Coffee-Table Notes

The Arches, Glasgow Three stars On the weekend before the Scottish independence referendum, it perhaps wasn't unusual to witness someone all Bravehearted up in kilt and Saltire face-paint going in to see a play called Wallace. Especially when the play in question is the centrepiece of a mini referendum festival thrown by the Arches called Early Days. As it turns out, the audience member in question is one Wallace Williamson, a very special guest of The Great Cause, a political chat show that forms the first part of Rob Drummond's timely new play. Also in attendance is an all too familiar parcel of rogues, including Honourable Members from the SNP and Conservative Party, a newspaper scandal-monger, a controversial comedian and the show's charming hostess herself. As awkward questions are asked by a mix of plants and the actual audience, some very dirty laundry is aired, revealing the flawed human face behind the professional political classes.  A second act lurch into histor

Dundee Contemporary Arts until November 9th Four stars Playing God appears to come natural to Heather Phillipson as the London-born poet, performer, sculptor and video artist gets back to nature by way of a jungle full of photographic cut-out dioramas and big-screen video cut-ups that suggests hat the so-called natural world is not so much being tamed as remixed and reimagined. Shown as part of the DCA's Discovery Film Festival, Phillipson's series of multi-dimensional configurations move from Eden to Heaven, Hell and other promised lands on earth as assorted fruits of the original sin are blown up to juicily epic proportions. Wildlife, on the other hand, look shrunken and out of proportion, while upside-down human limbs offer something else to chew on as giraffes and pink flamingoes graze. On the flipside of what are in fact a set of artfully arranged wooden flats, the same swirly day-glo writing that provides animated captions to the films point up the film-set style fakery o

When DC Jackson asked David Ireland what might be the Belfast-born actor and playwright's ideal part, for a man who had nominally quit the stage to concentrate on writing, it was a no-brainer. “I said I'd love to play a psychopathic loyalist gun-man,” Ireland remembers, “because it seemed that I only ever got to play losers.” Ireland's declaration clearly lodged inside Jackson's pop culture infested brain just as a bullet might. The result is The Killing of Johnny Glendenning, Jackson's scurrilous comedy which looks at the celebrity status of an imaginary set of Glasgow hard-men who live the high-life while make-believing they're in a gangster film. Ireland plays the title character in a play, which opens the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh's Autumn season with what one suspects will be a bang before transferring to the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow. An Ulster gunman and self-publicist extraordinaire, Johnny is headed for the mother of all show

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars It is an inspired idea, having young drama students on the verge of going out into the world work with seasoned professional playwrights to develop brand new works that stretch the talents of all involved. So it is with the three new short plays by Clare Duffy, Jo Clifford and Isabel Wright performed and directed as a series of double bills by the graduates of the Royal Conservatoire Scotland 's MA Classical and Contemporary Text course with support from Playwrights' Studio Scotland. Clare Duffy's 1914 Machine starts off looking like a girl's own adventure yarn, as female spy La Marquise flies across the English channel to deliver secret war plans to the government, and ends up lurching into a science-fiction future in which everyone communicates through screens. Inbetween, La Marquise flies high with a pre-war bohemian set for whom she supplies cocaine and some stolen radium that might just hold the key to the fut

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Three stars A giant crucifix flanked by The Ten Commandments is the opening gambit of director Patrick Sandford's wryly observed and all too rare revival of James Bridie's World War Two era philosophical inquiry into good and evil in a Wee Free Highland Manse. If this sounds like a wilfully portentious statement, once the two squaddies stationed there, Cohen and Cully, hook up with the minister McCrimmon's flighty niece Jean and embark on a game that conjures up the Devil himself, the play more resembles a fantastical TV show peopled by sophisticated demons who spout long-winded monologues in pursuit of the souls of the youthful and equally articulate gang tasked to thwart them. If Bridie unwittingly penned an admittedly hokey template for Buffy, Charmed, et al, Sandford's production remains rooted in the era it was written in. Dougal Lee's smooth-talking Mr Bolfry breezes into the manse's Sunday night austerity and offers up a litany

Dundee Rep Four stars When actor Robbie Jack takes the microphone as Tennessee Williams' alter-ego Tom Wingfield at the start of Jemima Levick's post-modern tinged revival of Williams' 1944 semi-autobiographical full-length debut, he could be the compere of some latter day live art confessional cabaret night channelling the spirits of Lenny Bruce and Eric Bogosian. As Jack signals for the blank wall of Alex Lowde's clean-lined set to raise, it's an unexpected opening to an openly sentimental affair more regularly gift-wrapped in more traditional theatrical ribbons and bows. Here, however, as type-written keywords from the script are projected above to signal moments within moments, the play becomes Tom's work in progress which he writes ever larger with every re-enactment he conjures up in dreams haunted by  his mother Amanda and sister Laura. The Wingfield apartment may be small, but it provides an escape route for all. For Irene Macdougall's Amanda, foreve

Perth Concert Hall Three stars Like many women of her generation, there is something tragic about Chris Guthrie, the heroine of Lewis Grassic Gibbons' A Scots Quair trilogy of novels. Or at least that seems to be the case in this new touring co-production between the enterprising Sell A Door Theatre Company and Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock, of Alastair Cording's evergreen stage adaptation of the trilogy's first and best known part. Here, book-loving free-spirit Chris, living off the land with her bullying father John, ferociously played by Alan McHugh, and eternally pregnant mother Jean, is forced to put aside her windswept ideals and grow up too soon as she finds herself shunted by circumstance from one patriarchy to another. Even the emancipation her inheritance provides can't save her from the brutalising effects of little boys games, although by the end, she finally seems to have found salvation of sorts. The corrugated iron skyline of Jan Bee Brown's set lends