Coffee-Table Notes

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When Gavin Jon Wright's hapless Spud embarks on his Class A-fuelled job interview in front of red drapes at the opening of Gareth Nicholls' main-stage revival of Harry Gibson's 1994 adaptation of Irvine Welsh's iconic novel, it's a telling pointer to everything that follows. Like the play, there is no filter in the mad rush of tragi-comic truth that Spud blurts out. This is a signifier too that this isn't a play in the conventional sense, but is a series of loose-knit routines that only make full sense when lifted off the page and delivered in a full-on Leith Walk demotic framed by designer Max Jones' strip-lit breezeblock wasteland. While ostensibly the story of 1980s dole queue junky Renton and his drug buddies, there is less of a gang mentality here than in Danny Boyle's film version, which Gibson's script pre-dated by two years. Nicholls' staging of the series of solos, duologues and ensemble-based

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars There's a serial killer on the loose in Theatre Jezebel's revival of Keith Huff's hard-boiled noir, first seen on Broadway in 2007, and he's eating everyone alive. For frontline cops Denny and Joey, the murderer's presence right under their noses is the final nail in the coffin of a partnership that dates back to childhood. Even now, in a lamp-lit room at a long table flanked by two rows of buckets, they joke that they're like 1970s TV heartthrobs Starsky and Hutch, except Denny and Joey's double act has long since stopped being funny. Dressed in identical sweatpants and hoodies in Mary McCluskey's darkly brooding production, Andy Clark and Robert Jack invest Denny and Joey with a captivating intensity as old loyalties are corrupted at both a personal and professional level for both men. Blighted by personal demons and unspoken tensions that threaten to blow up in their faces, as the pair switch between their vers

Edward Albee – Born March 12 1928; died September 16 2016 . When Edward Albee, who has died aged eighty-eight, wrote a play, it was usually a wilful provocation that arguably came from deep within his own experience. While best known for the dramatic explosion of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which seeped into popular consciousness by way of Mike Nicholls' film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Albee was anything but a one-trick-pony. This was evident in his three decade-spanning Pulitzer Prize wins, for A Delicate Balance in 1967, Seascape in 1975 and Three Tall Women in 1994. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had been initially selected by the 1962 drama jury, but was over-ruled by the Pulitzer advisory committee, who opted not to make any drama award that year. Given that the play won a Tony and ran on Broadway for over a year prior to the film version, one suspects Albee wasn't overly concerned, as he kept his distance from the theatrical establi

Dundee Rep Three stars It's a man's world alright in the Globe Theatre's 1960s inspired take on Shakespeare's proto rom-com, set largely inside designer Katie Sykes' rainbow-bordered box resembling an after-hours open mic dive bar. Here Valentine and Proteus are a couple of small town boys in stuffy old Verona, wanting to make the scene in the far groovier Milan. With his guitar on his back, Guy Hughes' Valentine hits the road, while Dharmesh Patel's Proteus remains hopelessly devoted to Leah Brotherhood's Julia. With Valentine forced into a dance-off over Aruhan Galieva's society girl Sylvia, Proteus follows his main man to the big city, while Julia dons Bob Dylan cap and suede jacket to inveigle her androgynous way into the gang. Nick Bagnall's production sees love letters sent as seven-inch singles before the would-be couples flirt with promiscuity and cross-dressing in a youthful rites of passage that traces an entire decade's wo

Edinburgh Playhouse Four stars The stage is all dressed up as a 1960s dancehall occupied by tuxedo-clad crooners at the opening of Joe Penhall and Ray Davies' musical history of the early days of Davies' seminal band, The Kinks. By the end, however, the hysteria of Madison Square Garden has whipped a nostalgia-seeking audience into a suitable frenzy. Inbetween in Edward Hall's touring production of a show first seen at Hampstead Theatre in 2014, the Muswell Hill born Davies brothers take on the world, crash, burn and come out fighting to produce a now classic canon of pre-punk music hall social realist vignettes. Penhall's necessarily dot-to-dot script lays bare a tale of back street ambition, tortured genius and warring siblings, with sensitive songwriter Ray and his wild child kid brother Dave initially flanked by a living room full of sisters who rather handily double up as a swinging op-art chorus line. As the band square up to money men in London and New Yor

Harry Gibson was working as a script-reader for the Citizens Theatre when he stumbled across Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh's iconic novel of 1980s Leith life that went on to become a phenomenon. It was the early 1990s, and the equally iconic Citz had just opened its Circle and Stalls studio spaces in the image of the long gone Close Theatre, with the intention of producing cutting edge new and experimental work with little financial risk. Not to make too fine a point of it, a lot of the stuff landing on Gibson's desk wasn't that great. In search of the holy grail, he went off to John Smith's bookshop, a legendary and now lost emporium on Byres Road, where he asked if there was any new Scottish prose fiction he should be taking a look at. Eventually, Gibson was handed the last battered copy of Trainspotting they had in stock. The book, which charted the hedonistic adventures of a group of young Leithers in 1980s dole queue Britain, was already being devoured by a young

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Three stars If ever there was a play where the phrase Keep Calm and Carry On would make the perfect publicity tag-line, Noel Coward's between the wars soap opera is it. Just as the phrase and its assorted derivatives have tapped into a kitsch form of post-austerity nostalgia for empire, Coward's play is an equally propagandist fanfare for the common man and woman designed to rally the troops. Set in the crucial twenty years either side of the end of World War One and the dawn of World War Two, Coward's play charts the fortunes of the Gibbons family, who breathe bustling life into Ethel and her demobbed hubby Frank's newly acquired Clapham dining room. As period newsreels soundtracked by cheap songs usher in each scene, it is here the play resolutely remains throughout its everyday tapestry of births, deaths, family schisms, tragedy and joy. As voguish whiffs of progressive thought briefly subvert old certainties if not old prejudices