Coffee-Table Notes

Oran Mor, Glasgow Three stars When a convicted prisoner talks about how the real conspiracies in the country are not between trade unionists and workers, but with politicians and corporations protecting the wealthy few, and how trade unions may soon be illegal, you could be forgiven for thinking the words are spoken by some contemporary dissident. As it is, they are the parting shots from striking builders Des Warren and future comedy actor Ricky Tomlinson, who, along with twenty-two other men in 1972 following a volatile period of industrial unrest in the UK, were convicted on the nineteenth century law of 'conspiracy to intimidate and affray.' It is the plight of the men who became known as the Shrewsbury 24 that is the subject of Neil Gore's loose-knit musical play for Townsend Productions which is currently on a whistle-stop tour of the country that takes in North Edinburgh Arts Centre tonight and Blantyre Miners Welfare club on Sunday. With the help of just an overhe

Linda Griffiths - Playwright, Actress. Born October 7 1953; died September 21 2014 Linda Griffiths, who has died aged sixty following a battle with breast cancer, was as wildly inspiring as she was wildly inspired, both as an actress and a playwright in her native Canada and beyond. Nowhere was this more evident in the latter than in Age of Arousal, Griffiths' 2007 play set in a nineteenth century secretarial college where five women search for emancipation in very different ways. In her programme notes for Muriel Romanes' 2011 production of the play for the Stellar Quines theatre company at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, Griffiths herself described her work as being ”wildly inspired” by George Gissing's novel, The Odd Women, which she discovered in the dollar bin of a second-hand book-store. “I turned it over, and it on the back it said ‘Five Victorian Spinsters’,” Griffiths said in an interview with the Herald at the time of the production, “and I

Peter Grimes - Actor, Writer, Adventurer. Born July 16 1966; died October 4 2014. Peter Grimes, who has died aged forty-eight following a long illness, was more than just an actor. He was an adventurer and a seeker, whose empathy, both with the characters he played and with the audiences he played to, reflected his sense of melancholy clowning with a deep-set truth at its heart. This was the case whether appearing as Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, as Shere Khan the tiger in The Jungle Book, as Barrabas, the thief pardoned as Jesus Christ was crucified beside him, or in the title role in an  expansive production of Peer Gynt, Ibsen's classic fantastical romp of self-knowledge. These characters reflected Grimes' own imagination, which was almost certainly too wild to fit into a theatrical mainstream, and it was telling that most of the theatre companies he worked for were similarly maverick operations which embraced the creative freedo

It's half-past three on a Sunday afternoon outside the Olympia Theatre in Dublin's Dame Street, and a scrum of bodies is masquerading as an orderly queue. Despite all appearances to the contrary, the rammy isn't a result of some reality TV teen sensation about to appear in concert on the Olympia stage. It is instead down to the Galway-based Druid theatre company's brand new productions of two very different plays by veteran Irish playwright and another kind of legend, Tom Murphy. Druid's revival of Bailegangaire, which they first presented in 1985, was a mighty enough proposition by itself for this year's Dublin Theatre Festival, which ended this weekend. A tale of a senile old woman telling a story she refuses to finish as her two-grand-daughters navigate their lives around her has become a modern classic. Paired with a new play, Brigit, a prequel of sorts featuring the characters from Bailegangaire thirty years earlier was an even more tantalising prospect.

There's something of a homecoming feel to Tony Cownie's appointment as associate director of Cumbernauld Theatre while artistic director Ed Robson goes on sabbatical for a year sourcing theatre abroad. It was in the former farm cottages situated in the local park, after all, where the director and actor made his professional debut in the late Tom McGrath's play, The Flitting. That was back in 1990, since when Cownie has carved out a successful career as a comic actor with edge, with roles varying from the Porter in Macbeth to an award-winning turn as the troubled Kenny in Mark Thomson's play, A Madman Sings To The Moon. In the mid 1990s, Cownie moved into directing with Liz Lochhead's play, Shanghaied, which was later presented with a second act as Britannia Rules. This led to a fruitful relationship with the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, where he was encouraged by the late Kenny Ireland, and latterly under Thomson, Ireland's successor as artistic directo

Institut Francais, Edinburgh / E.D.S. Gallery, Edinburgh, both until November 1st. Three stars French fancies abound in this group show of work from nine artists – five French, four from Scotland - mixed and matched across two galleries that bridge the gaps between Edinburgh's New Town and the city's West End. This is made explicit in Samantha Boyes' florid constructions, which at first glance look like afternoon tea is being served until you notice the assorted stuffed bird's heads and other wild-life nesting within. This sets an anthropological tone that sees much monkeying around throughout. Where Jacob Kerray's chimps in military drag come on like dressing-up box tinpot dictators, Dix10's pistol-packing infant taking aim at a kids entertainer's dog-shaped balloons in fatal repose gives similarly subversive edge to such  otherwise cutie-pie subjects. Elsewhere, few do this better than Rachel Maclean, whose explorations of national identity by way of da

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars  From beneath a pile of cardboard surrounding a park bench, a middle-aged man comes crawling from the wreckage he calls home. A casualty of the rise and fall of the Linwood dream, when the manufacture of the Hillman Imp put the small Renfewshire town  on the map before the plug was pulled as bigger, shinier cars dazzled the paying public even more, the Man sees in the new millennium with a dram and tells his story. It's a sorry and sadly familiar tale he tells, of how he started on the production line straight from school as a wet-behind-the-ears youth, met his wife and built a life on the back of it, only to be unceremoniously thrown onto the scrap heap as capitalism failed and the dream faded. But it gets worse, as he loses his life-long love and hits the bottle, only to appear at least, to have survived, seriously bruised, but unbowed. At first glance, Paul Coulter's monologue, performed with steely commitment by Vincent Friell in a prod