Coffee-Table Notes

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh November 7th-February 15th When Stan Douglas' play, Helen Lawrence, played as part of this year's Edinburgh International Festival, its live depiction of a post World War Two film noir beamed against a a 3D photographic backdrop looked at the class and racial divides of Vancouver's run-down Hogan's Alley district, later cleaned up then razed in the name of urban renewal. Hogan's Alley's 3D remains can be seen in Douglas' remarkable large-scale image that forms part of his new show at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery. Also on show will be Video, which recasts Orson Welles' film of Kafka's The Trial with a Senegalese woman in the Parisian suburb of La Courneuve, where some of the worst violence of 2005's Paris riots took place. “Sarkozy was still Minister of the Interior when we shot the piece,” says Douglas, “and his office tried to shut our production down, even though we had made deals with the local mayor and l

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars A lone tabla player ushers in Giles Croft's formidable production of Matthew Spangler's adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel with a frantic overture that points up the turmoil of the story's Afghan origins. If the images of big city skyscrapers that loom behind offer up some kind of salvation, the opening speech by the play's narrator Amir is poetic enough to resemble a Tennessee Williams monologue. Worlds collide and cultures clash in far crueller ways over the next two and a half hours, from the moment Amir plays cowboys with his father's servant's son and best friend Hassan after watching John Wayne films in the Iranian cinema in mid-1970s Kabul. Separated by class and ethnicity, Amir and Hassan's fates are marked by a shocking childhood event that sees Hassan brutalised, while Amir's shameful acquiescence leaves him hard to sympathise with, let alone like. What follows, as the Russian invasio

When Untitled Projects' production of Slope opens this week at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow as part of this year's Glasgay! festival, both the writer and director of this sex and drug fuelled study of the love affair between nineteenth century poets, Verlaine and Rimbaud, will be absent from the auditorium. Instead, director Stewart Laing and playwright Pamela Carter will be watching a live online feed of a show first seen at Tramway in 2006 in a production which put the audience above the stage peering down into the poets' bathroom as if spying on some of the lovers' most intimate moments. Slope's new hi-tech approach will further the play's underlying theme of voyeurism. This originally developed, not out of the script, but from the starting point of Laing's design. “All those years ago,” Carter recalls, “Stewart had this design, and wanted to develop a piece of work using it. It struck me that having an audience peering down into a bathroom is as voyeu

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars There's a slick but laid-back rapport between the overall-clad four-piece band playing a punky overture at the top of this ménage a trois of lo-fi mini musicals from the nabokov company and Soho Theatre. They address the audience as they enter the theatre, setting a casual tone to what follows as they step into character and costume for each playlet. Proceedings open with Jonesy, Tom Wells' tale of a sports mad asthmatic boy who can't finish a netball match without a brush with death, but still finds music in his heart. Ella Hickson's A Love Song For The People of London finds two solitary travellers adrift in the big city catch each others eye with tragi-comic results, while My Thoughts On Leaving You is a quick-fire run through a relationship, as boy meets girl in a nightclub toilet before playing out their everyday urban melodrama in song. While the first piece is essentially a fleshed-out monologue, the following two are old-s

Salutation Hotel, Perth Four stars In the banqueting hall of the oldest hotel in Scotland, a very special event is about to take place. The party tunes are playing, and the stage is swathed in sparkly scarlet tinsel designed to match the oh-so OTT outfits of our glamorous auctioneers, Tina and Rachel. They are here to raise money, spirits and a smile for Tina's heroic cross-channel swim following a near brush with death after an asthma attack. Once the audience have been escorted to their tables with bidding cards and raffle tickets in hand, what follows in Robert Jack's production of Lesley Hart's new play at first looks like a kitsch and slightly camp dissection of the toe-curling spectacle which a well-meaning but misguided fund-raising event can easily end up as. The bad gags, rictus grins and awkwardly staged amateur hour routines are all grotesque enough in the hands of the double act of Sally Reid as Tina and Claire Knight as Rachel in something which initially resem

