Coffee-Table Notes

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars All the pink ladies, single or otherwise, are in the house for the touring revival of Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey's lovingly irreverent homage to the seemingly more innocent 1950s that went on to be the world's biggest musical and a smash movie too. With a fistful of hit songs and a pastel coloured cartoon style staging, David Gilmore's revisitation of his 1993 London production is a dazzling depiction of teenage dreams, where even the bad girls and boys are good. Despite this, it zones in on the heartbreak as much as the highs of the term time romance between tough guy Danny, nice girl Sandy and the gang. With The Wanted's Tom Parker donning Danny's leather jacket with a knowing swagger, Over the Rainbow winner Danielle Hope's Sandy isn't quite so sickly sweet as sometimes played, and ex East Ender Louisa Lytton's Rizzo is a beatnik in waiting. Set pieces are writ large, from the souped-up thrust of Greased

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars The sound and thunder of some very English and very heavy weather opens Chris Hannan's play, that puts real life disgraced Tory MP Enoch Powell at the heart of a debate about whether our differences can ever be reconciled. Powell, of course, was the bi-lingual, classics quoting scholar, whose so-called rivers of blood speech in 1968 was a dog-whistle to the sort of legitimised intolerance which has looked creepingly familiar of late. One of those who suffered is Rose, the woman of colour who grew up conscious of Powell's demonisation of her kind. As played by Amelia Donkor, Rose turns out to have a few prejudices of her own, even as she forms an unholy alliance with Sofia, the right wing academic she usurped. Moving between the late 1960s build-up to Powell's speech and 1992, Roxana Silbert's new staging of her 2016 Birmingham Rep production frames the action against Ti Green's tree-lined urban idyll and monumenta

Peter Hall – theatre, film and opera director Born November 22 1930; died September 11 2017 Without Peter Hall, who has died aged 86, the theatre world would be a very different place. Not only did Hall direct the first English language production of Samuel Beckett's era defining play, Waiting For Godot, when he was only twenty-four. Before he was thirty he had founded the Royal Shakespeare Company, and would go on to take over from Laurence Olivier at the helm of the National Theatre, overseeing the company's turbulent move to purpose built premises on London's South Bank. For the next half century Hall moved from precocious young mover and shaker to elder statesman, be it at Glyndebourne, where he oversaw numerous world class productions, or latterly with his own Peter Hall Company. He returned to the National for the last time in 2011 to celebrate his 80 th birthday with a production of Twelfth Night. His daughter Rebecca played Viola. Bearded, leather jacketed

Holger Czukay – bass player, electronicist, composer Born March 24 1938: died September 5 2017 Holger Czukay, who has been found dead in his apartment aged 79, was much more than a bass player. Whilst with Can, the post hippy purveyors of a form of cosmic free-form rock he co-founded in 1968, the former student of radical composer Karlheinz Stockhausen helped define the band's propulsive and hypnotic rhythmic power alongside drummer Jaki Leibezeit. It was Czukay's work in the studio as editor and engineer, however, that helped shape and focus the band's surprisingly funky sound. His pioneering experiments with sampling, electronics and what came to be known as world music revealed a playful nature that coursed through both his solo and collaborative work. Czukay was born in what was then the Free City of Danzig, the Baltic port which later became part of Poland as Gdansk. Forced to flee with his parents as the Russians advanced, Czukay recalled arriving in Berli

The last time Polish theatrical whirlwind Helena Kaut-Howson directed a play in Glasgow, it was a piece called Werewolves. Her 1999 production of fellow Pole Teresa Lubkiewicz's play was for the short-lived Theatre Archipelago company. The initiative was intended as a reinvention of Communicado, which until then had been led since its inception by company founder Gerry Mulgrew. Werewolves was a play about ghosts gatecrashing a remote farmhouse party, and had already been published in 1978 by Kaut-Howson, who had directed productions of the play in Galway, Montreal and London. Eighteen years on, Kaut-Howson returns to Scotland with another shaggy dog story. Faithful Ruslan: The Story of A Guard Dog has been adapted by Kaut-Howson from the novel written during the 1970s by Russian dissident Georgi Vladimov. It is narrated by an Alsation let off the leash following the death of Stalin and the subsequent closure of the gulags, where, under military supervision, the dog and his pack

Cooper Gallery, Dundee, September 29th-October 7 th In December 2016, Laura Mulvey gave a keynote address at the Cooper Gallery as part of the 12hr Action Group symposium. This was the culmination to Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event?, the gallery's two chapter sprawl through feminist art since the 1970s. This September, the veteran feminist film theorist, who first introduced the notion of the male gaze to cinematic critique, returns to Dundee with her partner in art and life, Peter Wollen, for a series of screenings of some of the key films they made together. Urgency and Possibility: Counter Cinema in the 70s and 80s will show five films, dating from Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons, made in 1974, through to 1982's Crystal Amazons. Like them, 1977's Riddles of the Sphinx is feature length, while the shorter Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1981) will also be screened. The season will open with a screening of the pair's 1980 film, AMY!, preceded b

Adam Smith Theatre, Kirkcaldy Four stars The Galloway's Mince routine that forms a kind of climax to Tony Roper's relentlessly joyous masterpiece is probably one of the greatest comedy routines to have graced a stage over the last three decades. This side-splitting yarn that sees Roper's quartet of heroines solve one of life's great domestic mysteries was almost upstaged on Friday's opening night of the play's thirtieth anniversary tour by something equally explosive. Whatever technical hiccup caused the loud bang, barely a beat was missed before Mrs Culfeathers, Dolly, Margrit and Doreen dead-panned it to its hilarious conclusion. Such is the unbreakable power of Roper's play, which sets out its store in a 1950 Glasgow wash-house on Hogmanay, and proceeds to riff its way to closing time. This is done in Roper's own production for producers Neil Laidlaw and Jason Haigh-Ellery with a set of meticulously timed comic turns that colour in an entire s