Coffee-Table Notes

First world problems abound in The Whip Hand, Douglas Maxwell's new play, a co-production between the Traverse and Birmingham Rep in association with the National Theatre of Scotland. It opens in Lorenzo and Arlene's swish living room, where Arlene's ex Dougie has just turned fifty, and has a big announcement to make. Arlene and Dougie's daughter Molly is about to go to university, while Dougie's sister's son Aaron is equally smart, but appears to have mis-spent his youth in the pub with Dougie. While Louise Ludgate's blousy Arlene and Richard Conlon's artsy flibbertigibbet Lorenzo have embraced the ghastly pseudo hipster posturing of craft ale culture, Jonathan Watson's heroically unreconstructed Dougie sticks strictly to old-school tinnies. In Tessa Walker's production, what starts out as sit-com style awkwardness awash with wicked one-liners erupts into an explosive treatise on class, racial prejudice, social aspirations, acquired familial

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Distant drums usher in the first of two special Edinburgh International Festival shows by PJ Harvey and a nine piece band performing Harvey's 2016 album, The Hope Six Demolition Project. Conceived during trips to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington DC with film maker and photographer Seamus Murphy, the result was a record as much journalese as work of art. It tapped into global concerns of poverty and the effects of war by way of a swathe of musical influences fleshed out with a driving percussive edge. The title itself was drawn from a project in Washington where rundown housing was demolished to make way for new dwellings. The result was that the original residents were priced out of the neighbourhood. Such is the universal curse of gentrification and social cleansing.   Perhaps this is why Harvey and her black clad nine piece band march onstage like they're leading a funeral parade, martial drums to the fore. Harvey herself walks barel

Death becomes Pauline Goldsmith. Or at least that's how it seems anyway, as the Belfast born actress and writer revives her funeral-based solo show which she first performed it at the turn of the millennium. In the years since she first did the show, which looks at the ritual of a wake in tragi-comic fashion, Glasgow based Goldsmith has proved herself to be one of the country's most adventurous performers. With a track record which has seen her playing Samuel Beckett's solo piece, Not I, at the Arches to regular stints with Vanishing Point theatre company, with whom she is a creative associate, Goldsmith has developed a willingness t o fly without a safety net. Bright Colours Only itself was somewhat ahead of the current wave of solo theatre performers. By returning to it, Goldsmith is part taking stock of her own mortality. “If I wait much longer, it's going to be too near the knuckle,” she says. “Me being in a coffin when I'm at death's door myself mig

Anyone who is a fan of the international phenomenon of White Rabbit Red rabbit since it first appeared several years ago should immediately rush to Nassim , Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour's latest work. Like its predecessor, Soleimanpour's play features a different actor at every show performing a script they have never seen until that moment. In keeping with the spirit of the piece, it would be wrong to give away what happens next, except to say that the performer at the first show was Chris Thorpe, who leapt into proceedings with an all embracing vigour that saw him go willingly into the unknown. In some ways, such open-ness sums up everything about Soleimanpour's play for the Bush Theatre, London, which is introduced by director Omar Elerian. What follows is a delicate series of witty interactions, which gradually through Thorpe reveal a heartfelt plea for understanding through learning about cultures we might not initially understand. Soleimanpour doesn

There are some who have pre-conceived ideas about what to expect from Alan Ayckbourn. For many, the prolific writer and director of almost 80 plays is the high priest of English middle class mores, with his work awash with disaffected suburbanites falling apart in immaculately constructed if increasingly absurdist fashion. Few would suspect the now 78 year old Ayckbourn's latest work to be a six hour flight into dystopian speculative fiction told in two parts. This is exactly what they get, however, with The Divide, which forms a major component of Edinburgh International Festival's 70th anniversary theatre programme. Set a hundred years from now, Ayckbourn's vision for The Divide imagines a world decimated by a deadly virus that makes any contact between men and women fatal for both. In a country divided by gender, men wear white for their purity, while women dress in black as a mark of their sins. Given the state of the real world right now, such a scenario looks worrying

Signet Library, Edinburgh until August 27 Four stars Walking the full length of the Signet Library during this show of complementary photo essays by Czech born but French domiciled photographer Josef Koudelka, it initially feels as if you're striding through an airport lounge, that vast and teeming thoroughfare of free movement en route to arrivals and departures. Two rows of glass-topped display cabinets that contain the two displays disrupt the space. Placed there deliberately by human hand, they act as both barrier and gateway, each side in opposition and conjoined defiance. So it goes too for the contents of the cases, two monumental twenty metre long concertina books with their black and white pages laid out to tell a story of landscapes modified, remodelled and ultimately defiled in the name of progress. The first, Black Triangle (1994), charts how the Czech Republic's once heavily populated Ore mountain region was overwhelmed and gradually devastated by the co

In the spotlight, a man in a waistcoat stares the audience in the eye and tells us how lucky we are to be here, watching Thus Spoke... Three others – a man and two women – drape themselves around pillars at the edge of a big square of space as a wall of lights glows behind him. During the first man's reverie, he sprawls himself out on the floor, before a burst of raw blues by Jimi Hendrix punctuates the scene, acting as a bridge before the next person takes the mic to let rip, and on it goes, ad nauseum. Dating from 2014, and originally performed in French by Quebec's Groupe Gravel/Lepage, this ensemble piece of existential psycho-drama that forms part of the Canada Hub season is akin to a grown-up parlour game. Verbal riffs tumble out without any filter, as if senses have been over-stimulated somehow. The physical tics that accompany each amplified speech suggests those onstage are trying to climb out of their own skin. This becomes more like a series of routines from what m