If the 90s were just the 60s turned upside-down, as some wag once suggested, then such a notion  confirmed what cultural commentator Michael Bracewell described in his book on the era as an age 'when surface was depth'. What this appeared to mean by the time Stephen Greenhorn's play, Passing Places, appeared in 1997, was a definition of a decade that had already spawned Brit Pop, Girl Power, New Laddism and Cool Britannia. Here, then, was a shallow pool of pop without politics, Barbie Doll feminism in a Union Jack mini dress and sexism with an apparently ironic twist. The Berlin Wall had come down in 1989, and, after a decade of class and civil war by way of the Miners Strike and the Poll Tax, Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had been forced to resign from office after an eleven year reign of terror. Tony Blair's landslide New Labour victory in 1997 suggested  that things could only get better, but suddenly, with no pricks to kick against, it

Royal Conservatoire Scotland, Glasgow Three stars As openings go, when the cast of Ali de Souza's production of Hector MacMillan's ribald Scots version of Moliere's seventeenth century comedy, La Malade Imaginaire, come burling through the New Athenaeum auditorium led by a bagpiper before launching into an onstage ceilidh, it's a pretty strong statement of intent. What follows is an accomplished and suitably larger than life study of how an old man called Argan can take near masochistic pleasure in his imaginary ailments. He is cured, not by quackery and a fondness for enemas, but by waking up to his own gullibility as he's taken in by his gold-digging wife Beline inbetween attempting to marry off his daughter Angelique into the medical classes. MacMillan's pithy and richly evocative dialogue is captured impeccably by a young cast of final year acting students from the RCS, led by Philip Laing's physically dextrous turn as Argan, who has some fine comic inte

It seemed like there weren't many books dealing with a contemporary immigrant's experience before Khaled Hosseini's debut novel, The Kite Runner, was published in 2003. It was this quality that first attracted playwright Matthew Spangler to adapt Hosseini's tale of two boyhood friends – Amir  and Hassan -  growing up in Afghanistan against a backdrop of war for the stage. With both men living in the same Californian neighbourhood, Hosseini and Spangler met up for coffee, with the end result being Spangler's adaptation of The Kite Runner, currently on a UK tour in a co-production by Nottingham Playhouse and Liverpool Playhouse, and which arrives in Edinburgh next week. “I first read the book in 2005,” says Spangler, “and a lot of it is set locally to me, in the area where the family in the novel move to. The first attraction to me was that it was a book about the immigrant's experience, but it's a book about many things. It's a love story, a father-son st

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Long before anyone invented the make-believe Glasgow miracle, Robert Colquhoun and Robert Macbryde were creating a set of artistic mythologies that set the tone for much that followed. Kilmarnock born and Glasgow School of Art trained, as painters and lovers the two Roberts blazed a drink-sodden trail through bohemian London that saw them hailed as boy wonders before being spoilt by bad behaviour and sidelined by the more voguish face of abstract expressionism. Few have identified the talents of Glasgow's original artistic double act more than John Byrne, whose original 1992 romp through their messy lives has here been condensed into a suitably wild two-man version in Andy Arnold's production for the Tron in association with the Glasgay! festival. The bare back-side of a sprawled-out Macbryde being painted by his partner-in-crime at the top of the show sets the tone for the tempestuous and emotionally naked roller-coaster ride that follows. As t

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars The dramatic and musical cacophony that dovetails the two acts of Graham Linehan's audacious adaptation of William Rose's classic Ealing comedy speaks volumes about the post World War Two little Britain occupied by the disparate gang of get-rich-quick villains at the play's heart. By posing as a string quartet, the charming Professor Marcus and his coterie of crooks made up of a cross-dressing major, a pill-popping teddy-boy, a muscle-headed sidekick and a European psychopath may appear respectable in the eyes of Marcus' new land-lady, Mrs Wilberforce. Yet, as with the revolving set that allows the audience in to Mrs Wilberforce's crumbling King's Cross pile in Richard Baron's slickly realised revival, it's easy to see beyond the polite facade towards something messier and more complex. While Mrs Wilberforce is spotting Nazi spies in the newsagent, the dog-eat-dog aspirations of Marcus and co points to a crueller fut

