Coffee-Table Notes

It's half-past three on a Sunday afternoon outside the Olympia Theatre in Dublin's Dame Street, and a scrum of bodies is masquerading as an orderly queue. Despite all appearances to the contrary, the rammy isn't a result of some reality TV teen sensation about to appear in concert on the Olympia stage. It is instead down to the Galway-based Druid theatre company's brand new productions of two very different plays by veteran Irish playwright and another kind of legend, Tom Murphy. Druid's revival of Bailegangaire, which they first presented in 1985, was a mighty enough proposition by itself for this year's Dublin Theatre Festival, which ended this weekend. A tale of a senile old woman telling a story she refuses to finish as her two-grand-daughters navigate their lives around her has become a modern classic. Paired with a new play, Brigit, a prequel of sorts featuring the characters from Bailegangaire thirty years earlier was an even more tantalising prospect.

There's something of a homecoming feel to Tony Cownie's appointment as associate director of Cumbernauld Theatre while artistic director Ed Robson goes on sabbatical for a year sourcing theatre abroad. It was in the former farm cottages situated in the local park, after all, where the director and actor made his professional debut in the late Tom McGrath's play, The Flitting. That was back in 1990, since when Cownie has carved out a successful career as a comic actor with edge, with roles varying from the Porter in Macbeth to an award-winning turn as the troubled Kenny in Mark Thomson's play, A Madman Sings To The Moon. In the mid 1990s, Cownie moved into directing with Liz Lochhead's play, Shanghaied, which was later presented with a second act as Britannia Rules. This led to a fruitful relationship with the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, where he was encouraged by the late Kenny Ireland, and latterly under Thomson, Ireland's successor as artistic directo

Institut Francais, Edinburgh / E.D.S. Gallery, Edinburgh, both until November 1st. Three stars French fancies abound in this group show of work from nine artists – five French, four from Scotland - mixed and matched across two galleries that bridge the gaps between Edinburgh's New Town and the city's West End. This is made explicit in Samantha Boyes' florid constructions, which at first glance look like afternoon tea is being served until you notice the assorted stuffed bird's heads and other wild-life nesting within. This sets an anthropological tone that sees much monkeying around throughout. Where Jacob Kerray's chimps in military drag come on like dressing-up box tinpot dictators, Dix10's pistol-packing infant taking aim at a kids entertainer's dog-shaped balloons in fatal repose gives similarly subversive edge to such  otherwise cutie-pie subjects. Elsewhere, few do this better than Rachel Maclean, whose explorations of national identity by way of da

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars  From beneath a pile of cardboard surrounding a park bench, a middle-aged man comes crawling from the wreckage he calls home. A casualty of the rise and fall of the Linwood dream, when the manufacture of the Hillman Imp put the small Renfewshire town  on the map before the plug was pulled as bigger, shinier cars dazzled the paying public even more, the Man sees in the new millennium with a dram and tells his story. It's a sorry and sadly familiar tale he tells, of how he started on the production line straight from school as a wet-behind-the-ears youth, met his wife and built a life on the back of it, only to be unceremoniously thrown onto the scrap heap as capitalism failed and the dream faded. But it gets worse, as he loses his life-long love and hits the bottle, only to appear at least, to have survived, seriously bruised, but unbowed. At first glance, Paul Coulter's monologue, performed with steely commitment by Vincent Friell in a prod

Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh Three stars If you go down to the woods any night this week, you're in for a big-ish surprise with this new show from Vision Mechanics, which promenades its way after dark en route to some ecologically inclined Shangei-la. With the audience gathered in groups of twenty or so, the show's director and creator Kim Bergsagel and her trusty sidekick lead the throng to an Occupy style camp-site where they introduce us to the wisdom of an enlightened fellow traveller before we're encouraged to eavesdrop on the conversations going on inside the tents. Depending on where you're coming from, these sound either like heated debate or out and out bickering in what looks and sounds like a pastiche of grass-roots activism. With a police bust imminent, we're led down assorted paths, where a film by Robbie Thomson uses shadow puppetry and Ewan Macintyre's eastern-tinged backwoods soundtrack to tell the story of the show's inspiration, Amrit

