Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre , Edinburgh Three stars When Charlie met Mari, they could've changed the world. That's not quite the case in Dave Fargnoli's two-handed rom-com presented by the young Urban Fox company, but it would make a great tag-line, worthy of both the movie that's just made Mari a star, and for the high-profile charity that Charlie fronts so successfully. It could only be used, alas, if the former teenage activists who got sucked up in a world of spin, soundbites and hard sell can survive the online meltdown that might just destroy them both. As the first of the Traverse's week-long Hothouse season of work by locally sourced grassroots companies, Fargnoli's hour-long play opens with the couple on the run to an isolated cottage and already at each others throats in Amy Gilmartin's neatly minimalist production. As the pair rewind to their first meeting manning the anti-war barricades and beyond, we see how their mutual idealism became corrupted

Mike Bartlett may be no monarchist, but he's doing pretty well off the royal family just now. As his Olivier Award winning play, King Charles III, arrives in Edinburgh mext week, Bartlett is in New York with the cast of Rupert Goold's original 2014 Almeida Theatre production overseeing a safe transfer in a country which fawns over the royals possibly more than happens on home turf. What American audiences will make of a play that imagines that Prince Charles takes the throne following the death of the Queen, let alone the five-act Shakespearian-style historical epic in blank verse which Bartlett has written, is anybody's guess. The appearance at one point of the late Princess Diana's ghost might also raise an eyebrow or two, though such seemingly seditious material involving, not just Charles and Di, but William, Kate, Harry and Camilla too hasn't seen Bartlett carted off to the Tower of London just yet. Not that it was his intention to provoke. If anything, rat

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Three stars It's been quite a week for Robert Louis Stevenson at the RCS. Running alongside a devised post-modern take on Jekyll and Hyde, the rarely explored backstage area of the New Athenaeum Theatre became the venue for a look at his Boys Own style response to the 1745 Jacobite uprising like no other. With the audience herded into a room awash with metal platforms, hanging ropes and stainless steel ladders, Graham McLaren's production rips into Stevenson's yarn with hell-for-leather abandon, as an ensemble of fourteen final year students from the BA Acting course jump into David Balfour and Alan Breck's dissident world. That they do this by way of flying ships, upside-down aerial acrobatics and Vicky Manderson's joyous choreography makes McLaren and co's take on things no ordinary adaptation. The ghosts of both Bill Bryden's post-industrial spectacles and Ken Campbell's lysergically charged epic

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Three stars A crazed Mr Hyde straddles his bed-bound creator pleading with him not to kill him off because he's the only interesting character who's sprung to life from Robert Louis Stevenson's gothic tale of duality and barely repressed madness. This is a tellingly knowing nod to the twenty-first century's ongoing fascination with horror. It's there too in Lucien MacDougall and Benedicte Seierup's production, devised with nine final year students from the RCS' BA acting course, in some of the jump-cut film footage that cops its moves from the likes of American Horror Story in terms of its power to shock. With Stevenson here cast as plain old Louis, he is woken from his medicated dream in a hospital ward and tended to by a pyjama-clad chorus who watch enraptured from the sidelines as the main action unfolds. What follows is a psycho-active explosion in Louis' head reminiscent at times of the hallucinoge

Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh Three stars Two nights before Remembrance Sunday, and a woman is onstage surrounded by a hotch-potch of cardboard boxes, each one containing a totem of a remarkable story. She pulls a pair of tacketty boots from one, an ornate ladies hat from another. From one a seemingly endless reel of ticker tape unfurls its hidden messages. These messages and more are relayed in Alice Mary Cooper's evocation of a time capsule from The Great War packed by Dundee postal workers in 1921 and only rediscovered in 2013, a year before the centenary of the war's start. This timing is handy, because, while the actual box, crammed full with letters, photographs and documents, now sits in the McManus Gallery in Dundee, its accompanying instructions that it wasn't to be opened until the centenary allows Cooper's hour-long show and tell to put flesh on the bones of a piece of hidden history that goes beyond mere war stories. Commissioned by Harlow Playhouse

