Coffee-Table Notes

King's Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars The wheels of post-war industry were briefly halted on Monday during the opening Edinburgh date of Graham Linehan's new take on William Robinson and Alexander Mackendrick's classic 1954 Ealing comedy. When designer Michael Taylor's elaborate set got stuck on the revolve as Shaun Williamson's crazed Romanian gangster was supposed to be clambering out of the upstairs window of old Mrs Wilberforce's topsy-turvy house, it not only added an accidental comic frisson. It also inadvertently symbolised how an entire country was attempting to push its way towards a new society, but was collectively unable to budge. This is perfect for a play chock-full of little Englander archetypes attempting a King's Cross bank heist planned from the seeming sanctity of Mrs Wilberforce's upstairs room. A cross-dressing major, a pill-popping spiv, a psychopathic immigrant and a lunk-headed ex-boxer are brought together by Professor Marcus

“Darkness is important,” says theatre designer Kai Fischer as he clicks through a series of images on his laptop for Entartet, his performed installation which arrives at Edinburgh's off-piste Old Ambulance Depot art-space this week. Entartet is the German word for degenerate, and Fischer's stand-alone visual and audio work draws its inspiration from Nazi Germany's notorious Degenerate Art Exhibition that took place in Munich from July to November 1937. Arising from Adolf Hitler's furious stance against what he perceived to be the threat of abstract and modernist art, Die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst was the brain-child of Hitler's right-hand man Joseph Goebbels and favourite painter Adolf Ziegler. The pair confiscated some 650 artworks from German museums for an event designed to run parallel with what was considered to be the far purer Great German Art Exhibition. The Degenerate Art Exhibition featured works by Chagall, Kandinsky and Klee, as well as pieces by

It's been a long road from Beryl Battersby to Miss Havisham for Paula Wilcox. Yet, as the Manchester-born actress arrives in Aberdeen this week to play the latter in Jo Clifford's stage adaptation of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, both characters seem to be bookends of a sort on a career which has seen Wilcox move from 1970s TV sit-com star and household name to classical stage actress with ease. Not that the still youthful-looking sixty-two year old's career is over yet. Far from it, in fact, if recent stage turns in everything from a musical role in La Cage Aux Folles and playing an ageing rock chick in Stella Feehily's play, Dreams of Violence, for Max Stafford Clark's Out of Joint Company, to a new play by Jonathan Harvey at Liverpool Playhouse, are anything to go by. It's just that, there's something about the hopelessly romantic Beryl in Jack Rosenthal's still fresh sit-com, The Lovers, in which Wilcox led Richard Beckinsale's Ge

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars ` When a group of teenage asylum seekers and their pals took on a system that sanctioned dawn raids that resulted in incarceration and deportation, they not only shamed the politicians who allowed such atrocities to happen. They also united a working class community and changed lives forever. The fact that this true story reimagined here as a large-scale musical happened less than a decade ago on the streets of Glasgow is an even more disgraceful pointer to how human rights are casually breached on our own doorstep. Cora Bissett’s production for the Citizens, National Theatre of Scotland and a host of other partners may sucker-punch the audience with a knowingly schmaltzy if slightly too self-referential feel-good opening. The emotional impact of the show, however, as conceived by director Cora Bissett with writer David Greig and composers Soom T, Patricia Panther and the Kielty Brothers under the musical direction of Hilary Brooks, is

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 5 stars It's been five years since Morna Pearson's last main-stage play, but this new work more than confirms the promise of one of the freshest, most fearless and taboo-bustingly unique voices to be heard anywhere right now. In its depiction of how behind closed doors inter-familial dysfunctions can squeeze the life out of relationships beyond, Pearson's wild and dangerous demotic also manages to be both scabrously funny and damningly bleak. Geoffrey is a thirty-something art teacher who lives with his mother Edie, and is bullied by the kids at school. When he reads that he's in the top ten sexiest professions, Geoffrey takes a notion to start dating after advice from Lynn Kennedy's former pupil turned supermarket check-out girl, Evelyn. After a couple of false starts, Geoffrey meets Clara, who, as played by Molly Innes, awakens something in him on the dance-floor long suppressed. Geoffrey even takes Clara home to meet Edi