When Paul Bright's Confessions of A Justified Sinner was first presented by Untitled Projects and the National Theatre of Scotland in 2013, the performance and accompanying exhibition were far from straightforward interpretations of James Hogg's novel, which was presented as a possibly unreliable memoir on the alleged crimes of its narrator, Robert Wringham. Rather, in the hands of director Stewart Laing, playwright Pamela Carter and a network of visual artists and researchers from the 85A collective, Paul Bright's Confessions found actor George Anton relate memories of a legendary stage version of Hogg's book presented in the late 1980s by the maverick figure of radical theatre director  Bright. Anton's monologue was accompanied by scrappy film footage of incidents and rehearsals surrounding Bright's production alongside interviews with Bright's fellow travellers. What emerged from the play alongside the exhibition's meticulously observed archive was a

Tramway, Glasgow Four stars The lights are down on the entire auditorium from the start  of Vanishing Point's magical-realist meditation on how age withers us. With only a triangle of light cast between two grey door-frames, it could be a wake. The vague figures handing out what at first appears to be a production line of new-borns suggest something else again culled from the darkest of science-fiction graphic novels. When a young man on the way to the hospital where his wife has just given birth bumps into an old man in the park, a seemingly chance meeting lurches into a troubling dreamscape that sees the young man become a mere memory of the elder. As a possible escapee from an old people's home, he is by turns pettted and patronised by staff too wrapped up in their own lives to do anything other than care by rote. Devised by director Matthew Lenton with dramaturg Pamela Carter and a cast of eight, Tomorrow is as far away from the spate of plays about ageing that have sprung

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When the once idealistic Renee is asked where her joie de vivre has gone in John Byrne's 1960s update of Chekhov's turn of the century play, it's as heart-breaking an observation as the youngest of the flame-haired Penhalligan brood's own gradual withering in the 1ifeless limbo of navy-occupied Dunoon. Renee's eldest sibling Olive has long settled for a hum-drum existence, while Maddy's studied boredom as she sleepwalks through a loveless marriage is a sharp contrast to Renee's youthful vivacity. When the sisters extended family and the similarly exiled navy officers pass each other to a soundtrack of fractured piano chords at the start of Andy Arnold's production, it is as if they are very politely waiting for death while far-off London swings. Hope comes in the shape of a portable record player bought by the family's ageing Doctor for Renee's twentieth birthday along with some already outmoded trad-jazz records.

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars There are moments in David Greig's 2002 play when it looks like it might become a treatise on how a ruling elite can co-opt an entire community for their cause. It is true that the two Cambridge naturalists investigating the bird-life on a remote Scottish island prior to the outbreak of World War Two are agents of the state on unwitting reconnaissance. Once the island's dour custodian Kirk is out of the way, however, the nature-watch conducted by the mercurial Robert and his wet-behind-the-ears sidekick John takes on an altogether more liberating tone. This is particularly the case where Kirk's niece Ellen is concerned. By the second half, the trio are en route to creating a pagan Eden for themselves a million miles from buttoned-up mainland conventions. It is here where things really begin to fly in Richard Baron's up close and personal touring revival for the Borders-based Firebrand company in partnership with Heart of Hawick. On

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars When poet and World War One army officer Siegried Sassoon declares in Nicholas Wright's play taken from Pat Barker's 1991 novel that in a hundred years time he and his peers will still be “ploughing skulls,” recent events make his words sound like prophecy. By the time he says this, Tim Dellap's Sassoon has already made his public declaration condemning the political powers who he sees as prolonging the war for their own ends, a statement which sees him packed off to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where he meets Garmon Rhys' literary groupie Wilfred Owen. Elsewhere, fellow patient Billy Prior, played by Jack Monaghan as an angry young man before his time, is coming to terms with Edinburgh as a place that is “all old ladies and woollen jumpers,” while faced with the innate snobbery of an institution unused to working class officers. Both Prior and Sassoon have nightmares, manifested here in shock visions

Adura Onashile didn't know much about science when she read Rebecca Skloot's book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Despite this, something in this little known story of the black working class woman whose stem cells were taken without her permission in 1951 struck a chord with the actress who first came to prominence when she appeared in Cora Bissett and Stef Smith's multiple award winning sex-trafficking drama, Roadkill. The result was HeLa, Onashile's first solo work, developed with director Graham Eatough. First seen as part of Edinburgh Science Festival in 2013, Iron-Oxide Ltd's production went on to an equally successful Edinburgh Festival Fringe run as part of the Made in Scotland programme. Since then, the show has toured to India, Trinidad, Brazil, Jamaica and South Africa, with several dates in New Zealand forthcoming. Onashile has also managed to slot in some performances closer to home, and this weekend plays two nights at the Traverse Theatre in Ed

