Coffee-Table Notes

When Madeleine Worrall steps out onto the stage tomorrow night to play the title role in a new stage version of Charlotte Bronte's novel, Jane Eyre, it won't just be the audience at the National Theatre who will be watching. As part of the NT Live initiative, a live feed of Sally Cookson's production, originally seen at Bristol Old Vic in 2014, will be screened simultaneously in more than 650 cinemas across the UK. In Scotland alone some fifty-four cinemas will show the production. All of which sounds more than a little bit daunting for the Edinburgh born actress, who remains onstage throughout the show. “It is a bit terrifying for us,” she admits. “We think we're just doing it in front of the audience in the theatre, but we're actually being seen in cinemas all over. I'm trying not to think about it to be honest, but the NT Live people are being very clear that we're not trying to make a film, but are filming a theatre performance, with everything that go

Dundee Rep Three stars Young audiences beware. Choose carefully which brand of sticky confectionery you stuff your faces with during the interval of Dundee Rep's festive production of Roald Dahl's supernatural classic, as adapted here by Dahl specialist David Wood. If you scoff down the wrong kind, you might just return having been transformed into a mouse. This is exactly what happens to the Boy narrator of the story and his greedy friend Bruno when they accidentally gatecrash an international witches conference in Bournemouth's swanky Hotel Magnificent. Such notions of subjugation and social control over the young have already been cranked up at the witches conference itself. While the Tory-blue twin-sets stay on, attendees toss aside all vestiges of humanity that their wigs and gloves provide. This adds to the grotesquerie as Emily Winter's Grand High Witch holds the floor like some crazed tin-pot dictator waging war on imaginary enemies. Using a mix of

When a blacklisted construction worker on camera compares his experience to something written by Kafka, given everything that has gone before, you know exactly what he means. Especially as, rather than such a statement coming from some Cold War era East European dissident as he reads his once secret files, these words are being uttered at a table in a London pub by a middle-aged man in the early years of the twenty-first century. The incident is captured in the twenty minute video that forms the heart of Blacklist, Lucy Parker's multi-media work-in-progress running this week at Edinburgh's Rhubaba artspace. It comes during a round-table discussion between several men who were on a list of some 3,213 names compiled between 1993 and 2009 by the UK-based Consulting Association. Those on the list had either spoken out about on-site working conditions or else were known trade union members or activists. With the lists circulated among construction companies bank-rolling The Cons

There's a darkness at the heart of Saint Jack , the second album by The Nectarine No 9, Davy Henderson's skewed ensemble take on rock and roll following his adventures with Edinburgh post-punk primitivists Fire Engines and the major label pop entryist gloss of Win. Originally released in 1995 on Alan Horne's briefly reignited Postcard label, Heavenly's twentieth anniversary reissue goes some way to unearthing the missing link between those early deconstructions and Henderson's current guise leading the equally conceptualist Sexual Objects, who this year auctioned the sole copy of their second album, Marshmallow , on eBay for a cool £4,213. Having 'regrouped' once already last year and with dates pending in London and Glasgow to play Saint Jack in full, The Nectarine No 9 might just have found their time. With the band named after a Japanese love hotel, the title of this follow up to their loose-knit debut, A Sea And Three Stars (or C*** , if you will

When Pauline Knowles was cast as the White Witch in the Royal Lyceum Theatre's Christmas production of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, which opened at the weekend, she wasn't sure what to make of her character. In a career that has seen the Edinburgh-born actress play such roles as Chris Guthrie in Sunset Song as well as a plethora of new plays including David Harrower's Knives in Hens, it was the first time she would be playing such an out and out villain. Given the intelligence, depth and quiet steeliness Knowles has consistently brought to her work, her approach was never going to be a one-dimensional affair. “It's interesting,” she says, taking a break from technical rehearsals which have included her seeing the White Witch's wand light up for the first time.,“because I've had to try and think of her as someone who isn't a human being. All of the other creatures in it are beavers and what have you, but she's completely different. She's s