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars A shot in the dark and the shrill scream that begin J.B. Priestley's philosophical thriller don't tell the full story of something possessed with the airs and graces of a hokey drawing-room whodunnit, but which ends up as a tortured treatise on human nature's power to deceive. These attention-grabbing noises off are themselves a theatrical double bluff, as they open out onto a post dinner party scene where the ladies of the extended Caplan clan are making small talk. A cigarette box seems to carry more weight than anyone is letting on, and only when the gentlemen enter does revelation upon revelation pile up alongside the much missed figure of the late Martin Caplan. Martin was the social glue and a whole lot more besides of a publishing set steeped in the well turned out veneer of its own fiction. Sex, drugs, love and money are all in the mix, be it straight, gay, between husbands, wives and other part-time lovers. If only they'd mana

When the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow announced earlier this year that the centrepiece of the theatre's  seventieth anniversary Spring season in 2015 would be a new production of John Byrne's play, The Slab Boys, it confirmed excited whispers which had been circulating for some time. The Slab Boys, after all, has become a bona fide modern classic since it premiered at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in 1978. The fact that it will be directed by David Hayman, who had directed the original production of the play that redefined Scottish theatre thirty-six years ago gave the news an extra frisson. After blazing a trail as part of the legendary 1970s Citz ensemble, The Slab Boys will be Hayman's second return to his theatrical alma mater under its current artistic director Dominic Hill's tenure, following his barn-storming turn in the title role of Hill's production of King Lear. Today's exclusive announcement in the Herald confirms that the remainder of the Citz

Paisley Arts Centre Four stars When self-absorbed actor Miles turns up at an isolated farmhouse in search of a story, he gets more than he bargained for when he's taken in by Morgan and Angus who live there.  Both Second World War veterans, these life-long friends play out their lives in early 1970s Ontario, working the land as they keep old and uncomfortable memories at bay. Miles' arrival awakens something in a damaged Angus that can't be placated anymore by baking bread, counting stars and listening to Morgan's possibly unreliable tales of how they got to where they are. Inspired by real-life events that led to The Farm Show, a defining moment in Canadian theatre,  Michael Healey's 1999 play taps into a rich seam of dramatic and social history even as it pokes fun at the try-too-hard earnestness that springs from Miles and his big city ways. Out of this comes a tender meditation on how stories can enlighten even the most shattered minds. Alasdair McCrone's to

Dundee Rep Four stars Ever feel like you've been cheated? John Lydon's famous phrase springs to mind in Selma Dimitrijevic's production of her new version of Gogol's nineteenth century comedy, penned here with Mikhail Durnenkov. This isn't just because of the Sex Pistols t-shirt sported by one of the key players in the elaborate sting that follows from an unholy alliance between con-men. It is the way too that Dimitrijevic and her all-female ensemble play with artifice and gender in a way that itself is a stylistic gamble. Yet, as each character enters the locker-room to play macho games, it pays dividends even as the gang hustle their victim into suspending their own disbelief. Initially nothing is hidden in this co-production between Greyscale and Dundee Rep Ensemble in association with Northern Stage and Stellar Quines. Once the sextet of players have put on charity shop suits and waistcoats, they pick up instruments to become a junkyard dance-band before a playg

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Five women emerge from the blackness of Jamie Vartan's panoramic staging at the start of Lu Kemp's revival of Sue Glover's 1991 play, each dragging a wooden crate attached to a rope behind them. Resembling a quintet of Mother Courages, this is just one of many powerful images in Glover's brutal and unsentimental study of life across the seasons for six women working the land  in nineteenth century rural Scotland. Hired by the gentry and paid a pittance, youngsters Liza and Jenny line up alongside Sara and her teenage daughter Tottie. Maggie works alongside them inbetween tending to her bairns, while ex Bondager Ellen occasionally loosens her corset and comes down from the big house she married into. All have yearnings, be it for Canada or a local farm-hand, and when work turns to play, Tottie's tragedy is inevitable. After more than a decade without a production on home soil, one of the most striking things about Bondagers

