Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars The spectre of the 1998 Omagh bombing casts a long shadow over the Irish Troubles last bloody gasp, even as it ripped a community asunder forever. The collective sense of shell-shocked grief that followed is unlikely to be captured better than in Ross Duggan’s perfectly pitched elegy told through the words of three survivors of this all too pointless atrocity. First seen on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2011, Duggan’s trio of criss-crossing monologues relate the events of what became a weekend off to remember for all the wrong reasons. First there is Lizzy, the little girl for whom a trip to the shops will never be the same again. Next comes Mari, whose husband Brian went out for a thirtieth wedding anniversary present and ended up saving Lizzy’s life at the expense of his own. Finally, there is Conor, the young lad caught up in the romance of a cause he didn’t really understand, and ended up a bomber. With actors Claire Hughes, Eimea

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh 5 stars Thank God for writers like Howard Brenton. Because, as English Touring Theatre’s revival of Brenton’s mighty history play for Shakespeare’s Globe testifies to, there are few artists who could combine political intrigue, religion, tragedy and high comedy to make a twenty-first century epic to die for. The audacious sweep of John Dove’s production helps, from the moment the period-frocked actors wander into the auditorium to engage with an audience perhaps expecting a heritage industry view of Henry VIII’s second and seemingly most heroic, not to say epoch-changing, spouse. From Anne’s double-bluffing opening address, however, things couldn’t be more different, as the action dovetails between timelines framed around James I’s private investigations into Anne’s rise and fall en route to authorising a new bible. As Anne navigates her way through the uneasy coalition between church and state, she not only wraps David Sturzaker’s Henry aro

History's a funny thing for Howard Brenton. As The Globe's touring revival of of Anne Boleyn, the veteran playwright's most recent original work arrives in Edinburgh this week, Brenton's depiction of Henry VIII's second and most misunderstood wife is a deeply serious study of a woman whose apparent flirtation with then outlawed Protestantism suggested a steely revolutionary zeal. By juxtaposing Anne's story with that of a wilfully outrageous James V1, himself in the throes of political intrigue even as he investigates Anne's legacy, the portrait that emerges of this most turbulent period of English and Scottish history is more audacious than most. “ I'd wanted to write something about the Tudors for years,” says Brenton on a break from work on his next play, “but I couldn't find a way in. I had a mad idea to do something called Tudor Rose, and have one actress play all the monarchs, but I couldn't make it work. Then the Globe aske

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars When a microphone is passed out to the audience in the second half of Egyptian playwright and director Laila Soloman’s all too personal set of testimonies from the frontline of her homeland’s revolution, the effect is both moving and powerful. As each reads from a sheet of paper demanding justice for named ‘martyrs of the revolution’ killed by one form of state oppression or another, the communal litany that gradually forms is a very quiet form of solidarity that challenges the oppressors even as it bears witness. The first half that precedes it finds three Egyptian actors – one man, two women - sitting on chairs recounting their own knitted together experiences without fuss or anger in their native language as English subtitles flash up on a screen behind them. An everyday tale of Molotov cocktails, incarceration, military brutality and bombs made of tea, there is little need for dramatic embellishment in Soliman’s compendium of first-ha

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars There’s something of the Wild West in Martin Travers’ brutally intense play that is the flagship production of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Reveal 2012 season of new work. It’s not just the long leather coats and customised bowler hats that give Amanda Gaughan’s production the sort of rough-shod stylistic trappings that Sam Pekinpah would be proud of. As the play’s quartet of transients seek sanctuary in the gloom beneath a crossing they’re seemingly destined not to make, it’s the sense of a frontier lost to things not of their own making that gives it such a widescreen feel. All the more remarkable, then, that Travers has set his brooding tale of bargains made and secrets spilled in rural Lanarkshire in what he calls ‘another Scotland’. It’s a place where the brave new world that was promised presumably never happened, and where Ryan Fletcher’s ruthless Robert John and John Kielty’s more humane Andrew live off scraps in-between

Mayday and protest are natural bedfellows however some governments may attempt to re-brand it. This was something clearly recognised in the early days of Mayfest, Glasgow's now defunct trade union backed arts festival. It's something that is clear too in Mayfesto, The Tron Theatre's now annual month of politically inclined theatre, which acknowledges its obvious debt to Mayfest. While Mayfesto 2012 has scaled back its activities prior to a larger, city-wide event set to take place in 2013, the radical slack has been picked up by the National Theatre of Scotland, whose second Five Minute Theatre event takes protest as it's very pertinent theme. Following on from the inaugural Five Minute Theatre, which, over twenty-four hours, streamed more than two hundred new miniature plays which were selected from more than twice that number live over the internet, this year the NTS, in a very logical association with STV, have opted for a leaner model. Rather than an

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars The technical hitches that opened the 2012 version of the National Theatre of Scotland’s compendium of bite-size performances beamed live across the internet may have resembled the early days of Channel Four, but the creative anarchy that followed was worth the wait. Run over six hours, and with seventy-two plays on offer , this year’s protest-based theme concentrated things even further, even if the sole screen in the Tron’s noisy restaurant was less than ideal for anyone wanting to witness the event beyond the works performed live in the venue’s Victorian Bar. For those with laptops, the first hour alone included Craigowl Primary School’s study of Grandpa Broon, Amy Conway’s meditation on fallen war reporter Marie Colvin and the CurvebALL Collective’s physical theatre flash-mob in George Square. It was here Tam Dean Burn’s punk Robert Burns outfit The Bumclocks performed an anti-war mash-up of Burns, Pinter and Gunter Grass. Under the