Coffee-Table Notes

The Collector Gilded Balloon Three stars What do you do when the only way to earn a living is to work for the enemy? This is the dilemma for Nazir, the hip hop loving translator who provides the heart of Henry Naylor's new play set in Iraq in 2003. Nazir's story is told by way of three cut-up monologues spoken in turn by his partner, Zoya, and the two American army interrogators he translates for. With humanity turning to brutality, Nazir is effectively outed by one of the army captives and made a pariah that changes his and Zoya's lives forever. There is some neat writing in Naylor's timely script, which is given a strong delivery by Ritu Arya, Wiliam Reay and Lesley Harcourt. There are probably more imaginative ways of moving from one monologue to the other than simply turning the lights off as the actors shuffle on and off stage in Naylor's own production An understated power prevails, however, in a piece that highlights the potentially destructive aftermath of l

Sandy's Boxing Gym in Craigmillar might not know what hits it this week when Common Wealth Theatre Company move their new show in there for its Edinburgh Festival Fringe run. No Guts, No Heart, No Glory, after all, isn't a typical look at the power and the glory of one to one combat inside the squared circle. Evie Manning's production of Aisha Zia's script is not only about women boxers, but Muslim women boxers who also happen to be champions. “It all stems from Our Glass House,” Manning says of Common Wealth's previous Edinburgh show, a site-specific piece about domestic abuse performed in an empty house in Wester Hailes. “After we did it, we had a lot of conversations about representations of women onstage, and we decided that we wanted to focus our next piece on strong role models for women and what they can achieve.” With Zia also keen to do a piece based around young Asian women, Manning somewhat fortuitously met a Muslim neighbour in Bradford who was a boxer.

Royal Lyceum Theatre Four stars “All artists are afraid,” says the ageing actor early on in this new English translation of Austrian literary giant Thomas Bernhard's mid 1970s dramatic treatise on life, art and an actor's lot. Subtitled A portrait of the artist as an old man, Bernhard's play has the title character turn up at a wood-panelled Ostend hotel on New Year's Eve while a storm rages outside. As played by Peter Eyre, Minetti makes his entrance quietly enough, but, as he' tells anyone who pretends to listen, he's here to meet a noted theatre director, who looks set to cast him as King Lear thirty years after he turned his back on the classics and killed his career. As he waits, Minetti cuts a hangdog figure who plays to an ever changing audience of drunken revellers while he waits, locked in a limbo of his own making, out of step and out of time. At first he accosts a woman in a red dress lost in her own champagne fuelled reverie. Later it's a young w

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is laughing. Sitting in the New York apartment now called home on one of the hottest day of the year, for the artist once decried in the Houses of Parliament alongside others participating in a 1976 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts called Prostitution as 'wreckers of civilisation', it's a laugh that's justified. The man who gifted Breyer P-Orridge and fellow members of nascent industrial band, Throbbing Gristle, such a damning soubriquet, after all, was Scottish Conservative MP, the late Sir Nicholas Fairbairn. The flamboyant sexual libertine, former Chair of the Traverse Theatre and ex member of the Edinburgh Festival Council's name has recently been mentioned in reports highlighting the ongoing alleged VIP paedophilia scandal, and Breyer P-Orridge for one feels vindicated. “Why were they so angry at us researching sex magick and other forms of sexuality?” ponders Breyer P-Orridge, who was effectively exiled from the

Broth Traverse Theatre Three stars The Traverse Breakfast Plays have become a 9am Fringe fixture over the last few years. This year's season of six plays have been selected and developed from The Traverse 50, Scotland's new writing theatre's year-long initiative designed to develop and hone writers' playwriting skills. First out the traps is this brutally dark look at domestic abuse in a family which has somewhat miraculously stayed together despite the behaviour of its drunken head of the house. As with the soup on the stove at the start of Emma Callander's script-in-hand work-in-progress production, tensions betweeen the three generations of women who may or may not have battered Jimmy Chisholm's unreconstructed patriarch into submission are simmering to boiling point. This is seriously grown-up stuff from Primrose, who takes all the trappings of dour domestic drama and, as the likes of Martin McDonagh has done before him, explodes it into u

Summerhall Three stars Neil Cooper It probably isn't essential for audiences to know the inner workings of eighteenth century French philosopher  Denis Diderot's novel, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, before coming to see the Hof van Eede company's contribution to the Fringe's Big in Belgium strand, but it might help. Jacques, after all, was one of the earliest known novels to mix up the fictional form in a way that questioned the very essence of what a novel could be whilst also offering up a treatise on free will. Post-modernism before it's time, as one of this show's scholarly protagonists wryly observes. Things begin casually, with a bookish young man and woman who may or may not be a couple declaring their intention to introduce Diderot's ideas to us as they might in a lecture or a book group. Over the next hour of flirtation, bickering, misunderstandings and sixth form level misinterpretations of personal politics, the pair skirt

When Thomas Bernard wrote his play, Minetti, for veteran actor Bernhard Minetti in 1976, it introduced a new generation to a performer whose career had seen him play on all of Germany's major stages in the post Second World War years. Regarded as 'the king of theatre', and with an ego to match such a claim, Minetti joined the Schillertheatre in Berlin in 1957. By the time he first worked with Bernhard in 1974 aged sixty-nine, however, as a cantankerous circus ringmaster in The Force of Habit, Minetti's career was in need of a kickstart. Even though it wasn't directly about him, Minetti the play was it. For an equally provocative Bernhard, this new solo piece about an actor in decline stuck in the lobby of a New York hotel on New Year's Eve became a platform for his own ideas on life and art. Who better to become his voice than an old-time actor who echoed his own frustrations with the world, which the literary and theatrical establishment became a microcosm of.