Stills, Edinburgh until Sunday. Four stars While the welter of artistic contributions to the one hundred year anniversary of the First World War's opening salvo have been resolutely non-triumphalist, recent events in Palestine and what looks set to be Iraq Part Three suggest little has been learnt in the intervening century. As Remembrance Day looms, this is where this dense and at times overwhelming compendium of war in pieces curated by artist Owen Logan and Kirsten Lloyd of Stills comes in. A sequel of sorts to Logan and Lloyd's previous collaboration on the epic ECONOMY project, which looked at global capitalism in a similarly polemical fashion, the starting point of The King's Peace is selections from Masquerade: Michael Jackson Alive in Nigeria (2001-2005). Logan's satirical photo-essay sees him pick up the mantle – and the white mask – of the late pop icon and travels to Africa, where his mysterious collaborators the Maverick Ejiogbe Twins subsequently p

Little Theatre, Dundee Four stars A quartet of rarely-seen short plays by Tennessee Williams isn't the obvious choice for Dundee Rep Ensemble's fifth annual tour of the city's community venues. In director Irene Macdougall's hands, however, Williams' sad little studies of little lives in everyday crisis are revealed to be as rich in poetry and poignancy as his tempestuous full-length works. Opening with the compendium's title piece, the self-destructive urges of the play's damaged young couple played by Thomas Cotran and Millie Turner are captured in a series of desperate exchanges that sees them finally cling to each other for comfort. Like them, all of Williams' characters create elaborate fictions for themselves in order to survive the madness of the world beyond the bare floorboards and shabby rooms of Leila Kalbassi's set. Punctuated by a melancholy piano score, the plays contain a contemporary currency too that speaks variously about art, addic

Before Sue Glover wrote Bondagers, books on the subject of female farm workers in the nineteenth century seemed to be pretty thin on the ground. Once Glover's play charting six women's travails through the seasons became a hit in Ian Brown's original production for the Traverse Theatre in 1991, however, everything changed. The play's emotional landscape and lyrical largesse tapped into something that audiences lapped up, and Brown's production was revived for bigger theatres and toured to Canada. Suddenly there seemed to be a welter of literature on the subject, while the play itself was recently named as one of the twelve key Scottish plays written between 1970 and 2010. Twenty-three years on since its premiere, and more than a decade since it was last produced on home soil, Bondagers comes home to roost in Lu Kemp's new production at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. Even with such an extended absence, Glover remains close to the play. “It's difficult

Actor, choreographer, theatre-maker Born June 20 1973; died  October 15 2014 Damir Todorovic, who has died aged 41 following a short struggle with cancer, was an actor prepared to go places others feared to tread. This may not have been immediately obvious in a stream of film and TV roles in which the Serbian-born performer's shaved head and sharp East European features saw him frequently play the bad guy. With the Glasgow-based Vanishing Point theatre company in shows such as the award-winning Interiors, The Beggars Opera and Wonderland, however, he created parts that were quietly intense and which, by way of Vanishing Point's devising methods, were born from a place deep within him. It was made even clearer just how far Todorovic was prepared to go in As It Is, a show created by himself in which he strapped himself to a lie detector while being interrogated about his time as a young soldier in the Serbian army during the Balkan conflicts in 1993.  Originally commissioned by

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars While John Byrne's 1960s reinvention of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters plays to packed houses in the Tron's main house, Marcus Roche's bite-size staging of two of the Russian master's miniatures is an all too fitting curtain-raiser. Roche himself opens proceedings as Chekhov, manning the decks with some particularly riotous Russian dance numbers on the stereo before reading brief excerpts from his diaries. These take place shortly after the original production of The Three Sisters has been a massive flop, and Chekhov considers penning funnier fare once more. This leads neatly into Roche's adaptation of the unfinished The Night Before The Trial, in which a man awaits his fate on the eve of being hauled before the court for attempted bigamy and attempted murder. He is subsequently usurped by a young woman in need of medical assistance he'd be happy to administer if only her pesky husband wasn't also on the scene. Played scr