When Jeremy Thoms decided to start a record label, it was initially to put out the debut album by his own band, The Cathode Ray. Three years on, Stereogram Recordings has a roster of eight acts, six of whom will be taking part in the two-night mini package tour this week styled by Thoms as The Stereogram Revue. A seventh, The Band of Holy Joy, will be represented by proxy, but more of that anon. “It's something that hasn't happened for a very long time,” Thoms says of the initiative. “I was inspired by the likes of the Stax revues in the sixties, and the Live Stiffs tours in the seventies, where all the acts on the label play on the same bill. With the Stereogram Revue, everybody plays twenty minute sets and hopefully leaves their ego at the door. There will be rough edges to it, I'm sure, but I quite like that. All my favourite artists, like Vic Godard, just plug in and thrash it out. Even so, I suspect I'll be a complete nervous wreck on the night.” With James K

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Sirens and sleigh-bells are the dramatic pulse behind Andrew Panton's epic new staging of C.S. Lewis' Christian fantasia, adapted here by Theresa Heskins in a version given a fresh breath of life with new songs by Claire McKenzie and Scott Gilmour. The sirens accompany the story's four child heroes' escape to the country where they spend the war exploring the cavernous house where an eccentric professor lives. The sleigh-bells usher in the far darker presence of the White Witch who rules Narnia by force, decreeing it to remain forever winter, but without a hint of Christmas. But there are prophecies to be fulfilled, and Peter, Susan, Lucy and Edmund are key players in all this, even as the ice slowly melts to signal the coming of Aslan, played by Ben Onwukwe as a dread-locked lord of all goodness. Panton's production is an impressive feat of theatrical light and shade from the off, as the siblings enter the war

1 It was a poet who gifted the name to Boots For Dancing, the critically neglected Edinburgh-sired agit-Funk auteurs led by vocalist 'Dancing' Dave Carson during Post-Punk's first flourish between 1979 and 1982. The phrase was introduced into the lexicon by way of an off-the-cuff counterpoint to another band's three-word melding of socio-cultural tropes. Such tropes were forged in the heat of a generation's existential disaffection in late 1970's Thatcher's Britain. They also tapped into everything Boots For Dancing were about. Here was a name that implied a Doc Marten buffed youth club gang cutting loose from the working week and letting off their collective tension on the floor. There was a sense of pride too in such a mass ritual, where sartorial elegance and cutting a dash was as much a part of the experience as the moves themselves. Looking good, feeling better was an unspoken mantra. It came with a package, that understand music was a matter of

Responses to the ongoing refugee crisis have been many, but Turner Prize winning artist and musician Martin Creed's is probably the pithiest statement to date. Consisting of a AA-side free download single with accompanying videos released this weekend, Let Them In and Border Control form a new body of audiovisual work that is as short and as sharp as the miniatures on Creed's Love To You and Mind Trap albums. Both songs are meticulously structured in keeping with Creed's forensically patterned canon. The self-explanatory Let Them In offers up a vocal arrangement that gives a superficial nod to the Beatles' All You Need Is Love by way of REM's Shiny Happy People, while its even briefer flipside is a dry-as-a-bone minimalist word game that resembles protest poems of counter cultures past. Heard together, these two minutes and five seconds of DIY pop sound like fractured nursery rhyme anthems to sing along to in a way that might just help change the world. Prod

Turning thirty was a bigger deal than it should've been for Carla Easton, singer, song-writer and driving force behind all-female quartet, Teen Canteen. Instead of either trying to ignore such a benchmark or else drown the sorrows of her twenties last hurrah, Easton decided to get pro-active. Roping in an A-Team of musical friends including Eugene Kelly of The Vaselines, Duglas T Stewart of the BMX Bandits and Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub, Easton arranged a night designed to celebrate girl groups while raising funds for Scottish Women's Aid, and The Girl Effect was duly born. Those attending the sold out show at Edinburgh's Summerhall venue in May this year in association with the arts centre's in-house promoters, Nothing Ever Happens Here, saw some fourteen acts play two songs apiece by female artists of their choice. These ranged from covers of classic 1960s pop from the likes of Martha Reeves and The Ronettes through to more recent chart botherers such as Destin