Rufus Hound takes his work seriously. Given that the formerly  flamboyantly-moustached comedian best-known until recently as a panellist on Keith Lemon's abrasively smutty ITV2 game-show, Celebrity Juice, has just taken over the exhausting lead role in One Man, Two Guvnors, such dedication to his craft is probably a good thing. Richard Bean's 1960s-set adaptation of Goldoni's eighteenth century comic romp, The Servant of Two Masters, after all, all but reinvented a tireless James Corden when he originated the role of underworld stooge Francis Henshall in National Theatre artistic director Nicholas Hytner's production. With Welsh actor Owain Griffiths having stepped into Corden's sizeable shoes on the West End, Hound's appearance in the touring version of One Man, Two Guvnors, which arrives in Glasgow next week, might potentially open up similar doors for Hound. Especially now he's quit Celebrity Juice to appear in another stage play, Utopia, a

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars There’s something naively life-affirming about Colin Higgins’ love story between well-heeled nihilistic teenager Harold and seventy-nine year old free-spirit, Maude. Higgins’ own stage version of the 1971 cult film he scripted for director Hal Ashby was a commercial flop on Broadway, and it’s not difficult to see why from Theatre Jezebel’s Glasgay! revival. It’s not that it’s bad. It’s just that a black comedy based around a kid who fakes multiple suicides inbetween hanging around funerals makes more sense now than it probably did during that awkward period in American social history when the summer of love had given way to something darker and more cynical. While Kenny Miller’s vivid, scarlet-coloured production taps into the play’s period oddity, it also shines a beacon on how disaffected youth can be woken up to life by their elders in a way that might easily be applied to today. Miller allows his cast to breeze through what becomes an

In the west end of London, a huge old higgledy-piggledy house appears  to have burst through its walls and been tilted to one side by its foundations resting somewhat creakily on a post-war bomb-site. As an image of a dusty old England that looks fit to collapse, it couldn't be more perfect for Graham Linehan's new stage version of classic Ealing comedy, the Ladykillers, which tours to Edinburgh this week prior to dates in Aberdeen and Glasgow. Judging by its spring dates, this darkly comic yarn about a gang of villains who move into rooms in an eccentric old lady's dilapidated house close to the railway station in order to plan a security van heist has more than survived the translation. Much of this is down to Linehan's collaboration with director Sean Foley. Both, as Foley somewhat appropriately puts it, “have previous.” Linehan, of course, is the Dublin-born co-creator and co-writer with Arthur Matthews of seminal clerical comedy, Father Ted. Since t

“It's like a children's story,” says Morna Pearson as she makes her way up the steep metal stairs of the Traverse Theatre's Leith-based rehearsal room after observing through a window as a group of actors throw themselves into a dance routine, “but with dirty bits.” Pearson is talking about her new play, The Artist Man and the Mother Woman, which opens at the Traverse next week, and it's the most direct she's likely to be on the subject. Such reticence is peculiarly at odds with Pearson's dramatic voice if her 2006 debut play, Distracted, is anything to go by. Set in a Morayshire caravan park occupied by dysfunctional transients, Distracted served up a wild and vivid form of Doric-accented surrealism which suggested great things for Pearson. Distracted went on to win the prestigious Meyer-Whitworth new playwriting award in 2007, which saw Pearson following in the footsteps of David Harrower, Henry Adam and Conor McPherson. Given such acclaim and the subsequent a

