Coffee-Table Notes

When David Greig and Tom Morris first sat down to talk about how their respective theatres could potentially collaborate, little did they realise the dramatic mountain they would have to climb in order to make it happen. As the recently appointed artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, Greig already had an ever-expansive track record over twenty years as a playwright. Morris too had helped reshape the theatrical landscape, first at Battersea Arts Centre, then with the National Theatre of Great Britain, with whom he co-directed the international hit, War Horse, alongside Marianne Elliot. As artistic director of Bristol Old Vic since 2009, Morris was in the midst of overseeing the second phase of a major refurbishment of the 250-year-old theatre. The prospect of Greig and Morris working together across both theatres was enticing, but what to do, and how to navigate their way towards a summit that audiences of both theatres could climb with them? As with all such

On the streets of Paris, revolution is in the air. The people want to take back control from an out of touch government whose leaders are shoring up their own wealth. Barricades look set to be leapt. Such is the way of history repeating itself in France, from the 19 th century uprising through to 1968 and even the current, and slightly more ideologically ambiguous wave of street protests by the so-called Gilets Jaunes. It was seeing photographs of the latter in a French newspaper that struck a chord with Claude-Michel Schonberg.   “Those pictures looked exactly like the set of Les Miserables,” says the composer of one of the most iconic pieces of musical theatre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. “First of all it made me realise that Les Miserables is still relevant. Secondly, it also made me realise that in 200 years we have learnt nothing.” Maybe this is why the current year-long UK tour of Les Miserables, originally adapted by Schonberg and writer Alan

Various venues, Edinburgh Four stars How did we allow this to happen? This is the question asked by historian William Dalrymple regarding the UK’s impending departure from Europe in his contribution to this six installation city-wide series of love letters to the continent which 62 per cent of Scotland’s voters chose to remain part of. Commissioned by Edinburgh’s Hogmanay and Edinburgh International Book Festival, and running from dusk to late evening from now until Burns Night, this is resistance in monumental fashion. Dalrymple’s rich evocation of the two-way traffic between Scotland and the rest of Europe is writ large on the wall of the Tron Kirk, where a window on the world is brought to life by Double Take productions as a simmering score by RJ McConnell threatens to explode. The umbilical connections between nations are rolled back even further to ancient times atop Calton Hill. Here, Kapka Kassabova’s words declare how ‘migration is our inheritance’ as shimmering ani