pillowman marks a prodigal’s return that puts both the director and the venue itself squarely in the spotlight. “After doing the first two shows, what the Board at Aberdeen Arts Centre liked about Company is that, like the others, audiences will maybe feel challenged by the work in ways that don’t happen so much these days. Company totally fits in with their remit in that way.” Company first appeared on Broadway in 1970 after Sondheim was approached by actor Anthony Perkins, who asked him to read a set of eleven short plays by Furth. Sondheim in turn passed them on to producer Harold Prince, who first mooted the idea o

Summerhall, Edinburgh, January 25 th -March 10th If Robert Burns was an early sighting of a working class auto-didact, it befits a multi-media arts festival to reimagine Burns’ questing poetic spirit for the twenty-first century. This is the aim of the Summerhall-hosted Burns Unbroke festival, which over its six-week duration will feature an array of music, performance and visual art inspired by the bard. The visual art strand includes work by more than thirty artists spread out over eleven gallery spaces. This includes pieces by Graham Fagen, Bridget Collins, Douglas Gordon and the Chapman Brothers, as well as former Frankie Goes to Hollywood vocalist, Holly Johnson. Four new commissions will also feature; a mural by Ciara Veronica Dunne, a film-based installation by Ross Fleming, a mixed media piece by Derrick Guild, and a map by Robert Powell that pinpoints all the places in Edinburgh relevant to Burns. Presented in a collaboration between Summerhall and the Artruist or

The Playhouse, Edinburgh  Three stars Anyone wishing to see the connections between classical ballet and shaking your stuff in late-night dives as salvation from the 1980s recession could do worse than check out this touring revival of the musical stage version of Adrian Lyne’s 1983 film. Back then, in a post Fame, pre Billy Elliot world, Tom Hedley’s original story concerning Pittsburgh teenager Alex was as blue-collar aspirational as it got. Alex does dayshifts as a welder at the local steelworks before thrusting her way through a late-night floor-show at the local club, all the time harbouring dreams of joining the tutu-clad elite at the Shipley Dance Academy.  Enter boss’s son Nick, who attempts to buy his way into Alex’s affections while being forced to lay off shop-floor staff. With the club Alex dances in similarly exposed to hard times, this ushers in a sub-plot concerning even more hardcore small-town sexploitation, until Alex and everyone else come good, with Nick for

Hannah Tointon was warned off watching Alfred Hitchcock’s big-screen version of Strangers on A Train when she was cast in the new production of Craig Warner’s stage adaptation of the story which arrives in Glasgow next week. Director Anthony Banks told his cast of TV friendly faces that Warner’s script, originally seen a different production on the West End in 2013, had gone back to Patricia Highsmith’s original novel, published in 1950, a year before the film was released with a screenplay co-written by Raymond Chandler. “Anthony told us to steer clear of the film,” says the thirty-year-old actress, probably best known for her small-screen stints in The Inbetweeners, Hollyoaks and, depending on your age, children’s shows Kerching! in the early noughties, and Switch a decade later. “I’ve read the book, which is about these two people, who when they meet talk about how they both have someone they’d like to get out of the way. One of them treats it as a joke, but the other is quite