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Three stars In a muddy bog, Robert The Bruce is crowned king of Scots after crushing the English and claiming the throne as his own. As with history, it is Bruce's younger brother Edward you have to keep an eye on in Ben Blow's speculative reimagining of the Bruce boys post-Bannockburn assault on Ireland, produced here by the Edinburgh-based Black Dingo Productions. Like a Shakespearian villain on the make, Gerry Kielty's Edward snipes from the sidelines prior to a power-hungry burst of sibling rivalry that sees him left to his own manipulative devices on Irish soil, intent on creating a kingdom of his own. Once in the wilds with his troops, he encounters Failtrail, a young milkmaid who is forced to sing for him before the two face up to the dehumanising realpolitik of power games and become accidental allies, Director Kolbrun Bjort Sigfusdottir sets all this in the bleakest of landscapes in a meditation on war which sounds at times

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, November 7th-June 26 th Long before the current generation of female Scottish artists started making waves, muscles of joy were being flexed in a way that paved the way for everything that followed. This major show of more than ninety works from familiar names including Joan Eardley and Phoebe Anna Traquair to less well-known but just as significant figures bookends its time-frame from when Fra Newberry became Director of Glasgow School of Art to the year of Anne Redpath's death. In the years between, the doors were opened to women artists in a way that was unprecedented as they seized on new liberties in a way that allowed them to express their art as never before. Not that it was easy, as the exhibition makes clear by framing it in the context of the conditions female artists negotiated as students and practitioners due to their gender. Given that it moves through the age of suffrage to a more seemingly swinging age, the new researc

Citizens Theatre , Glasgow Four stars The light is barely there at the opening of Sam Holcroft's twenty-first century adaptation of Anton Chekhov's slow-burning tip-toe through the seemingly wasted lives of several generations of country folk. As bookish Sonya's diligence at the accounts is disturbed by her uncle Vanya's barely contained frustration at the sheer mundanity of what his life has become, things are exacerbated even more as his city slicker brother in law and Sonya's father is doted on by his glamorous new wife Yelena, who Vanya is besotted with. Only dashing doctor Astrov seems to have any kind of vision for the future, even as he's worshipped by Sonya. Up until he meets Yelena, Astrov's notions of biology are all in the abstract, as he talks at length of insects, pheromones and living wild and free in tribes. Everything else, it seems, is just the end of the line for a bunch of part-time would-be suicides. Stripped to the bones of

King's Theatre , Edinburgh Four stars Freedom and democracy aren't words usually associated with the late Margaret Thatcher, the former UK Prime Minister whose ideology-driven decade in office set the tone of things to come. Those are the exact words, however, which open Moira Buffini's play, which puts Thatcher on stage alongside the Queen as a cut-glass double act showing off the edited highlights of Thatcher's time in office between 1979 and 1990. This makes for quite a history lesson as Buffini imagines a series of meetings between the pair, simply known here as Q and T. As older versions of the two women watch over these formal and frosty exchanges between their younger selves, a world of IRA bombings, royal weddings and the Falklands War is laid bare as Q becomes a quietly radical conscience of the nation. All of this is delivered in Indhu Rubasingham's production, originally seen at the Tricycle Theatre in London prior to this commercial tour, in a

It's probably not every day a Glasgow cabbie starts talking to his passenger about what a great playwright Samuel Beckett is. That's exactly what happened to Dominic Hill, artistic director of the Gorbals-based Citizens Theatre, however, when he jumped a fast black one day en route to work. The theatre's forthcoming production of Beckett's 1957 play, Endgame, had just been announced in partnership with Manchester's recently opened Home venue, and the cabbie knew all about it. This had little to do with the fact that Hill's production will feature David Neilson and Chris Gascoyne, both familiar faces from iconic TV soap, Coronation Street, as the blind Hamm and his servant, Clov. Rather, the driver was a fan of the play itself, and was keen to tell the bloke on the back seat all about it lest he miss the show. Hill eventually 'fessed up who he was, but not before he and the cabbie had agreed on one thing. “It's my favourite Beckett play,” Hill s