Dundee Rep 4 stars Paul Godfrey’s stage adaptation of Compton Mackenzie’s famously filmed novel is as clever as Michael Frayn’s backstage farce, Noises Off. Framed as a 1950s BBC radio play, such a conceit not only allows for subtle hints of backstage shenanigans among its cast of three who appear alongside a tireless sound effects man. Sharing the original story’s multiple roles among the trio also makes for canny economic sense. Godfrey’s version was last seen at the old Mull Little Theatre. Irene MacDougall’s new production, which tours community centres in the area this week, does much to capture the show’s essence, both in its stylistic dexterity and its deceptively subversive intent. For those who don’t know it, Mackenzie’s World War Two-set yarn is set on two neighbouring islands whose whisky rationing is overcome via a fortuitous shipwreck’s offloaded cargo. As played here, an entire community is personified with a swiftly changed facial expression or accent

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars The snow is falling throughout most of director Matthew Lenton's refreshing new look at Shakespeare's darkest of rom-coms. While this takes literally the bard's own scripted notions of how the seasons are out of whack, it opens with a sorry-looking Bottom tending to a terminally ill wife, his only distraction a TV talent show that might just help him and his fellow wannabes live the dream. Given his wife's blessing to chase his muse following a mercy call from Peter Quince, Bottom does exactly that, led on his way by a gaggle of blonde-wigged fairies who resemble peroxided Harpo Marxes. This is accentuated even more when the mechanicals are conjured into similar apparel by Cath Whitefield's wide-eyed Puck, who sprinkles her star-dust with abandon. The quartet of confused lovers, meanwhile, are too wrapped-up in themselves and their colour-coded space-age winter warmers to connect, and Flavia Gusmao's lusty

HMV Picture House, Edinburgh 4 stars Sparks may have come late to the concept album party with their 2009 album, The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman, but theatricality has always been essential to Ron and Russell Mael's oeuvre, from composer and keyboardist Ron's deadpan demeanour to Russell's sprite-like enthusiasm onwards. This is more apparent than ever throughout the first of UK date of the siblings Two Hands, One Mouth tour. As the name suggests, the duo leave themselves unadorned either by band-mates or onstage scenery, occupying a simply-lit black box space instead. The pair have even penned a lasciviously-inclined theme song, which plays as looped pre-show music sounding like a choir of Oompa Loompas. Ron Mael enters alone to tinkle out a teasing overture of snatches from Sparks' greatest hits before his brother finally comes on sporting a tweedy outfit suggesting a silent movie director turned gamekeeper. The piano-based sprawl across selected highlig

In the corner of the Citizens Theatre rehearsal room, seven young women are gathered round a piano, at which is sat musical director Hilary Brooks, who leads the ensemble through their scales. In their dressed-down tracksuit bottoms and voice-protecting scarves, the women might well be attending some common or garden open-call audition for some big west end musical in search of fresh blood. Such a notion seems to be confirmed a few minutes later when they’re put through their paces on a metal building-site set in a cheesily choreographed routine involving umbrellas that help punctuate a song infused with unabashed peppiness. Such a bright mood has been salvaged after a piercing electronic shriek shattered the scales into discordant submission. Such an incident gives a hint that what’s being knocked into shape is no ordinary musical, as well as highlighting the tensions between old-school jazz hands routines and more modern fare. Such creative tensions are at the heart o

Matthew Lenton has never directed Shakespeare before. At first glance, Lenton's visually rich magical-realist imaginings with his Glasgow-based, internationally acclaimed Vanishing Point company don't really fit with the bard's poetically dense flights of fancy. Peel back the layers, however, and the two worlds that collide in his new production of one of Shakespeare's most revisited rom-coms may have more in common with Lenton's world than you might think. “ It's the Shakespeare play which as a kid I always found the most accessible,” Lenton says of the Dream. “I've always been interested in the magic and the darkness and the beauty of it, and it's nice to be able to spend time in such a different place. I've always had a difficult relationship with Shakespeare. It was certainly not something I loved as a kid, and not something I found easy. It's still not something I find easy to watch on a stage, and not something I find easy