Coffee-Table Notes

Something akin to musical chairs appears to be the order of the day in the Edinburgh church hall where members of Lung Ha Theatre Company are gathered to rehearse their new show. As a trio of professional dancers from the Curious Seed company join in the fun, simulating waking up to a brand new day in a place unknown and pulsed along by a percussive soundtrack, it is clear from some of the strange behaviour on show that We Are All Just little creatures does what it says on the tin. By the time this co-production between Lung Ha and Curious Seed opens in Edinburgh later this week, there will be forty performers from Lung Ha’s ensemble onstage alongside the dancers, with seven children aged eight to ten years old from the Craigmillar-based Lyra company up there with them. Together, they will be moving in some kind of unison to a live soundtrack composed and played by David Paul Jones and Kevin Lennon. All of which makes for a very different kind of show for Lung Ha as the premiere t

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars There was always a beautiful sleight of hand about Local Hero, Bill Forsyth’s big screen hymn to the transformative power of Scotland’s rural landscape. On the one hand, Forsyth’s iconic tale of an American oil company’s attempt to buy up the fictional village of Ferness is a charmingly romantic study of the power of the little guy in the face of being made an offer they can’t refuse. On the other, with free-market economics in full swing when the film was released in 1983, its take on community spirit defeating corporate capitalism was the gentlest of protests. Thirty-six years on, this feels like the case even more in this gorgeous new stage musical based on Forsyth’s original screenplay, and co-written by Forsyth and the Lyceum’s artistic director David Greig. Featuring nineteen new songs by the film’s original composer, Mark Knopfler, director John Crowley’s co-production between the Lyceum and the Old Vic is a loving and immacu

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When boy meets girl in Shakespeare’s frothy but terminally unreconstructed rom-com, the so-called happy ending has always been at best questionable. Jo Clifford’s gender-bending new reading of the story of how Katherina learnt to succumb to Petruchio’s will proceeds to turn the play’s world upside down, break every rule going and run with it to make a whirlwind piece of queer-core cabaret inspired subversion. Here, Katherina is a boy, a bratty swot with ideas above his station and a serious attitude problem. Kate isn’t at all like his himbo brother Bianca, who only wants to serve the women who run the world as they woo him into willing submission. Petruchio, meanwhile, is a woman who, enjoying the challenge of Kate’s resistance to her charms, is on a mission, and won’t put up with any of Kate’s nonsense, no matter how much he refuses to put out. Over a rollicking 75 minutes, Michael Fentiman’s co-production between the Tron and their ente