Coffee-Table Notes

Cherry Jones never wanted to play Amanda Wingfield, the bruised and brittle matriarch in The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams' semi autobiographical masterpiece that made his name. It was only when former National Theatre of Scotland associate director John Tiffany wooed the veteran stage and screen actress, best known in the UK for her Emmy winning turn as U.S. President Allison Taylor in TV drama, 24, into tackling the part that she discovered there was more to Amanda than meets the eye. “I'd always thought of Amanda as a harridan,” says Jones on a break from re-rehearsing Tiffany's 2013 American Repertory Theatre production for its current Edinburgh International Festival run. “I'd auditioned for Laura about five times in my youth, but I was too big-boned to ever get the part. I'd always seen the play through young people's eyes, but when John Tiffany forced me to sit down with it, I started to realise that here was a woman in desperate straits. “Her

St Patrick's Church, Edinburgh until August 28 Four stars The words 'In Memorium' may be carved above the entrance to the chapel in the Edinburgh Cowgate church once at the centre of the capital's 'Little Ireland', but Roderick Buchanan's new film installation that forms part of Edinburgh Art Festival's Commissions Programme is anything but an elegy. As the film's subject, Irish-born but Edinburgh-based historian Owen Dudley Edwards talks about James Connolly, the Cowgate-sired radical who rose to fame through his role in the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, an entire history is rolled back and has fresh life breathed into it. Over almost two hours of close-up conversation broken up by Brechtian style captions, Dudley Edwards talks about church, state, politics and power in Ireland, Scotland and the bridges between the two. There are thumbnail portraits of Edinburgh and Dublin's psycho-geography past and present and a nod too to Connolly'

King's Theatre Four stars One of the first things that strikes you about EIF's revival of John Tiffany's American Repertory Theater production of Tennessee Williams' defining early play is how warm everyone is to each other. Would-be writer Tom Wingfield may be desperate to get away from the fire escape of the St Louis tenement that made him, but in Michael Esper's portrayal is a long way from the uptight neurotic he's sometimes presented as. Instead, the sparring with his mother Amanda is part and parcel of the day to day knockabout of a supremely dysfunctional but still loving family. This is most defined in Cherry Jones' exquisite portrayal of Amanda, a woman made brittle by disappointment and only too willing to lionise her past, but who now she is alone only wants the best for her very special children. Where Tom is a classic ennui-ridden bookworm, her daughter Laura is fragile in a more troubling way. Even here, however, Kate O'Flynn's

There is something Prospero-like about Kieran Hurley when he sits at a table at the centre of his performing world in Heads Up , the Glasgow-based auteur's story-telling close-up of four very different lives closing in on themselves just as the world is about to end. It's something about the way he conjures up some of the city's eight million criss-crossing stories, the lit candle in front of him the only beacon left for his creations to cling onto. There is something spiritual too going on as Hurley taps out the alchemic pulses of MJ McCarthy's touch sensitive soundscape like a barefoot tabletop prophet overseeing his imaginary creations. The language is raw, the experiences of his characters transcendent. This is the case whether it's the off the rails futures speculator, the potty-mouthed schoolgirl, the coked-up rock star and would-be messiah who finds new life through crashing and burning, and the fast food worker who is reborn. In a show that fleshes out

Royal Lyceum Theatre Five stars When Matthew Lenton's Glasgow-based Vanishing Point theatre company first presented Interiors in 2009, this close-up meditation on human behaviour behind closed doors put the company on the international touring map in a way that became a benchmark for how expansive home-grown theatre can be. Seven years on, seeing it back to back in an Edinburgh International Festival double bill with the company's's more recent construction, The Destroyed Room, first seen earlier this year, is a chance for long-term VP watchers and novices alike to reflect on the umbilical link between the two pieces. In Interiors, the audience peer through the windows of a small house on the longest night of the year in the bleakest of mid-winters. Inside, an annual dinner party held by an older man and his grand-daughter is being prepared to celebrate the move from darkness into light. As the guests arrive, expectation and social politesse give way to a set of

Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop 16 July – 31 August 2016 It's good to talk. Just ask Sian Robinson Davies, whose new sound work, Conversations, which has just opened at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop as part of Edinburgh Art Festival, features thirteen bite-size dialogues between inanimate objects, intimate body parts and intangible universal constructs. Over almost half an hour's worth of speed-dating size exchanges, assorted odd couples flirt, rub up against each other or else just try to explain themselves through snippets of philosophical enquiry. Characters include a Credit Card attempting to explain to a Penis the notion of contactless transactions, an on-heat Lipstick coming on strong with some sexless Breezeblock and last words from a Pillow in conversation with Revenge. “I started writing the conversations because I was asked to write textual responses to a couple of artists' work, both of whom work with objects,” Robinson Davies explains about the roots of Conver

Matthew Lenton's view of the city is immense. High up in what looks from the outside like a Brutalist office block, but which has been converted into flats, the theatrical visionary behind Vanishing Point theatre company can peer through floor to ceiling length windows and watch Glasgow's throbbing heart in motion. It's a city Lenton loves, and which has provided endless inspiration for his series of impressionistic everyday epics that concentrate on visual and sonic poetry as much as any words spoken. Perched somewhere between several of Glasgow's more iconic artistic institutions, even such geographical markers seem loaded with symbolic weight. It's hard not to stand besides Lenton's window without thinking of Interiors, Vanishing Point's internationally acclaimed show first seen in 2009, and which is revived this weekend for a short run at Edinburgh International Festival. The production will be seen alongside the more recent The Destroyed Room, whi