Coffee-Table Notes

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It may be a tad early in the year for Shakespeare's sunniest rom-com to come blinking into the light, but that hasn't stopped the all-male Propeller company from hitting the road with the frothiest of double bills, with Ed Hall's productions of the Dream and The Comedy of Errors playing the King's on alternate nights. Neither does it stop the array of long-john clad fairies, who drape themselves about a netting-lined stage before a stripey-tighted Robin Goodfellow, as Puck is credited here, bursts out of a box feet first as if from an upside-down toybox come to life. As the cast of fourteen flit between the play's three worlds, what follows resembles a 1980s alternative comedy troupe doing an elaborately choreographed role-play. At first, Joseph Chance's Robin seems to call the shots, click-clacking chaos into the four young lovers all-night exploits with a wooden rattle. Soon it's Darrell Brockis' Oberon

Dundee Rep Three stars Life in a hospital ward can play tricks on you. Especially when you've had a stroke like ageing matriarch Catherine, the tough cookie at the heart of Stuart Paterson's new play, directed by Philip Howard in a temporary studio space that seats the audience on the theatre's main stage either side of the action. Used to calling the shots running her own haulage firm, Catherine is now in a bed-ridden haze of medicated confusion, in which a steady stream of old loves seep from her dream-state with lifelike clarity even as she can barely recall her grandson's name. Doctors and nurses treat her with a professional briskness as her husband Duncan and daughter Margaret attempt to salvage a few precious moments. At the centre of this life in decline is a towering performance from Ann Louise Ross, who invests Catherine with a hard-headed steeliness that slips at crucial moments to reveal an emotional vulnerability, before she pulls herself toget

In 1493, a youthful King James 1V of Scotland embarked on a curious experiment, in which he decamped two infant children to Inchkeith Island on the Firth of Forth in the care of a mute woman. The point of the exercise for the curious monarch was to determine how the children might learn language while isolated from the rest of the world, and if, in its pure state, their utterances were in fact the language of the gods. Fast forward five hundred years or so, and a couple of artists equally as curious as King James pick up on what remains a bizarre incident. Things become even stranger when the artists look into what happened when British troops were stationed on Inchkeith during the Second World War. A Freedom of Information request lodged with the Ministry of Defence about their own interests in language deprivation casts up some apparently startling material, which the pair determine to make public. The result of all this is The Forbidden Experiment, the latest dramatic inquiry

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars It's the voice of God you hear first in Vanishing Point's exquisitely realised impressionistic evocation of the life and times of the poet and song-writer whose influence on popular culture over the last half century is only now being fully recognised. It's a jolly voice compared to the deadpan melancholy of Ivor Cutler's own, but this unseen presence points up Cutler's own uneasy relationship with religious beliefs of all persuasions, even as this co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland is as much a spiritual meditation as any liturgy. Using a framing device of an actual meeting between actor Sandy Grierson, who plays Cutler, with Cutler's partner Phyllis King below the Kentish Town flat where Cutler once lived, the first half is a celestial radio play that shows how a dreamy boy from Ibrox went from life as a pilot and a teacher to an underground cult figure and star of TV and radio. These scenes give us

The squall of feedback that pierces across the auditorium of Eden Court Theatre in Inverness may only last a few seconds, but, it’s enough to cause a brief commotion among anyone in the room. The cast and band are in the thick of rehearsals for The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutler, Vanishing Point theatre company’s impressionistic music homage to the Glasgow-born poet, singer and stalwart of the late John Peel’s radio programme, which - quite literally - speaks volumes. Cutler was, after all, a member of the Noise Abatement Society, and claimed to loathe amplified music in all forms. The feedback is a consequence of a late-running sound-check caused by a piano’s exterior splintering in a way that rendered it unusable. A replacement piano found at short notice, a piano tuner was also required to before work could proceed. The band is led my musical director James Fortune, and includes multi-instrumentalist and recipient of a Herald Little Devil award Nick Pynn. Pynn, who

Time was that if you lived in Edinburgh it felt like you could see drummer Chris Corsano play live pretty much any night of the week. During his time living in the capital in the mid to late noughties, the New England-sired drummer whose collaborators range from former Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore to free jazz saxophonist Evan Parker was a ubiquitous figure here. Having hooked up with the city's fecund Noise scene, shows ranged from teaming up with assorted affiliates of the Giant Tank disorganisation, to duos with pedal steel vixen Heather Leigh Murray or bass player Massimo Pupillo of Italian power trio, Zu, to taking part in Arika's Resonant Spaces project. All this while touring the world with Bjork, whose Volta album Corsano appeared on. One particularly busy couple of weeks in 2007 saw Corsano play Edinburgh with female Noise duo Hockyfrilla, another Edinburgh date in a duo with former Geraldine Fibbers and Evangelista vocalist Carla Bozulich, supportin

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It's a strange sensation, hearing an actor open Max Stafford-Clark's production of Stella Feehily's impassioned call to arms to save the NHS with Socialist firebrand Aneurin Bevan's speech that launched this most treasured of institutions in 1948. A politician with ideals and integrity is such a rarity these days that it can't help but sound heroic. This is the case too watching a piece of political agit-prop, a form which not that long ago was considered to be passe, but which now appears to have been reborn for the age of austerity with a vigorous sense of righteous urgency. This is with good cause, as Feelihy proves in the play's central tale of one family's travails after their 90 year old mother Iris has a stroke. A sadly familiar story of over-crowded and understaffed hospital wards is punctuated by a series of sketch-like interludes, as Bevan and Winston Churchill step out of the audience to form a d