Coffee-Table Notes

“I've always seen John Webster as a proto- feminist,” says Zinnie Harris about The Duchess [of Malfi], her new Version of Webster’s similarly named seventeenth century revenge tragedy. As Harris prepares to open her own production of the play at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh in co-production with the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, where it will visit its temporary home at Tramway in September as part of the Gorbals-based theatre’s Citizens Women season, this is probably fair point. Webster’s original play, after all, pits a free-spirited widow against a patriarchy unable to deal with her autonomy as she marries beneath her class. As Harris makes clear, the play’s focus on male control is as pertinent today as it ever was.     “I think there is a conversation going on just now that's about how we treat women,” she says, “and this is a play that was out of its time. Webster was saying that you try to destroy women at your peril. It's a play that's about female

Ask LJ Findlay-Walsh what are some of the most important elements of Take Me Somewhere, the Glasgow-wide performance festival that opens its third edition this weekend, and a suitably expansive array of answers will tumble forth from the festival’s artistic director. These answers are about gender, race, sexuality, queerness, and all the other issues of identity politics currently at the fore of ongoing debates the world over. Such deeply personal matters have always been at the heart of live art. While all are present and correct in Take Me Somewhere, the driving force at the centre of this year’s month-long extravaganza is Pop. This is the case be it through music, art and culture in its broadest rainbow-coloured forms. “There’s a lot of interesting strands this year,” says Findlay-Walsh. “I’ve never wanted to have a theme, but themes emerge from the work that comes up which always seem to have something in common.” This is the case with some of the festival’s twenty-fou

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars When Mark Lockyer’s entire world collapses in on him, an unexpected letter packs him off to sunny Spain with full approval of his therapist. Far from the sunny package-tour getaway he might have expected, Lockyer is forced to square up to his personal demons while stepping into another world entirely. As he whiles away his days at Pepe’s café, small-town dramas are played out in front of his nose in a way that sees him become accidentally complicit with them. Flitting between conversations with his dead mother and brief encounters with a Dutch neighbour, a doctor who turns out to be the local mayor and a sad-eyed flamenco dancer called Ramona, Lockyer’s yarn is structured like a classic cuckoo-in-the-nest one-man noir. In this way, a personal quest to find himself co-exists alongside a tangle of scenarios that could have been lifted straight from the pages of a pulp thriller. At times, Alice Malin’s production for ATC resembles a se