Coffee-Table Notes

Leith Depot, Edinburgh Four stars When New Zealand-born chanteuse Lydia Cole and Edinburgh singer/song-writer Hailey Beavis shared a bill at a festival in Barcelona, they hit it off so well they ended up writing and recording an EP together on a Catalonian farm. It takes a forgotten lucky horse shoe found on the farm and retrieved by guitarist Timothy Armstrong to jog Cole’s memory on the lyrics to The Fool That I Am, a typically candid song from her second album, The Lay of the Land, which Cole dedicates to Beavis in her second ever UK gig as part of a short low-key tour. You can see why Cole and Beavis are musical kindred spirits, both from their individual sets and three of the songs from the as yet unreleased EP that are peppered throughout the night. Both serve up a series of fragile confessionals leavened by an inclusive warmth which at one point prompts a discussion among the audience about Edinburgh’s bus service. Sporting a jumper that suggests Mondrian art direct

Tramway, Glasgow Five Stars When Edwin Morgan’s rollicking Scots verse adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s nineteenth century epic of unrequited love, grand gestures and its eponymous hero’s desperate self-loathing first appeared in 1992, it laid bare the poetic power of love on a universal scale. A quarter of a century on, Dominic Hill’s revival for the first off-site Citizens Theatre production in its temporary new home at Tramway honours Morgan’s rendering of Rostand’s yarn in vivid and audacious fashion, delivering the entire production with an almighty swagger. Surrounded by punk-styled dandies and garishly-clad soldier boys and girls mixing and matching Pam Hogg’s era-hopping costume design, Brian Ferguson’s Cyrano is a mercurial street-poet terrier who hides his self-consciousness about his oversize nose behind a demeanour that is part court jester, part ragamuffin provocateur. This barely masks a lovesick melancholy and a huge intellect that finds an outlet in drafting ro

When Muireann Kelly moved to Glasgow from County Mayo in her native Ireland, she was all too aware of some of the differences, as well as the similarities, between her birthplace and her adopted home. One of these was in the way history and mythology is dealt with, particularly in relation to how incomers from other places are treated. More specifically, while the actress and theatre director had long been aware of a major tragedy in 1937, when ten young boys from Achill island in County Mayo were killed in their bothy in a fire in Kirkintilloch during potato-picking season, she discovered that few people she met in Scotland had heard of the story. The 1937 Kirkintilloch disaster is at the heart of Scotties, a new play co-written by Kelly with Frances Poet, which opens in Glasgow next week as part of a tour presented by the Kelly-led Gaelic-based company Theatre Gu Leor (Theatre Galore). Supported by the National Theatre of Scotland and the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Scotties aims