Coffee-Table Notes

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Three stars Judging by the level of activity at Assembly Roxy just now, one could be forgiven for presuming Edinburgh Festival Fringe season had come even earlier than usual. In actual fact the seventeen shows crammed in across three spaces in the Venue over the next few days make up the second Formation festival. Founded by the Edinburgh-based Annexe Repertory Theatre earlier this year, Formation is designed to provide a platform for some of the city’s younger theatre companies. It also fills the void left by the demise of Discover 21, the bijou basement space formerly housed in St Margaret’s House. While much of the programme focuses on new work, including spoken-word and script-in-hand scratch performances, this time out Formation is also looking at the edgier end of the classical canon. In this way, Jean Genet’s three-handed look at power, class and below-stairs frustration lends itself naturally to such intimate productions as the one director Ko

Tom Stoppard hadn’t planned to write Travesties, his audacious 1974 dramatic musing on art and revolution that put novelist James Joyce, Dadaist Tristan Tzara and Russian iconoclast V.I. Lenin in the same room in 1917 Zurich. As Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s revival of the play runs on apace as the wild card of the Perthshire-based theatre’s summer season of five shows after opening last week, more than forty years on it is clear that Travesties hasn’t lost its multi-faceted mojo. The roots of the play stem partly from Stoppard’s friendship with actor John Wood, and a promise to write him a new play, and partly from reading a biography of Joyce. “I’d written my play Jumpers for the National Theatre a couple of years before, but John was working for the RSC, so I said to him, never mind, I’ll write you another play,” says Stoppard, who turned a stately 81-years-old this week. “I was reading Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce, and when I came across the fact that Joyce, Tzara

Wee Red Bar, Edinburgh Three stars As their name suggests, Twelve Twelve Theatre are a young Edinburgh-based company who this year aim to produce a dozen plays over as many months. This third double bill of short new works takes them halfway to their target, with another three to come. If that says much about the DIY ambition of the company co-led by Saskia Ashdown and Andrew Cameron, the plays go further. Mr Noose Tie is Jim Rennie’s absurdist yarn concerning a man who is forced to roleplay his own suicide attempt as part of a public experiment. Bit part players in Rennie’s psychological romp through Mr Noose Tie’s state of mind include his Kafkaesque boss and a woman in a bunny outfit who migt have saved him. Overseen by a steely doctor off the leash and a deadpan bouncer called Huge Philip, the heart of Mr Noose Tie’s troubles can be found with the woman he possibly still loves. What emerges in Ashdown’s brisk production is a self-reflective matter of life and death which