Coffee-Table Notes

Crocodile Fever Traverse Theatre Four stars The heat is on in Meghan Tyler’s wild new play, set during the late 1980s Northern Irish Troubles. Here, Alannah gets by foraging on Tayto crisps and illicit fags inbetween tending to her ailing Da’ upstairs. When her free-spirited sister Fianna roars in the front door after a three-year absence, their booze-filled reunion unleashes all their pent-up frustrations at every macho dinosaur that ever reared its ugly head. Gareth Nicholls’ turbo-charged co-production between the Traverse and the Lyric Theatre, Belfast sets out its store on Grace Smart’s garish pink-hued living room room set, in which the sisters’ long dead mammy peers down at the spick and span interior that provides shelter from the chaos outside. As Alannah, Lucianne McEvoy presents a magnificent comic study of high anxiety that almost makes Lisa Dwyer Hogg’s potty-mouthed Fianna appear well-balanced. As old traumas come to light, the sisters take no prisoners

Leith Theatre Four stars When Anna Calvi incants a whispered ‘No, don’t you stop me’ mantra on Wish, from Hunter, her third, Mercury Music Prize nominated album, the hush that greets it as she points her finger at the audience following an epic guitar wig-out suggests no-one in the room would dare. Calvi’s first return to Edinburgh International Festival since 2015 saw her sashay onstage already twanging at her guitar on a rawer and less dreamy take on Hunter’s title track. Black-clad, Medusa-haired and accompanied by the martial engine room of drummer Alex Thomas and multi-instrumentalist Mally Harpaz, Calvi’s mix of primal keening and guitar slashes rooted in 1950s juke-box melodrama came alive with a gender-hopping psycho-sexual ferocity. The intensity of the work may point to something transcendent, but she remains in total control. Stuttering Bo Diddleyesque guitar patterns give way to the woozy loveliness of the David Hockney inspired Swimming Pool. This in turn sn

Church Hill Theatre Four stars Things run deep in the 1927 company’s new compendium of folk tales, unearthed from the recesses of the British Library archive and brought to life for Edinburgh International Festival’s You Are Here strand. After their last EIF adventure with The Magic Flute, 1927 have gone back to their DIY origins with a mash-up of expressionistically inclined action performed by writer/director Suzanne Andrade and Esme Appleton, Paul Barritt’s ingenious animation and a musical score by Lillian Henry expanded to incorporate all manner of junk shop noises played by David Insua-Cao and Francesca Simmons. As a bonus, the baker’s dozen of tall tales come with extra added lip-syncing to narration and occasional characterisation from a plethora of accents. This gives more colour and shade to the stories, which feature a menagerie of little creatures, from the fattest cat you’re ever likely to see, and a very chic looking beatnik ant fending off numerous suitors wit