Coffee-Table Notes

When Take Me Somewhere infiltrated Glasgow’s arts venues last year, the pilot edition of this new festival of experimental theatre and performance took with it the spirit of the Arches. This new entity was founded by Jackie Wylie, the former artistic director of the labyrinthine arts lab and club space which, situated beside and beneath Central Station, was underground in every way. When the Arches closed in 2015 after Glasgow Licensing Board turned down the venue’s application for a late license following advice from Police Scotland, its absence left a damaging hole in the city’s artistic infrastructure. Arriving on the scene two years later, Take Me Somewhere was a reclaiming of the energy which had driven the Arches, and made it one of the most significant arts spaces in Europe. It was also a form of closure, as many of the tireless team of individuals and pioneers who had developed their skills at the Arches reunited to tie up loose ends in a way that was effectively getting t

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars If you believe the elaborate fable told from a storybook between acts during this greatest hits compendium from Edinburgh’s live art cabaret extravaganza, the night’s roots stem from the early 1980s. In their boundary-pushing diversity, some of the acts actually do recall what used to be called alternative cabaret during that era. Either way, the eight bite-size performances culled from the last five years of speak-easy one-nighters revealed Anatomy as key players in the city’s ever fertile artistic underground. Hosted by Anatomy founders Harry Josephine Giles and Ali Maloney, the show opened Rosa Postlethwaite’s tellingly named Without Whom We Would Not Be Here Tonight. Lewis Sherlock followed with The Undercog, in which Sherlock shadow boxed with funding bodies. In Sanitise, Jordan & Skinner choreographed the domestic excesses of cleaning a toilet with wordless wit, while in Uranus, Moreno Solinas sang arias to illustrate sexual n

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars It may be coincidence that the not so wonderful Wizard of Oz is the only character who speaks with an American accent in the latest touring revival of composer Stephen Schwartz and writer Winnie Holzman’s prequel to L Frank Baum’s fictional fantasia by way of the Hollywood classic. It is telling too, perhaps, that the mechanical façade that gives this bumbling little guy power over an entire nation appears to also have terrible hair. There are knowing nods like this aplenty in Schwartz and Holzman’s creation, brought to life with steampunk stylings by director Joe Mantello in epic fashion. It starts out with the death of the Wicked Witch of the West at the hands of an unseen kid with fancy shoes called Dorothy. Things then rewind to reveal how a green-skinned geek with attitude called Elphaba and her blonde ambition-laden nemesis turned bestie Galinda became the binary epitome of good and evil. In what is essentially a high school dram