Eastgate Theatre and Arts Centre Four stars Five women sit on chairs in a row at the start of Sylvia Dow's new meditation on the role knitting has played on Borders life, their faces lit up by the patterns formed from the projections of nineteenth century mill-workers them. When they sing of lifetimes spent in those mills, it is in a harmonious unison gloriously at odds with the disparate yarns that unravel over the next hour in word, song and image. Developed over the last three years as part of an oral history project dubbed Knit Two Together and presented by the ever fertile Stellar Quines Theatre Company as part of the Luminate festival of creative ageing, Dow's script flits from latter-day knitting circles to poverty-stricken women imprisoned for stealing thread to illustrate a hidden history excavated and presented in this most playfully inventive show and tell. Muriel Romanes' production transforms all this into a criss-crossing cut-up collage which, with its mix of

Traverse Theatre , Edinburgh Three stars Bob has lost something. For this gentleman of a certain age, it might just be his whatsitsname, or it could well be his thingummy. Either way, and even if he can't remember his own name, he's going to make the great escape from the old peoples' home that houses him and get back to where he came from come what may. Before all that, however, Linda McLean's new play for Lung Ha's theatre company has each member of the five-strong cast introduce themselves to the audience both out of character and in. Our guide is Karen Sutherland as Bob's niece in Australia, Lesley, who gives us an insight into Bob's life in a way that he's not capable of these days. As Bob makes a break for it to a soundtrack of old Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard numbers, his topsy-turvy world also includes a surreal line-up of invisible dogs, would-be superheroes and talking CCTV cameras. With a spate of plays looking at the effects

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars Punk rock probably wasn't uppermost in Sarah Waters' mind when she wrote her iconic 1998 novel about one young woman's getting of wisdom as she burls through nineteenth century lesbian London. When a a train ride to the big city becomes a cut-up sound art chorale, however, it is clearly at the heart of Lyndsey Turner's audacious production of Laura Wade's equally wild adaptation. As provincial girl Nancy falls for gender-bending music hall diva Kitty, life becomes one big cabaret, though not before the show begins with a cheeky wink to Lyceum shows past care of David Cardy's Good Old Days style Chairman. He dictates the action with his gavel, thumping things along when they get a tad dull. With a Palm Court style band accompanying the action, it is this embracing of theatricality that makes what follows so exquisite. So while Nancy's home-life is expressed through a series of flattened-out sketches, her a

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars It's fitting that Paul Higgins and Ricky Ross' new musical play is set in the shabby, wood-panelled walls of a Wishaw community hall. For among the chairs that sit as mismatched as the people who form the choir founded by Iraqi doctor, Khalid, there are few contemporary plays that nail their colours to a grassroots mast quite as much as this. As single mums, ex cons and zero hours contract workers are thrown together with Tory councillors and other posh locals, each with a theme tune they share with the group, a cross-class, cross-gender, pan-generational supergroup finds unexpected harmony through singing together. There is romance, between Ryan Fletcher's twenty-something Donny and Nesha Caplan's unemployed Velia, sexual tension between Jess Murphy's suburban wife Charlotte and Peter Polycarpou's Khalid, and a melting pot of life between. In the end, however, it is tracksuit-clad Scott's political rap that di

Bharatiya Ashram, Dundee Four stars The central wisdom of playwright David Greig and composer and songwriter Gordon McIntyre's lo-fi musical rom-com as gleaned from an underground car park ticket machine is that change is possible. With this in mind, director Ros Philips takes such everyday philosophy by the scruff of the neck and runs with it to blazes in her Dundee Rep Ensemble production that forms the company's latest community tour. Where the play was originally performed in 2008 by two actors, Philips does it with a cast of eight, as thirty-something lost souls Bob and Helena's wild weekend after falling together in an Edinburgh bar is charted by a cagoule-clad chorus who double up as assorted waifs, strays and hangers-on the pair meet en route. While this may lose something in terms of manic urgency, it also fleshes out what begins as a drunken one-night stand and ends with what might just be a dream come true. As they pause for breath inbetween scampering fr

