Coffee-Table Notes

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars In a strip-lit room on a messy bed surrounded by hastily discarded clothes, two broken lovers cling to each other. Together alone, they share whispered secrets in their special place, far from the maddening crowd. The bag that sits at the foot of the bed marks the return of a man with a head full of ideas, while the woman who lies beside him eggs him on to take things all the way. Murder can be sexy in Dominic Hill's stripped down, studio-bound take on Shakespeare's Scottish play, in which, with the aid of dramaturg Frances Poet, the central couple's most intimate exchanges become a form of bonding before they go too far. The result is a sweaty, erotic and breathlessly self-destructive re-imagining that casts the Macbeths as serial killers driven to extremes by their own distress. A drawer brim-full of never played with toys suggests loss in the cruellest of ways. A tape recording brings further echoes to the fore later on,

Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow until November 19 th Four stars Opposites attract in this joint exhibition which forms part of the Czech Season in Scotland, and which has been programmed to coincide with this autumn's 2017 Season of Photography in Scotland. Where Markéta Othová's off-kilter still life studies are writ large, Aleksandra Vajd's images are miniscule in comparison. Just as Othová's pictures are figurative and recognisable even as they flirt with abstraction, Vajd's miniatures play with form, colour and concept. With each artist's work hung turnabout side by side, the pair mark out their territory by way of a spectrum of scale. Othová takes the seemingly ordinary and, peering at it from awkward angles, choreographs it with a sense of sculptural definition. An isometrically patterned rug sprawls into view. A small plate is placed inside a larger one so it resembles a target. The vast contours of a shadow dappled wheat-field seen from a hillo

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars Monty Python's public school Dada has become ingrained in the global psyche over the last half century. The veteran six-strong troupe's canon of classically educated sketches and routines have trickled down the generations to influence many of today's would-be absurdists. This may be why Eric Idle and composer John du Prez's stage musical of the team's 1975 big-screen Arthurian pastiche, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, feels so timeless, even as it has become a pension plan for its original creators. The young cast lolloping through David Buckroyd's production are able to mercilessly ham up the assortment of gormless knights, whose heroism in going off in search of the holy grail is consistently thwarted by the terminally mundane. Throw in a few rubbish villains, a Lady of the Lake akin to a latter day luvvied up diva, and a genuine crowd-pleaser transplanted from another Python movie, and the result is a kind

Collective Gallery, Edinburgh until November 5th Four stars The sheets of newspaper that cover up Collective's windows may give the impression of the gallery being shut down or else under new management giving it an end of tax year make-over. In truth, the recorded hubbub of bar-room chatter inside begs to differ, just as the light-boxes of half empty (or half full) pint glasses on the wall suggests the doors are open, if not all, hours, then at least as late as licensing laws allow. Look closely at the newspapers, and the windows themselves are mapped out with a series of pointers for what a good old-fashioned boozer, is, was and can be. These are new works by Toby Phips Lloyd and Andrew Wilson, aka Lloyd and Wilson, that form part of The Last Hour! Dreamt up, possibly over a pint, by curator Timothea Armour, and inspired by The Pub and the People, a mass observation study undertaken between 1938 and 1943, The Last Hour! features a series of events to explore pub life and i

King's Theatre, Glasgow Four stars There are few bands whose back-catalogue more suits the narrative trappings of a jukebox musical than Madness. This was proven in 2002 when writer Tim Firth took the Nutty Boys' canon of post-music hall social-realist vignettes and turned them into a back-street morality play for its time. It's a time that seems to have caught up with James Tobias' touring revival for Immersion Theatre Company and Damien Tracey Productions, as it follows the two paths its teenage hero Joe could take when he tries to impress his new girlfriend Sarah. Joe does this by breaking into one of the new luxury flats being built in his Camden 'hood, where predatory property developers look set to bulldoze away the street he grew up in. What follows on David Shields' red brick and rust-laden set is an infectiously honest yarn, in which Jason Kajdi's Joe is torn between paying his dues or else making a Faustian pact with George Sampson'

There have been many Macbeths who have moved through the portals of the Citizens Theatre. As with other things in the Gorbals based institution which will soon be undergoing a major make-over, if you're not careful they'll end up hanging round like ghosts. The trick, as the Citz's current artistic director Dominic Hill has discovered during his six year tenure, is to keep moving, to respect the past while creating something new for the moment, with one eye always on the future. So it goes with The Macbeths, Hill's stripped down take on Shakespeare's Scottish Play, which will be performed in the Citz's sixty-seater Circle Studio. Hill's new take on the play focuses solely on the play's central couple, and how vaulting ambition whispered in the bedroom ends up being the only thing that keeps them together, before the extreme actions that result from it destroys them both. “It's just about him and her,” says Hill on a break from rehearsing his two

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars The sound of prison doors clanging shut permeates throughout the auditorium from the start of Helena Kaut-Howson's epic stage version of Russian dissident writer Georgi Vladimov's allegorical novel, first translated into English by Michael Glenny. A caption projected high at the back of Pawel Dobrzycki's stark, steel-grey stage sets out the show's store. A thirteen-strong troupe line up in military formation to be put through their well-drilled paces as a fictitious set of modern day prisoners in Siberia who frame the action. This is in preparation to play-act inmates, guards and above all the dogs who roar through Vladimov's story of what happens to the most devoted servants to the cause once the prison camps are liberated following Stalin's death. Kaut-Howson charts Ruslan's story, from being unleashed into the world by his master, to ending up on the scrap-heap. Even when he's taken in by an equally displa