Queens Hall, Edinburgh Five stars Sophie Ellis-Bextor has come a long way since her first Edinburgh appearance fronting short-lived indie band TheAudience at La Belle Angele in 1998. While the intervening years have seen her epitomise T4-friendly disco diva electro-pop, this year's Wanderlust album has found her pretty much coming full circle in an eclectic collaboration with Mercury nominated singer/song-writer Ed Harcourt. Harcourt is at the keyboards as part of the black-clad sextet that accompany Ellis-Bextor on the current leg of the tour to support the album, as they were earlier in the year at Oran Mor in Glasgow. In what is effectively a two-act show, the stage is bathed in red as Ellis-Bextor enters in matching mini-dress to open with the eastern-tinged movie theme melodrama of Birth of An Empire before moving through a conceptual pot-pourri of off-kilter ballads, woozy Cold War waltzes and epic chorales. Some charming between-song banter covers tour bus Conga injuries and

Things change when you get older. Just look at Tomorrow, the latest theatrical meditation from Vanishing Point, which plays its only Scottish dates at Tramway from this weekend following its premiere in Brighton and follow-up dates in Brazil. In the company's Glasgow rehearsal room, a largely youngish cast from Scotland, England, Russia and Brazil convene under director Matthew Lenton's guidance to go through a scene in what, despite only makeshift scenery, conjures up the slightly derelict feel of an old people's home. As the cast assemble, their natural ebullience seems to slow as they ease into character. When they cover their faces with tight-fitting latex rubber masks, the transformation is complete. Only when one or other of them breaks into their natural stride do things jar. Otherwise, it's as if time itself has caught up with them in an instant. “I was interested in doing something about care,” says Lenton. “I had this image of having a cast in their eighties o

Cumbernauld Theatre Four stars A sulky teenager dressed in black sprawls aloft the raised platform of his bunk-bed, going through his photo album on his ipad, which projects enlargements onto a big screen on the other side of the room. Everyone's in there; his mum, his best mates, one of his kind-of girlfriend's selfies. Most significantly are the portraits of the boy's dad, who died the week before, and his uncle, who his mum just married. As the boy lays bare his plans to stab his uncle in revenge for the killing of his dad, it becomes clear that he is a contemporary version of Hamlet, and that the pictures projected in his room are of his mum Gertrude, his best pal Horatio and his squeeze Ophelia. Then there's his uncle, Claudius, who he calls Uncle C. This is a neat trick in Iain Heggie's fresh look at the bard, performed with youthful confidence by Sean Purden Brown in Heggie's own production for Subway Theatre Company in association with Sico Productions.

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars When a middle-aged man walks onstage in his underwear, puts on a pair of bright scarlet shoes and declares himself the reincarnation of Judy Garland, evidence may suggest otherwise, but it's a provocative opening nevertheless to Lee Mattinson's solo outing about one man's belated coming to terms with who he is. The man in his underwear is Francis, a spoon-playing romantic in search of true love as he moves through the back-street club scene that becomes his own yellow brick road en route to salvation fronting a local community choir. Just as Francis finds a sense of belonging, alas, a one-night encounter with a building-site worker he obsesses over before being hit with a restraining order leaves him diagnosed with Aids. Such a life and death litany is related in florid terms in Mattinson's script, which references the mundane everyday minutiae of Francis' existence in a way which resembles an Alan Bennett monologue. Jennifer

Dundee Rep Four stars When a Morningside-accented Judas gives a two-part definition of the word 'politics' in Matthew Hurt's ecclesiastical solo vehicle for Simon Callow, the applause provoked by its second half suggests more than a hint of recognition in its description  of politicians as annoying insects in need of swatting. When Judas, seated at the centre of an otherwise empty row of chairs awaiting the Last Supper, goes on to describe the faithful rump of his former messiah's followers as “masochists with a fetish for disappointment,” the silence that follows is equally telling. By this time Callow has already introduced us to many of the people who shaped Jesus or where shaped by him in a version of the gospel seen from a dozen points of view. Using a variety of largely northern accents beside a pile of chairs, we first of all meet Jesus' mother, Mary, and his brother, James. In Callow's hands these become plain-talking Yorkshire folk, the apostles are ha

