Coffee-Table Notes

If music be the food of love, Meilyr Jones is having something of a feast just now. The Welsh singer-songwriter’s debut album, 2013, released, somewhat confusingly, in 2016, revealed a set of baroque pop vignettes on love, romance and being a stranger in a strange land. Born out of an extended trip to Rome hanging out with actors, the record was awash with artful arrangements, orchestral flourishes and references to Shakespeare. Two years on, and Jones is in Edinburgh, where he is composing a soundtrack and new set of songs for Wils Wilson’s 1960s-inspired take on Twelfth Night, Shakespeare’s cross-dressing rom-com that opens the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh’s autumn season in a co-production with Bristol Old Vic. “It’s complete madness,” says Jones. “It’s quite full on, working with all these different people. The only thing I find difficult about this is that in a gig, I can change anything at any time. Obviously with theatre you can’t, because with lighting and all that

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