Coffee-Table Notes

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Once upon a time there was a fifteen-year old boy called Christopher Boone, who loved prime numbers and his pet rat Toby, but hated being touched. When one night Christopher finds a dead dog run through with a garden fork, he turns detective and accidentally embarks on an adventure that will open up a world beyond the assorted codes he's constructed to protect himself and change his life forever. The several million fans of Mark Haddon's novel that inspired this stage adaptation by Simon Stephens may already know the intricately obsessive ins and outs of all this in ways akin to Christopher's whip-smart but socially awkward demeanour. Seeing it brought to life in Marianne Elliot's hit production for the National Theatre, however, is something else again. The above is framed by having Christopher's teacher Siobhan read out Christopher's story to the class, then having his classmates act it out. Siobhan herself, p

Kings Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It's hard not to think of the all too recent tragedies of migrants seeking sanctuary while watching Stephen Unwin's mighty new production of Arthur Miller's 1956 play for the Touring Consortium Theatre Company. In Eddie Carbone's gradual betrayal of all the blue collar codes he's lived by with his wife Beatrice and orphaned niece Catherine, after all, is a global tragedy played out in one cramped living room in a poverty-stricken New York neighbourhood. Not that such a thesis is pushed too far, as Eddie's insular life as king of his tenement castle is shaken up by the arrival of Beatrice's Italian cousins, Marco and Rodolpho, a couple of 'submarines' who travel to America illegally. Where Philip Cairns' Marco is a grafter, James Rastall's Rodolpho is a blonde and seemingly feckless aesthete whose ability to sing, dance, cook a meal and sew a skirt gives Daisy Boulton's initially guileless Cathe

Everybody loves an outsider. In literature and film, it's the oddball, the geek and the troublesome, the shyly intelligent but socially awkward or emotionally damaged anti-hero who readers and audiences identify with. If such protagonists are teenagers angrily coming to terms with a world that seems to be against them, the appeal is even greater, whether it's James Dean's sensitive tough guy in Rebel Without A Cause or an entire coterie of misfits in John Hughes' ultimate teen angst flick, The Breakfast Club. In books, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye has itself become a rites of passage for young readers who can identify with the book's narrator, Holden Caulfield, while Jay McInerny did something similar for teenage girls in his 1988 novel, Story of My Life. All of which goes some way to explaining the phenomenal and enduring success of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ever since Mark Haddon's novel was first published i

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars The accordion-led overture that ushers in Tony Cownie's new version of Carlo Goldoni's eighteenth century comic cut of mistaken identity speaks volumes about what follows. Sure enough, as soon as Angela Darcy's servant Columbina and her nice but dumb mistress Rosaura open their mouths, we're in old-school sit-com land. Separated at birth, twins Zanetto and Tonino arrive separately in Verona for very different reasons. Where Zanetto is a bumbling half-wit who seems to have met his perfect match in Rosaura just as his servant Arlecchino does with Columbina, Tonino is a bum-slapping charmer who has been followed by Beatrice, a Freud-referencing suffragette who just can't help herself. Jessica Hardwick's Beatrice is pursued both by Tonino's man Florindo and by the flamboyant Lelio, played by James Anthony Pearson as a a ginger-wigged fop resembling a creature who looks somewhere between The Joker and Sideshow

The last time Simon Stephens was in Edinburgh, seeing the billboards and advertising hoardings outside the city's Festival Theatre for his award-winning stage adaptation of Mark Haddon's novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time gave him a little swell of pride. For all the phenomonal success of both the book and the play, which has seen Marianne Elliot's National Theatre production of Stephens' version transferring to both the West End and Broadway prior to its current tour which arrives in Edinburgh tonight, it felt a little bit like coming home. “Edinburgh is very special,” says the Stockport-born writer having just watched a new production of childrens' musical Bugsy Malone at the Lyric Hammersmith, where he is an associate artist. “It's the city where I met my wife. I formed my band there, and I lived there for two years, and started writing my first play in a flat above a shop on Broughton Street.” Such attention to detail and forensic

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars 'People Make Glasgow World Class' declaims the bus shelter hoarding just across the bridge that leads to the Gorbals-based Citizens Theatre. Beyond the spin, such a statement could easily form part of Douglas Maxwell's new play. Set beneath a neon-lit reconstruction of artist Stephen O'Neil's real life installation, it becomes a fantastical love letter, not just to the Govanhill neighbourhood it is set in, but to the city itself. For Peter and Demi, the young couple at the play's centre, it is a city full of monsters, where family life is disrupted by a cacophony of police helicopters and howling dogs who add to the din of their crying baby. With sleeplessness at a premium, Peter's terminal adolescence rubs up uncomfortably against the likes of Dharmesh Patel's property developer Raj, who takes Umar Malik's disaffected schoolboy Kuldev under his wing and is the epitome of every big-talking wide-boy who e

Onstage there's a young woman in a white jump-suit having her head shaved by a young man in a leopardskin dress. David Bowie's Rebel Rebel blares out the speakers while a young audience looks on. Even by the standards of the vegetarian cafe/bar/venue that is Mono, this Thursday teatime performance is an eccentric spectacle. The haircut/performance marks the launch of the 2013 edition of live art festival, Buzzcut, which has moved into Mono's speak-easy environs for the first time. If ever proof was needed, Buzzcut's plethora of similarly off-the-wall events demonstrates that the venue's open-minded and inclusive policy goes miles beyond its left-field musical constituency. Seated at a table over snacks, someone is opening up the gatefold sleeve of the vinyl edition of Bowie's new surprise album, The Next Day. The album has just been purchased from Monorail Music, the impeccably stocked record shop housed next to the bar and lovingly co-owned and run by Glasgow m