Coffee-Table Notes

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars Ebenezer Scrooge is the quintessential Charles Dickens character, wheeled out once a year like fairy lights to brighten up the neighbourhood. Watching Philip Rham's vivid and well-rounded interpretation of the mealy-mouthed old skinflint in Richard Baron's seasonal revival of Leslie Bricusse's rollicking feel-good musical, it is clear he is also a man of our times, and a perfect representation of the state we're in now. Scrooge, after all, is an emotionally damaged loan shark who has made his fortune on the backs of the poor, and who exploits austerity as an excuse to pay his staff below minimum wage while hiking up interest on his pay-day loans. The bustling street scene that opens the show having been ushered in by projections of falling snowflakes, however, is as inclusively cosy as the Christmas card brought to life that Adrian Rees' set so resembles. Even Scrooge's creepy presence can't dim such an image as h

 Clarke Peters is sitting on a beach in Rhodes. In half an hour's time the sun will set and the actor and writer whose profile has rocketed in the last year via his portrayal of righteous cop Lester Freamon in David Simon's sleeper hit TV drama, The Wire, will have spent another day in paradise. This time last week, Peters was in Edinburgh directing a very different kind of TV star, Denise Van Outen, in her Jackie Clune scripted solo show, Blondes, and expounding about a new wave of musical theatre on The Culture Show. Somewhere in-between the two, Peters has managed to fit in two days filming on a new big screen version of Gulliver's Travels with Jack Black. Peters will be jetting back to Edinburgh this weekend, however, for two very special mid-morning Question and Answer sessions, designed specifically with Wire fans in mind. That these are set to take place in The Underbelly's biggest space, The Udderbelly, is testament to just how much The Wire - the fiv

One of Lee Breuer’s sons was about three years old when the American theatre director started work on his version of JM Barrie’s Peter And Wendy with the New York-based Mabou Mines company. At that time, Mabou Mines were only playing the first act of the show that arrives in its full form as the last major component of the Edinburgh International Festival’s drama programme at the beginning of September. By the time Breuer introduced a second act, some five years into the play’s development, another son had arrived and was again three years old at the time Peter And Wendy was being rehearsed. Rather than becoming an attention-seeking distraction from the work at hand, the presence of Breuer’s infant children opened his eyes to what would become a crucial factor in his new take on Peter Pan. “It became deeply personal,” he says in his tough-guy New York drawl. “From having my sons around, it dawned on me that Peter wasn’t the nine-year-old that JM

Going west isn't so much a perennial American pastime as a way of life. Ask Robert Ashley, the New York-based composer of spoken word opera, whose back catalogue over the past quarter of a century is largely made up of a mammoth trilogy of Perfect Lives, Atalanta - Acts of God and Now Eleanor's Idea, which obliquely maps out a cross-country quest in search of enlightenment. The final part of the trilogy is itself divided into four parts, each focusing on the response of one particular character after the banks run out of money. With the fourth part, Foreign Experiences, at Tramway for one night this weekend, some 15 years after its premiere, such prescience in relation to the current global economy is purely accidental. "When I started it," says 79-year-old Ashley in a slow, considered voice somewhat at odds with the 72-beats-per-minute tempo his work is scored for, "I was interested in the modern notion of religion in the US, where it seemed to

On April 27 th 2016, eight days before the May 2016 Scottish Parliament Election, I went along to a Cultural Hustings which had been organised by the Scottish Artists Union at Out of the Blue in Edinburgh. The Scottish Artists Union is a visual artists lobbying body set up like other trade unions such as Equity and the Musicians Union to protect the employment rights of its members, particularly where issues of professional fees are concerned. Out of the Blue is a community-based arts trust based in an old army drill hall in Leith. It is a mixture of studios, exhibition and meeting spaces and offices for small arts organisations. There is a cafe there too, and there's music sometimes as well, though nothing too late or too loud, because it's in a residential area. A promenade production of the stage adaptation of Irvine Welsh's novel, Trainspotting, was on there as well, which was produced by a young unfunded theatre company called In-Yer-Face Theatre. Out of the Blu

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars “What's the use of a story with no pictures?” asks the precocious heroine of Anthony Neilson's new adaptation of Lewis Carroll's mind-expanding classic, programmed as the Lyceum's Christmas show this year. Wise beyond her years, young Alice's statement accidentally pinpoints the power of the sort of theatre which Neilson has made his own. Carroll's logic-jumping fantasia is the perfect starting point for such a theatrical philosophy, as Neilson's own production of his play presents a vivid world of cartoon grotesques and Twilight Zone style projections as Alice takes her hallucinatory trip down the rabbit hole. It begins, however, in a sunny English idyll, where Jess Peet's Alice can barely stay awake for her outdoor lessons. Having been ushered in by a wheezy organ refrain as miniature hot air balloons hang over the circular lawn below, the moments up to Alice seeing a giant rabbit walking towards her a

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars Ten years have passed since Catherine Johnson's ABBA-inspired play with songs last visited Edinburgh, and seventeen since Phyllida Lloyd's original production kick-started a wave of so-called jukebox musicals. As this touring revival has already made clear as it beds down for a holiday run that sees it go right through to the new year, time has not dimmed its audience's enthusiasm for what at moments looks like the ultimate feelgood affair. Set on a magical Greek island where Sara Poyzer's tavern-owning ex-pat Donna holds court, her daughter Sophie lures three men who may be her father to the island as guests at her wedding to handsome himbo Sky. As Donna's old gal pals turn up, reunions of both a comic as well as an awkward kind add to a tempestuous mix of romance, reconciliation and identity crises all round. Even without ABBA's back catalogue stringing the narrative together, Johnson's script has a common t