When a young tree surgeon called Richard Vallis responded to a poster by learning disabilities charity, The Action Group, it set in motion a chain of events that not only changed his life, but altered the cultural landscape of Edinburgh forever. It was the late 1970s, and The Action Group, set up in 1976 by parents of children and adults with learning disabilities, were looking for volunteers to work with them. Lancashire-born Vallis had recently moved to the city, and, wanting to meet new people in the place he still calls home, thought he'd chance his arm. Today, Lung Ha's Theatre Company, which was formed as a direct result of Vallis' involvement with The Action Group, celebrates its thirtieth anniversary as one of the UK's leading exponents of inclusive arts working with performers with learning disabilities. While an informal celebration will take place next week, this weekend sees the opening of Lung Ha's latest production. Thingummy Bob is a new play

Liquid Room, Edinburgh Four stars The last time Godspeed You! Black Emperor played Edinburgh was in 1998, when the Quebec-sired nontet played only their second ever UK show at the tiny Stills Gallery on Cockburn Street at the behest of the short-lived but pioneering leftfield music promoters, The House of Dubois. Given the explosive nature of the band's extended strings and guitar-led instrumentals, the venue's private view size speakers were duly blown, though not before neighbours alerted the local constabulary regarding the impending apocalypse below. Seventeen years on, not much has changed with Godspeed's template. As the now eight-piece ensemble of two bassists, two drummers, three guitarists and lone fiddler Sophie Trudeau gradually flesh out an opening violin and bass motif, there's still the same scratched-out projections with the word 'Hope' on it that top and tails an epic two-hour suite of slow-burning thunder that move between the martial and the m

North Edinburgh Arts, Edinburgh Three stars Bells chime and voices sing in what sounds like a mix of celebration and mourning at the opening of Annie George's solo play, performed by herself during the closing stages of a short tour following its Edinburgh Festival Fringe run. As we see projections of George writing out her own name at the bottom of her family tree, a very personal quest for identity ensues as she dramatises her inquiry into her own history through the voices of her ancestors who become witnesses to a world in turmoil. The starting point for this is the life and work of George's grand-father, Paduthottu Mathen John, whose portrait is projected as George adopts his persona to illustrate her hand-me-down legacy. She does this too through snapshots of her mother and father as her family eventually move to the west and a less turbulent way of life than in both pre and post colonial India. There is considerable charm in George's impressionistic labou

Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh Three stars The story of Hector MacDonald is one of the least sung tales in British military history. For those who engineered this one-time nineteenth century war hero's downfall, this is possibly with good reason. David Gooderson's play, first seen at the Finborough Theatre in London in 2013 as So Great A Crime, and revived here for an extensive tour in this co-production between Eden Court, Inverness, the Mull-based Comar organisation and Ed Littlewood Productions, makes this abundantly clear.   Born in the Black Isle, Gaelic-speaking crofter's son MacDonald rose through the ranks to become Fighting Mac, a terrier-like warrior of the Second Afghan War who eventually became a Major General, serving in what was then Ceylon. Here, among a more leisured officer class, MacDonald was vilified by his peers, who eventually brought him down with accusations of inappropriate behaviour. In a story where the truth of what actually happene

On Tuesday I attended a meeting of City of Edinburgh's Culture and Sport Committee. I was there in my capacity as a member of CEC's Music is Audible working group, set-up a year ago following a tsunami of dissent concerning the capital's attitude towards live music during a meeting of the city's musical community at the Usher Hall under the banner Live Music Matters. One of the main issues raised at LMM was that of noise complaints. CEC's current legislation dictates that live amplified music must remain inaudible beyond the four walls of where it is being performed. Many argue that this favours a complainant. While outside of John Cage any notion of music being inaudible is an absurdity, such legislation isn't made any more credible by CEC officers not being trained to measure sound in any meaningful scientific way. This has made for some full, frank and very necessary exchanges between music professionals and CEC officers. The culmination of this proc

