Coffee-Table Notes

Romeo and Juliet is a play that can come in many guises. As one of Shakespeare's best-known tragedies, it's tale of star-crossed lovers caught in the crossfire of families at war has been reinterpreted umpteen times down the centuries, with Leonard Bernstein turning it into teen-gang musical West Side Story while for his 1996 big-screen version Baz Luhrmann took inspiration from MTV. More recently the Royal Shakespeare Company presented Shakespeare's play on Twitter as Such Sweet Sorrow, with actors engaging with other Twitter users as well as each other. The last time Shakespeare's Globe brought Romeo and Juliet to Scotland was back in 2007, when they played it outdoors in Glasgow University Quad in a production that featured future Game of Thrones star Richard Madden as Romeo. Eight years on, Shakespeare's Globe artistic director is back with a new touring production that moves indoors for dates at Dundee Rep and the Theatre Royal, Glasgow. “Touring was in Sh

When Becky Minto first went to study theatre design at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in the mid 1980s, the Liverpool-born designer was by her own admission “a proper scally.” It wasn't just the acting students going around singing songs from Les Miserables that opened Minto up to a new world after studying interior design, but some of the technical terms themselves in her chosen field that threw her. When one lecturer started talking about the male and female parts of a connector, Minto didn't know what he was on about, and only when she put her hand up to ask and it was explained that the male part had prongs on and the female part didn't did the penny drop. Twenty-five years on, Minto is one of the most prolific theatre designers in Scotland, who has worked with the likes of the National Theatre of Scotland, Grid Iron and Vanishing Point as well as most building-based companies in the country. Last year she capped off more than two decades of experienc

Penny Arcade is in a New York state of mind. Sitting in her apartment in the city that was once presumed to be so good they named it twice, the sixty-something performance artist, raconteur, activist and force of nature takes stock of just how much the formerly bankrupt Big Apple has changed. The once hip bohemia of Greenwich Village, where Beat poets and hippies defined generations, has become a slave to overpriced real estate, with its four zip codes ranked in the top ten most expensive places to live in the USA. CBGBS, the club that sired the New York punk and No Wave scenes, and gave a platform to the likes of Patti Smith, The Ramones, Blondie, Television and Talking Heads, is no more following a dispute over increased rent. Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground are all gone now, leaving a perfectly honed set of myths behind along with their poetry and art. Then there is Penny Arcade, the dervish-like native New Yorker who first shook up Edinburgh

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three Stars It speaks volumes that the cross-generational love story that drives David Ireland's potty-mouthed rom-com begins in the Belfast branch of Starbucks. Here, after all, is a now classic symbol of urban homogenisation, in which anything resembling character has been scooched away and replaced with the same shade of bland. Such places can't plan for people, however, as twenty-something Stevie and pushing fifty Martha come together – eventually – over a good book and a mutual mourning for loved ones, even if Stevie being dumped can't quite match the death of Martha's husband seven years before. Where would-be Buddhist Stevie has his rabid Protestant sister Rebecca and an over-bearing mother steeped in tradition to contend with, Martha is a thoroughly modern Glasgow emigre with few superstitions left. Beyond the hangover of the Troubles, it seems, there are plenty of borders to cross. There's a deceptive depth to Conleth Hill&

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow Three stars Leaving aside the unintended irony of the first night of Shakespeare's sunniest rom-com being rained off, if ever there was a play to be seen outdoors, A Midsummer night's Dream is the one. This was made clear once the seasons finally smiled on Emily Reutlinger's production, the second of this year's Bard in the Botanics season, which serves up a bright, youthful but utterly serious take on the play. It starts with grey-robed besties Hermia and Helena appearing to have taken a vow of silence before the pair let rip with their heart's desires. With Theseus' attempts to preside over both greeted with disdain, once the pair morph into Bottom and Titania respectively, it looks more like they've not quite come down from Glastonbury. As performed by just five lead actors, there's a trippiness in the way each character melds into another, as if they're being led astray between realities. Such high spirits a

When Richard II talks of 'unlikely wonders' while alone in his prison cell awaiting his execution in Shakespeare's rarely seen history play, it's hardly the most positive of speeches. The phrase has nevertheless inspired Bard in the Botanics artistic director Gordon Barr to dub the company's latest summer season of outdoor Shakespeare productions in Glasgow's West End with such an appositely sunny sounding sobriquet. With familiar works such as The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream reimagined alongside rare sightings of Love's Labours Lost and the aforementioned Richard II, it's easy to see why. “The quote is about how life can surprise you,” Barr explains before heading off to rehearsals for the first of two productions in the season he's directing himself. “Calling it Life's A Bitch seemed too much, but in Richard II it's much the same thing. For us, it's about us gaining in confidence, both in ourselves and in our

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars A flash of metaphorical lightning is sometimes all it takes for your whole world to be turned upside down. So it is with Arnold, the haplessly under-achieving host of a small town creative writing group in Alan Ayckbourn's sixty-ninth play, first seen in 2005. For much of the first act Arnold is almost painfully nice to the disparate community who come together in his crumbling old house to share what they've not written, even as it provides respite from their assorted real world problems. With Arnold's young work-mate Ilsa looking after his ailing mother upstairs, inspiration is in short supply for all. Like a toyshop after dark, however, when Arnold appears to have closed the door on his guests for the night, only then does the imagination run riot as an entire pulp fiction factory bursts from a sea of unpublished pages that never made it out of their creators' heads. What follows in Clare Prenton's dexterously man