Coffee-Table Notes

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Joy, gaiety and a complete absence of complicated women. Such a holy trinity is what King Charles II declares it takes to get him into the royal box of the seventeenth century playhouse that looms over the lushly lit stage in Jessica Swale's Olivier Award winning historical romp. More fool him, as by this time a star has already been born in the form of wise-cracking orange seller Nell. Lured from heckling in the cheap seats, Nell takes the stage herself in a theatre scene reinvented for a new age. Old-school traditionalists, meanwhile, are suitably scandalised in this touring version of Christopher Luscombe's lavish production, first seen at Shakespeare's Globe and revived here by English Touring Theatre. What follows is a gorgeously realised yarn that is part costume drama, part rom-com and part theatrical in-joke laced with sit-com styled one-liners worthy of Blackadder. As the most regal of stage-door Johnnies in sea

Over thirty-odd years, Sean Dickson's musical journey has been a wonder to behold. From fronting Buzzcocks inspired Glasgow shamblers turned Baggy love-gods t he Soup Dragons, Dickson's sideways move to psych-pop troupe The High Fidelity was nothing compared to the full-blown damascene dance-floor conversion that eventually followed. Since then, Dickson's euphoric adventures as a DJ and producer under the Hifi Sean moniker have sounded as far away from the Bellshill scene he came out of as can be. 2016's Ft. album capitalised on Dickson's eclectic connections with a hands-in-the-air grab-bag of beat-heavy confections featuring an all-star cast of guest vocalists and artistes. These range d from Yoko Ono and Bootsy Collins to B52 Fred Schneider singing about trucks and Suicide's Alan Vega 's last recording . As if such an array of synthesised soul, poppers-friendly floor-fillers and banging techno- abstractions wasn't out there enough, there wa

When Jessica Swale decided to write a play about Nell Gwynn, she wanted to get beyond the cartoon image of English history's most famous orange seller, who went on to become the mistress of King Charles II. The result was a comedy that opened at Shakespeare's Globe before transferring to the West End, where it won the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 2016. Revived by English Touring Theatre for its current tour, Swale's play opens in Edinburgh tonight, when audiences should get a chance to see Nell in more depth than is often portrayed. “Nell Gwynn was a really important actress,” says Swale. “I don't think there's been much about her onstage or screen that presents her as anything other than a tart with a heart. Most people have heard of her without really knowing anything about her, and only really think of her as this orange seller who married the king, but she was so much more than that. “The play is very much Nell's story. We see her as a young

Edinburgh International Science Festival @ Usher Hall, Edinburgh Wednesday April 12th 2017 “This will always be for Yuri,” says a disembodied laptop-generated voice, sounding like a cross between a more pukka Stephen Hawking and a badly spliced old-school Pearl & Dean cinema ad for a local steakhouse, “but especially tonight.” Fifty-six years to the day since Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to journey to outer space when his craft orbited the earth on April 12 th 1961, Public Service Broadcasting's musical tribute that follows, simply named Gagarin , is suitably epic. As is too the whole of PSB's The Race for Space album, performed in full at the end of a two-year voyage since the record's release as part of Edinburgh International Science Festival. As with their debut EP The War Room and follow-up album Inform-Educate-Entertain , PSB's mix of vintage newsreel samples and warm instrumental infusions on The Race for Space tap int

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars For anyone reading this, chances are all information, data or opinion that follows will already have been documented and archived somewhere we may not know about. Likewise for the show itself, an hour-long dramatic dissection of surveillance culture past, present and future, presented here by Proto-type Theatre with input from several producing partners, including Tramway, Glasgow. Maybe that's why the two young women who greet the audience in the Tron's bunker-like Changing House space are wearing pink, Pussy Riot style balaclavas. As they peer out from behind a desk loaded with notes, their hidden faces are enlarged on the screen next to them by way of a live video feed. As with the overload of information that follows, once the masks are off, identities are revealed alongside a life-hack's worth of leaks. The show's devisers and performers Rachel Baynton and Gillian Lees move from the Cold War to 9/11 and beyond without eve

Byre Theatre, St Andrews Three stars The barn may initially appear biblical at the opening of Bea Roberts' play, revived for a short tour of the Scottish countryside after being seen in London and Bristol throughout 2015. The wise men who occupy it, however, have precious few gifts left to give in an at times brutal treatise on country matters. It begins in 2001, when South Devon vet Jeff and farmer Michael are holed up with Michael's cattle in the thick of the foot and mouth scare that decimated the rural landscape at the time. As the pair spar their way through a crisis that lays bare their more personal losses, the lives of both men are changed forever as they find some kind of grim solidarity amongst all the despair. Paul Robinson's original production for Theatre503 and Bristol Old Vic is overseen here by a partnership of Perth Theatre and Theatre by the Lake, Keswick. Over its seventy-five minutes, the play highlights a way of life under siege in a rural worl

Sandy Thomson was halfway through writing her new play, Monstrous Bodies, when news broke of the then presidential candidate Donald Trump's latest indiscretion. Following a stream of derogatory remarks about women and numerous allegations of sexual assault, the Washington Post released a recording from 2005. This captured Trump making off-camera remarks captured by the Access Hollywood show about how when you're apparently a star like him, you can 'Grab them by the pussy'. When Thomson heard the remarks, she was so incensed that it turned her play upside down. “I was affronted,” says Thomson, the founder and driving force behind the Angus-based Poorboy Theatre Company, who are co-producing Monstrous Bodies with Dundee Rep, where the play opens next weekend. “I was affronted that thirteen allegations of sexual assault hadn't stopped him, and I was affronted that he could say all those things he did about women, and it still didn't stop him.” Up until that p