Customs House, Edinburgh Four stars The lost-looking sailor who opens the door into one of Leith's most grandiloquent buildings where Grid Iron Theatre Company's tenth anniversary staging of vignettes from Jim Crace's food-absorbed novel awaits may look like he's stepped off a ghost ship, but there's something even more haunting beyond. From Johnny Austin and Charlene Boyd's sexy Addams Family style couple who top and tail the show with some of its more wildly erotic imaginings, to the over-riding and all-pervading sense of melancholy that runs throughout Ben Harrison's production, life, death, sex, loss, mortality and everything inbetween are served up in a way designed to gorge on. Navigating the capacity audience of just forty around the building through a network of rarely occupied rooms prior to a short Scottish tour, the action veers from staircase erotica to an array of settings and situations, with each tale of the unexpected brought vividly

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars When the second Mrs de Winter surges forward onto the beach at the opening of Kneehigh Theatre's radical reworking of Daphne du Maurier's iconic windswept classic, it isn't clear whether it's the storm she's just walked through or the last breath of her predecessor that soundtracks her every triumphant sashay into the night. Either way, when she utters the novel's immortal opening line about how last night she dreamt of Manderley, the seaside house where her widowed older husband Max took her following a whirlwind romance, it gives new resonance to everything that follows. Rather than offer up some slavish sub-Hitchcockian homage, Emma Rice's production of her own adaptation more resembles a late night Freudian explosion in Mrs de Winter's head that gives her a very rude awakening. As she stumbles through designer Leslie Travers' take on Manderley built of higgledy-piggledy staircases that climb to cha

Usher Hall, Edinburgh Four Stars The two laptops that shine in the gloom from one side of the stage flanked by Asian Dub Foundation's live quartet speak volumes about how far we've come since George Lucas's first and best feature film appeared in 1971. Before Lucas veered off into smash hit space operas and pulp adventure yarns, THX 1138's depiction of a medicated dystopian society utilised hi-tech surveillance techniques and computer data to illustrate a form of social control which seemed like so much post-1960s paranoia. Almost half a century on in ADF's mash-up of sound and vision that began a UK tour this weekend it now looks and sounds like prophecy. ADF have previous form in grafting live soundtracks onto the likes of La Haine and Battle of Algiers, and you can see the appeal of Lucas and co-writer Walter Murch's parable about a man who attempts to escape from a psyched-out world of sex crimes and virtual messiahs to such a politically charged band. As a

Singing was a way of life for actor Paul Higgins when he was training to be a priest. Deacon Blue frontman, Ricky Ross, on the other hand, didn't want to sing at all, but just wanted to write songs for others. For one reason or another, things worked out differently for both men, with Higgins becoming a familiar face on stage and screen in the likes of Black Watch, The Thick of It and Utopia, while Ross and band helped defined mainstream popular music throughout the late 1980s and beyond. The results of both men's relationship with song have led to The Choir, a brand new musical play written by the pair which opens in a major production this week at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow in co-production with commercial producers, Ambassadors Theatre Group. As the first fruits of an initiative designed to nurture and develop new musicals by homegrown writers and composers, The Choir somewhat fittingly tells the story of how a community choir in Wishaw gradually comes together, over

It was inevitable that Emma Rice would go to Manderley one day. As both a long time fan of Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier's iconic 1938 novel transposed so memorably to the big screen by Alfred Hitchcock two years later, and as joint artistic director of the Cornwall-based  Kneehigh Theatre, Rice was more than aware of the story's dramatic potential. As her production should prove as it arrives in Edinburgh tonight for a string of dates in Scotland, what might initially appear to be a commercial staple is a Rebecca like no other. Where purists might prefer  a more slavish recreation of Du Maurier's gothic noir concerning the unseen presence of Maxim de Winter's first wife who died at sea in mysterious circumstances, and the influence she has as he brings his new young bride home to his country pile, Rice takes an infinitely more playful approach. It begins with a live chorale of sea shanties performed by a chorus of fishermen who pop up through trap doors in upturned boa