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars It is the ghosts who are left standing at the end of Dominic Hill's brooding new production of Shakespeare's tragedy, which puts a bespectacled Brian Ferguson centre-stage as the Danish Prince in angry search for closure following his father's murder. With the back of the battleship grey stage lined with reel to reel tape recorders in what appears to be an abandoned and possibly haunted house where the party never stops, Hamlet and his pals attempt to capture the voice of his father's spirit by way of a BBC Radiophonic Workshop style soundtrack worthy of 1970s horror thriller, The Legend of Hell House. Leading the charge in all this is Ferguson, who plays Hamlet as a dour-faced pistol-packing wind-up merchant trying out different versions of himself. One minute he has an old-school cassette deck slung across his shoulder, interviewing Peter Guinness' Claudius and Roberta Taylor's Gertrude like an on-the-spot reporter, the nex

An Tober, Tobermory, Isle of Mull Until September 27th Four stars The Scotch mist that wafts around Duart Castle at the opening of Rachel Maclean's new film speaks volumes about where she's coming from in what looks like a major leap towards something even more ambitious than her previous work in this major commission for the Mull-based Comar organisation. Films such as LolCats and Over The Rainbow became pop cultural cut-ups featuring green-screen footage resembling Lady Gaga and Katy Perry video stylings in which Maclean played a multitude of day-glo Cos-playing creatures lip-synching dialogue sampled and rearranged from a similarly eclectic array of film and TV sources to create her own fantastical narratives. Following her three-screen epic dissection of broken Britain in the Oliver-sampling Happy and Glorious, however, The Weepers sees Maclean put flesh and blood on her dressing-up box multi-tracking as she directs real live actors in a bricks-and-mortar setting. Not that

When Brett Bailey's Third World Bunfight company presented Exhibit B as part of the 2014 Edinburgh International Festival, the show's twenty-first century reimagining of colonial era human zoos, when black Africans were shown in front of their white thrill-seeking masters as novelty artefacts to gaze on, garnered a slew of five-star reviews. As someone who gave Exhibit B a five star review in this magazine, I was aware before I saw the show's series of tableau vivant of the accusations of racism that had been levelled against Bailey, a white South African artist. These accusations came from protesters in various countries where Exhibit B had been seen, as well as in Britain, where it was set to transfer from Edinburgh to the Barbican's Vaults space in London this week. Today's announcement by the Barbican that their week-long showing of Exhibit B has been cancelled following protests on the first night that saw the road outside the venue blocked comes following an o

John Byrne hates exposition. In his own writing in now classic works   such as The Slab Boys and Tutti Frutti, his characters talk in baroque   flourishes of pop cultural patois that ricochet between them. In his   new version of Chekhov play, Three Sisters, however, which opens next   week at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow before embarking on a national   tour, tackling such rich but exposition-laden source material hasn't   been easy. “I love Chekhov,” Byrne says over a Cappuccino in Edinburgh's Filmhouse   cafe, “but you can only capture about a third of it, because it's   Russian. I thought The Seagull particularly was all exposition, all   that 'I dress in black because of my father's death' sort of thing,   which we're so unused to, characters describing themselves and saying   what's happening to them. So I wouldn't normally like that, but all   life is in Chekhov's plays. “I chose an old literal translation of Three Sisters by some woman I  

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Wannabe gangsters take note. It's unlikely that anyone will ever be able to take you seriously again after DC Jackson's scurrilous comedy set in the mankiest of Ayrshire pig-farms. Here, would-be good fellas Dominic and Skootch are holed up with tabloid hack Bruce as the mother of all shoot-outs accidentally ensues. When smooth-talking MacPherson turns up, his patter is just a curtain-raiser to what happens when emigre Ulster Loyalist Johnny Glendenning finally shows face. If this sounds like standard sub-Hollywood tough guy fare, Jackson's play is delivered with such potty-mouthed filter-free glee as it piles up the bodycount that it becomes both shocking and hilarious. While it is a study too of West Coast of Scotland machismo and the perceived glamour of being part of a gang, Jackson’s dialogue is peppered throughout with the geekiest of pop cultural detritus. Computer games, mobile phone apps, the restorative powers of Aswad, B

