Coffee-Table Notes

Jessica Hardwick could be forgiven for wanting to let her hair down. The Borders born actress has barely had a breather since she graduated from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2013 to join the Citizens Theatre as one of the company's acting interns for that year. Her new tenure threw her in at the deep end for her first professional role as Sonya in Dominic Hill's epic staging of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment adapted by Chris Hannan. This was followed with Hardwick playing the maid, Christine, in Hill's equally intense staging of August Strindberg's play, Miss Julie, as adapted by Zinnie Harris. For both of these roles Hardwick was awarded playwright John Byrne's inaugural Billy award, named in honour of actor Billy McColl and introduced to support the best in rising young talent. Hardwick was subsequently cast in Byrne's take on Chekhov's Three Sisters at the the Tron Theatre, where she also performed with Stellar Quines in Lucy Port

Reid Gallery, Reid Building, Glasgow School of Art until December 12th "The things people think about Africa," says the down to earth and very English sounding voice of Grace Ndiritu in her video piece, Raiders of the Lost Ark (2015), at one point, "and they never go to Africa. Fuckin' Hell, man." Filmed on location at the Wusha Mikel Church in Ethiopia and the Samyeling Tibetan Monastery, Raiders of the Lost Ark's prosaic observation sums up everything Ndiritu's vast catalogue of film and video works, paintings, photographs and performances are about. Raised in Britain and with a Kenyan heritage, as Ndiritu bridges the shadow line of cultural assimilation, appropriation and fetishisation of the exotic, a transformative visual poetry emerges that fuses shamanic ceremonial with trash pop notions of ethno-delic glam chic and ancient future ritual. This is made most explicit in Holotropic Breathing for the Masses (2015), a film of what in September of this

Festival Theatre , Edinburgh Four stars As constitutional crises go, the death of the Queen and subsequent accession of Prince Charles in his mother's wake might well rock the establishment where they are both figureheads. And if the man who would be king breached royal protocol and started tasking charge of matters of state, who knows how things might turn out? This is the starting point for Mike Bartlett's contemporary history epic, which begins in this UK tour of Rupert Goold's Almeida Theatre production with a solemn candlelit requiem as the cast process into a brick-lined semi-circular crypt that doubles up as the bowels of Buckingham Palace. Here we meet Charles and his tabloid-friendly brood: a dutiful William, a ruthlessly ambitious Kate and a hopelessly hapless Harry, who falls for Jess, a St Martin's art school girl who introduces him to some real common people. Charles, meanwhile, must confront old ghosts even as he squares up to a reactionary govern

Fans of long-running cult American fantasy series Supernatural will have spotted a new arrival in its tenth season, currently airing on E4 in the UK. The red-haired woman called Rowena may not have said anything during her first appearance sitting in her hotel room at the end of the episode, Soul Survivor, which aired last month. The two men hanging from the ceiling above her impaled by stakes, however, spoke volumes about her demonic intent. As fans of the show will find out when Rowena makes her presence fully felt in the season's eighth episode, Girls, Girls, Girls, on November 25 th , what turns out to be a 400 year old matriarch with some very important progeny also speaks with a Falkirk accent. This comes in the form of thirty-six year old actress Ruth Connell, who was last seen on these shores playing Mrs Beaver in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh back in 2008, but who now seems to have entered an even more fantastical realm.

Traverse Theatre , Edinburgh Three stars When you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose, as some street-smart sage once wrote. So it goes for Malky, the Leith Walk wag at the heart of Mikey Burnett's play as he lets rip over one tragi-comic night sparring with his flat-mate Frank in the bathroom. When Malky bursts in, he's lost his last pound on a sure fire winner that fell at the first, the dole have stopped his money, and, most crucially, the love of his life has dumped him to the point of almost having to get a restraining order out on him. What follows over the next fifty minutes is a quickfire riot of the sort of twisted desperado logic which initially comes on like a post Trainspotting flat-sharing sit-com. Things take a more serious turn in Iain Davie's production for the Napier University sired Trig Point Theatre company, as such exchanges point up just how much those backed into a corner by economic and emotional poverty can end up clutching

When Brix Smith Start picked up a guitar for the first time in fifteen years, it was an understandably emotional experience. Smith Start, after all, is a survivor of not just one, but two stints as guitarist with legendary punk-sired outsiders, The Fall. She was also married for six years to this most truculent of bands' mercurial vocalist and leader throughout almost forty years, thirty-odd albums and countless ex members, Mark E Smith. Following such service above and beyond musical duty, Smith Start eventually moved into a career in fashion, first running a chain of boutiques with her current husband, Philip Start, then on TV alongside Gok Wan on Gok's Fashion Fix. Once she started playing guitar again, however, there was no turning back, and the result of this renewed love affair is Brix and The Extricated, a band she fronts with no less than three former Fall members, including bassist Steve Hanley and his drummer brother Paul, who first played with The Fall aged

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars One could be forgiven for presuming the loneliness of the long-distance vacuum cleaner salesman to not exactly be the most dynamic raw material for top-drawer adventure yarns. This didn't stop Graham Greene, however, whose 1958 pastiche of very British spy stories was filmed a year later by Carol Reed. Clive Francis' stage version dates from 2007, and in Richard Baron's new production mines an ongoing vogue for doing pocket-sized modern classics with one eyebrow archly raised. Baron's cast of four open the show with a nod to Greene's own tenure in the spying game as each shares the narration between them to unveil the fast-moving story concerning Jim Wormold, the down-at-heel salesman who's been ditched by his wife for an American and left in Cuba with his precocious teenage daughter Milly in tow. Inexplicably enlisted by the London secret service to keep an eye on any nefarious activities Johnny Foreigner might be

King's Theatre , Edinburgh Three stars One fears for the worst when a curiously past-it looking Algernon drops a cue in the opening scene of Oscar Wilde's evergreen rom-com concerning mistaken identity amongst courting couples who flit and flirt between town and country. Within seconds, however, it becomes clear that Lucy Bailey's touring production is throwing the audience a googly. This comes in the form of the Bunbury Company of Players, the fictitious home counties am-dram group used as a framing device to justify Bailey's casting of older actors in roles usually reserved for ingenues. As scripted by Simon Brett, the Bunbury Players have been revisiting Earnest since their first production of the play in 1970, so it is now the preserve of the company's elder statesmen and women rather than starlets. While the rehearsal room role-call of offstage affairs, reluctant butlers and cricketing distractions add an extra layer of hammed-up identity crises, they

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