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars There are moments when it feels like Benjamin, the teenage Christian fundamentalist at the heart of Maja Zade's English translation of German playwright Marius von Mayenburg's drama, is bursting, not just out of his school uniform, but out of his very skin in this co-production between Actors Touring Company and Unicorn Theatre. One minute he's quoting the scriptures to justify his refusal to take part in mixed swimming lessons, the next he's thrown into temptation by both his classmate Lydia and his would-be disciple and good cause, George. Growing pains and a bursting sexuality, it seems, are guided by a blind faith that is prepared to sacrifice anything that gets in its way. This is made flesh here by Benjamin's  biology teacher, Erica, who, in between dodging the everyday sexism of her male colleagues becomes an equally obsessed believer. Set on an array of wooden surfaces and platforms which his cast navigate, Ramin Gray&

In a Leith rehearsal room, the cast of Grid Iron Theatre Company's production of The Devil's Larder, which begins a short tour of some of Scotland's more less travelled venues next week, are pondering the contents of a label-free tin of something that's presumably edible. “Do you know what it is?” asks Johnny Austin. “I don't want to know,” Charlene Boyd snaps back. “It feels quite syrupy,” Ashley Smith ponders as she shakes the tin. “I know what it is,” says Antony Strachan. No-one asks, with Austin and Boyd slipping into character as they proffer the tin up like gothic quiz show hosts that could have been made flesh and blood from an Edward Gorey drawing as they salivate and speculate over the tin's potentially aphrodisiac contents with thrustingly lascivious intent. So erotic is Austin and Boyd’s routine that director Ben Harrison gets them to pare things down so that only the faintest whiff of sex remains. “Maybe if you stopped touching e

La Belle Angele, Edinburgh Four stars “This is a Sleaford Mods disco party,” the Nottingham-sired duo's demonic frontman Jason Williamson roars at one point before launching into Tied Up in Nottz, “and you're all invited.” It had already been a busy week for Williamson and and feral-looking trucker-capped beats-meister Andrew Fearn even before this first of four sold out dates in Scotland, which culminates in a show at Glasgow Art School on Saturday. The night before, Williamson and Fearn had played live on BBC TV's Later...With Jools Holland as the unlikely musical meat slapped between a sandwich of Burt Bacharach and Labi Siffre. There will be more on the forthcoming extended edition of the show, though it's unlikely to top the Mods' third visit to Edinburgh, a trip which began two years ago when they played to a handful of curious Noise fans in an Old Town basement dive before gatecrashing a performance art night next door. With such a pedigree, their wilf

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It's telling that it's a British Airways style Union Jack crest ripped asunder on the tail of the decapitated passenger plane that's been bombed out of the sky at the opening of Regent's Park Theatre's touring stage version of William Golding's novel. As it's colonialist history has made clear, behind the flag's stiff-upper-lipped veneer lays a symbol of something altogether less edifying. That history is all but acted out in microcosm in Timothy Sheader's production of Nigel Williams' adaptation, which begins with jungle drums beating hard as the surviving schoolboys of the crash are thrown together on an unknown island. With Luke Ward-Wilkinson's Ralph an unassumingly wide-eyed outcast whose authority is challenged by the tribalism and mob rule of Freddie Watkins' Jack and his gang, their little boys games soon get very serious indeed. Played out on the vast expanse of Jon Bausor's detritus-li

Sleaford Mods are having their moment. The first time the dynamic duo of vocalist/wordsmith Jason Williamson and techno-primitivist soundscaper Andrew Fearn brought their acerbic alliance of shop-floor social commentary and four-to-the-floor electronic abrasion to Edinburgh in 2013, they played in Old Town basement dive The Banshee Labyrinth to a handful of the city's fertile Noise-scene regulars used to more abstract rackets. Afterwards, Williamson and Fearn were taken to a performance art night at a rehearsal space next door, and ended up playing the same set again to an audience that made it into double figures this time. Seeing them second time around in such close proximity helped make sense of the short, sharp shock that was the equivalent of a musical punch to the face earlier on, but it was no less startling. When Sleaford Mods returned to Edinburgh in November 2014 on the back of supporting the reformed Specials on tour, it was to a sold out Electric Circus, where,