Mull Theatre Three stars On the vague off-chance that anyone has woken up in Utopia this morning, it might be worth visiting the fictional town in Chris Lee's new play for Mull Theatre to find out the extent to which such Shangri-las can be spoilt. Loosely based on Andorra, by German writer and contemporary of Bertolt Brecht, Max Frisch, Lee gives this epic yarn a contemporary spin that goes way beyond his source's analogies to his own era's cultural prejudices to capture something utterly current. Ushered in with the sort of triumphalist fervour  that would make a VisitScotland ad look understated, Alasdair McCrone's production sets Lee's play in a walled city which, while looking like an ancient Greek ruin, also oddly resembles McCaig's Tower in Oban. Here a former war journalist drowns his sorrows while his adopted daughter Anissah, seemingly an interloper from a land regarded with suspicion, works the local bar. Forever close to her brother Johan, played by

SSE Hydro, Glasgow Four stars Given that it was the over 60s demographic that swung the victory for the No camp in this week's Scottish independence referendum, it's something of a surprise that Scotland's most curmudgeonly OAP double act, Jack and Victor, didn't lay their cards on the table last night in the first of their twenty-one night stadium-sized stage version of Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill's scurilous TV sit-com. In the end politics didn't matter  much in a show that started off simply enough as a series of routines were played out across Navid's open all hours corner shop and the legendary Clansman bar where Gavin Mitchell's bar-man Boabby held court to Winston, Tam, Isa and Navid. Once we're ushered into Jack and Victor's front room, however, things take a turn for the meta, as Kiernan and Hemphill take full advantage of the live arena for a series of self-referential gags that resemble something Pirandello might hav

The Arches, Glasgow Three stars “By taking away my choice,” Marcus Roche soft-soaps his audience at one point, “you've given me my freedom.” Such sentiments may sound like they've been crafted by the snake-oil salesman this writer, director, performer and self-starting multi-tasker extraordinaire resembles. Given that Roche was actually preparing to flog off his vote for today's Scottish independence referendum as he toadied up to us with such gloriously contrary platitudes, however, he's pretty much on the money whatever the result. Of course, as with the real-life ebay shyster who attempted to sell his vote online, no back-handers were actually pocketed in Roche's one-night only extrapolation of just how much money talks when politics is involved.  Darting from laptop to lectern beneath two opposing flags of convenience in his contribution to the Arches' Early Days Referendum Festival, Roche does his bit for internationalism by way of soundbites from French a

Tramway, Glasgow, Sept 26th-28th When the Arika organisation took a side-step from curating experimental music festivals in a now booming scene they laid the groundwork for with their Instal and Kill Your Timid Notion events, the more holistically inclined series of themed Episodes they embarked on seemed to chime with a renewed hunger for ideas and seditious thought. While Episodes still featured performances and screenings, they were consciously not made the centrepiece of events that involved discussions and debates which questioned the relationship between artist and audience, and indeed the structures of such events themselves. In Episodes 4 and 5, Arika concentrated on the musical and political liberation expressed by the black community through jazz, and a similar state of transcendence found for the Queer and Trans community through the House Ballroom scene. Episode 6 in part fuses both experiences in Make A Way Out of No Way, which over three days looks beyond the nuclear fami

Summerhall, Edinburgh until September 26th Three stars They could be pages torn from an art-zine, an architect's portfolio or a sketch-pad given to pre-schools on a rainy day, such is the playful but matter-of-fact show-and-don't-tellness of French avant-savant Claude Closky's new series of pen-and-ink miniatures. Spread across four rooms in ascending or descending numerical order depending on which way you go at it, a series of black ball-point pen lines mark out assorted patterns on white paper sheets that fade into the background of barely-there clip-frames or matching white wooden ones that form a kind of camouflage in which even the bare floorboards seem to be in on the act. The lines themselves sit side-by-side by Closky, or form squares, curves and triangles that could have been inked on using an old-school Spirograph set or else Etch-a-Sketched into being to make up end-of term games of Noughts and Crosses, Battleships and Hang the Man.  The percentages themselves,