Coffee-Table Notes

Four stars Two newsreaders sit behind a desk while a dramatic theme music plays out. Scripts are wielded like weapons by the man and woman as they prepare to dole out the headlines to anyone still seeking some kind of truth beyond fake news. Initially strait-laced - and straight-faced - in their delivery, the veneer of democracy soon starts to fade, however, as a litany of atrocities takes in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the 1980s Soviet-Afghan conflict, and a whole lot more, as any pretence at an objective worldview is consumed into the chaos the pair collapse into.   The foodstuffs that fill the desk are used as props for little miniature scenarios projected live onto a screen at the side of the stage. While caviar and vodka are passed out like holy sacraments, toy tanks are abandoned on the woman’s hair, while tiny figurines are burnt like tin soldiers.   This is quietly ferocious stuff in Petr   Boháč ’s production for the Czech Republic based Spitfire Company, which draws its word

  Five  stars Once upon a time, Fred Deakin was a shy kid who started playing records at teenage parties to try and make friends. Within a few years, as a student in Edinburgh, he was running some of the best clubs in town, and had the best posters to boot. And that was before he became a proper pop star as one half of electronic party people Lemon Jelly and a professor in design. Most of this is in Club Life, Deakin’s very personal late night show and tell concerning his life manning the wheels of plastic fronting legendary 1980s and 1990s clubland concepts. These ranged from the nu jazz of Blue to the Easy Listening irony of Going Places by way of heroically named nights such as Thunderball, Devil Mountain, Impotent Fury, and self-styled worst club in the world, Misery. These are all revived by way of assorted potted greatest hits selections, as Deakin takes us on a tour of Edinburgh nightlife from back in the day. Director Sita Pieraccini transforms Deakin’s testimonies into a parti

Four stars   When smart kid Mark starts at a rough school, the last thing he expects is to buddy up with Darren, a tough talking bully from a damaged background. Opposites attract, however, as sparring eventually spill over into acts of sex and violence that go way beyond the growing pains of adolescent angst. When the pair are reunited when the old school tie has long been discarded, however, the scars still linger for both of them.    Sophie Swithinbank’s blistering two-hander explores the roots of psychosexual pain in a macho world by way of a script shot through with street-smart exchanges that ricochet between the two boys in a way that recalls the two-fisted barbs of Barrie Keeffe, who explored classroom politics in works such as his 1977 TV play, Gotcha. Things have moved on considerably since then, however, and with no grown-ups on stage in Matthew Iliffe’s production for HFH Productions, things take an infinitely turn. Corey Montague-Sholay as Mark and William Robinson as Darr

Summerhall Three stars When Adam Lenson was diagnosed with cancer aged 34, his first world middle class existence was understandably turned upside down. Having upended the path he was on once already after dropping out of medical school to become a theatre director, Lenson found himself taking stock of both his past and potential selves if he had only jumped another way. As Lenson’s life flashes before his eyes by way of a series of TV monitors rewinding the days, the end result in Hannah Moss’s production is a playful offloading of assorted what-ifs amidst the sliding doors of one’s own mortality. Using a microphone and loop pedals to create a kind of karaoke lecture, Lenson channels his experience into a focussed meditation made even more life affirming by the fact that he is even here at all.   In a show developed at Camden People's Theatre, geeks might also pick up on the lesser spotted connection between children’s comedy gangster musical, Bugsy Malone, and Daft Punk (simples,

Festival Theatre Five stars   Love and money are everything in Australian maverick Barrie Kosky’s audacious new look at Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s ‘play with songs’, drawn from Elisabeth Hauptmann’s translation of John Gay’s eighteenth century romp, The Beggar’s Opera. Almost a hundred years on from its 1928 premiere, Kosky’s Berliner Ensemble production breathes new life into the show, as he does away with Weimar style trappings and drapes it in an infinitely more modern looking if still decadent gloss. Set in a poverty strapped world where appearances matter, Kosky opens proceedings in front of a full length silver curtain, where local gang boss Peachum holds court before Macheath and Peachum’s daughter Polly make their entrance. The revolt into style that follows resembles a 1980s Soho-set pop video dreamt up by an unholy alliance of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Julian Temple. Gabriel Schneider’s Macheath, aka Mack the Knife, is a big suited city boy spiv forever on the make or

Unlike the 1960s, if you can remember the 1980s, you were almost certainly in the thick of some protest or other. Breach Theatre’s Ellice Stevens and Billy Barrett’s new verbatim musical looks back in showtunes at the implementation by the UK government in 1988 of Section 28, a hysteria-led legislation which prohibited the so-called ‘promotion of homosexuality’ by local authorities.   By making a song and dance of things using four performers, two musicians playing a brand new synth-led score played live by Frew and Ellie Showering, Barratt’s production excavates an important piece of social history before celebrating those who protested against it prior to its eventual repeal in 2003 (2000 in Scotland).     The result, as Stevens, Tika Mu ‘tamir, EM Williams and Zachary Willis lead us on a whistlestop tour of invading TV studios, abseiling into the House of Lords, and the irresistible rise of marching for gay and lesbian rights, is a piece of old-school pub theatre agit-prop, but with

Church Hill Theatre Edinburgh International Festival Five Stars The wind blows hot and cold in the assorted worlds brought to life in this ingenious 75-minute comic meditation on the climate crisis, presented in a collaboration between award winning Belgian mime and puppetry companies, Focus and   Chaliwaté . As white clad human figures pop up aloft a similarly pristine terrain, they don’t so much inhabit as become the picture postcard landscape, with miniature houses and forests embedded in upturned boots that become mountains seen from a distance.   A TV crew drive through hazardous conditions in an epic display of car seat choreography set to a Paul Simon soundtrack, only to fall prey to the elements twice over. A beautifully realised puppet polar bear and its cub come blinking into the light, only for the icebergs they are settled on to split. Meanwhile, in a more domestic interior, the walls may not quite be sweating, but when the furniture starts to melt and a hurricane makes Sun