Young Marble Giants The minimal palette of Cardiff trio Young Marble Giants' first and only album, Colossal Youth, remains as spooky and as fragile today as it was when it crept quietly into the post-punk landscape in 1980. The Pop Group Bristol's incendiary troupe of avant-punk insurrectionists return after this year's Celtic Connections show to perform their just repressed We Are Time album in full. Manic dub-funk sloganeering dangerous enough to bring down governments. Vic Godard & Subway Sect Subway Sect's support slot on the Edinburgh Playhouse date of The Clash's May 1977 White Riot tour at Edinburgh Playhouse inspired what would become The Sound of Young Scotland. Godard's re-recordings of his vintage northern soul period can be heard on 1979 Now. The Sexual Objects One of those attending the Edinburgh White Riot date was Davy Henderson, who formed Fire Engines, Win and The Nectarine No 9 before morphing into The SOBs, who ha

Young Marble Giants never meant to reform. In truth, the Cardiff-sired trio, who play their first ever Glasgow show on Monday night, had been barely there in the first place. The band's sole long-playing release, Colossal Youth, named, like their own, after images of ancient Greek statues, seemed to have come fully formed from nowhere when it was released by Rough Trade records in 1980. The record's collection of fifteen austere vignettes sounded like nothing else around, with brothers Stuart and Philip Moxham weaving clipped, scratchy guitar and bass patterns around singer Alison Statton's fragile, untutored voice as she sang Stuart Moxham's lyrical fragments with a distance that made them sound like the darkest of nursery rhymes. A drum machine and occasional organ added to the eeriness, as did the shadowy image of the trio on the album's suitably stark cover. Lo-fi doesn't come close. “We didn't think it was going to get anywhere,” says Stuart Moxham

Oran Mor, Glasgow Three stars When a convicted prisoner talks about how the real conspiracies in the country are not between trade unionists and workers, but with politicians and corporations protecting the wealthy few, and how trade unions may soon be illegal, you could be forgiven for thinking the words are spoken by some contemporary dissident. As it is, they are the parting shots from striking builders Des Warren and future comedy actor Ricky Tomlinson, who, along with twenty-two other men in 1972 following a volatile period of industrial unrest in the UK, were convicted on the nineteenth century law of 'conspiracy to intimidate and affray.' It is the plight of the men who became known as the Shrewsbury 24 that is the subject of Neil Gore's loose-knit musical play for Townsend Productions which is currently on a whistle-stop tour of the country that takes in North Edinburgh Arts Centre tonight and Blantyre Miners Welfare club on Sunday. With the help of just an overhe

Linda Griffiths - Playwright, Actress. Born October 7 1953; died September 21 2014 Linda Griffiths, who has died aged sixty following a battle with breast cancer, was as wildly inspiring as she was wildly inspired, both as an actress and a playwright in her native Canada and beyond. Nowhere was this more evident in the latter than in Age of Arousal, Griffiths' 2007 play set in a nineteenth century secretarial college where five women search for emancipation in very different ways. In her programme notes for Muriel Romanes' 2011 production of the play for the Stellar Quines theatre company at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, Griffiths herself described her work as being ”wildly inspired” by George Gissing's novel, The Odd Women, which she discovered in the dollar bin of a second-hand book-store. “I turned it over, and it on the back it said ‘Five Victorian Spinsters’,” Griffiths said in an interview with the Herald at the time of the production, “and I

Peter Grimes - Actor, Writer, Adventurer. Born July 16 1966; died October 4 2014. Peter Grimes, who has died aged forty-eight following a long illness, was more than just an actor. He was an adventurer and a seeker, whose empathy, both with the characters he played and with the audiences he played to, reflected his sense of melancholy clowning with a deep-set truth at its heart. This was the case whether appearing as Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, as Shere Khan the tiger in The Jungle Book, as Barrabas, the thief pardoned as Jesus Christ was crucified beside him, or in the title role in an  expansive production of Peer Gynt, Ibsen's classic fantastical romp of self-knowledge. These characters reflected Grimes' own imagination, which was almost certainly too wild to fit into a theatrical mainstream, and it was telling that most of the theatre companies he worked for were similarly maverick operations which embraced the creative freedo