Coffee-Table Notes

Dundee Contemporary Arts until March 22 nd Four stars White light, white heat and pop art fun palaces are what initially spring to mind as one enters this biggest UK display to date by the French-born Quistrebert brothers to a mind-bending projection of op-art geometric patterns beamed onto canvas in a pitch-black room. Such black and white counterpoints in what is styled as Stripes 2 (2013) gives off the image of a well turned out chill-out room designed for sensory disorientation and altered states in ways many of DCA's shows have explored over recent years. In the main gallery there is plenty of space left between the paintings that make up the Overlight series (2015), on which are daubed thick-set layers of modelling paste mixed up with coatings of either gold, chrome or gold chrome. Inside these already shiny surfaces are embedded tiny LED lights, both coloured and clear. Parked next to each other, with two next door using a gritty powder used for high visibility r

In the Sun-filled rehearsal room on the top floor of Dundee Rep, a tender scene is being played out. On the floor, two young lovers are declaring undying devotion to each other. “We'll never ever leave each other,” the young man utters earnestly to his heart's desire as they hold on to each other, albeit somewhat gingerly. “My body is yours. Your body is mine,” he says, with her repeating his words back at him. Watching over the scene alongside assorted stage managers and crew is a woman who appears to be dressed in a pair of checked pyjamas. While choreographer Mark Smith negotiates the couple's movements as actors Miles Mitchell and Amy Conachan repeat the scene several times, the woman eventually can't help herself, and, as the “My body is yours” lines are being spoken, moves into the playing area and puts Mitchell's hands firmly onto Conachan's breasts. “Touch each other,” the woman says out loud. The woman is Jenny Sealey, who since 1997 has been

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Before the opening of Mark Thomson's new production of Bertolt Brecht's late-period masterpiece, seen here in a new translation by Alistair Beaton, the large ensemble cast begin to mill about the auditorium. Dressed down in jeans and hoodies, they chat with the audience as they enter, or else warm up their accordion playing in the box seats above Karen Tennant's expansive set, left wide-open with pianos and a drum kit arranged around a gallows and some pillars. As a plummy-voiced civil service type attempts to foster social engineering in a war-ravaged village, Sarah Swire's rock diva narrator breezes onstage, and the villagers become a multi-tasking musical theatre troupe, playing out the plight of servant girl Grusha, who flees an uprising with her Imelda Marcos-like mistress's forgotten child after pledging herself to soldier Simon. With Grusha's survival dependent on others, her story eventually gives way

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When a white-clad young woman lights a set of candles at the opening of Lucy Porter's sleeper hit of the 2014 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, she ushers us into a very different age of enlightenment to the world history normally allows us privy to. Our hosts, after all, are Polyhymnia, Thalia and Clio, the three founder members of The Fair Intellectual Club, a female-led secret society operating in Edinburgh in the early eighteenth century as a counterpoint to the men only hellfire clubs and salons that proliferated at the time. As our three fiercely intelligent graces engage with each other as much of their brand new world of history, philosophy and big ideas, their intellectual endeavours are only distracted by affairs of the heart, the wild new indulgence of chocolate and a looming matrimony which, as is so often the case, may break up the gang forever. Or not, as the case may be in what looks like a pre-cursor to the free university movemen

Travelling Gallery, Dundee until February 27 th , then touring Scotland Three stars It's appropriate that the opening dates of this seventeen week, seventy-eight venue bus-bound pre-show to the forthcoming V&A Museum of Design Dundee's purpose-built waterfront takeover are where they are. Flanked on one side by the Caird Hall, which once doubled up as a Moscow theatre in John Schlesinger 's 1983 TV film of Alan Bennett's An Englishman Abroad, and Tony and Susie Morrow's statue of DC Thomson's comic favourites Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx on the other, such monumental icons demonstrate exactly how the local could go global in a pre-digital age. Back on the bus, meanwhile, five artists and two studios showcase wares drawn from fashion, textiles, jewellery, gaming and software in an understated array of state-of-art displays. 3D is all the rage throughout, most notably via Anarkik3D Ltd's duo of Ann Marie Shillito and Xiaoqing Cao, whose Cloud

Perth Concert Hall Three stars The stage seems to be taking deep breaths at the start of the Sell A Door company's touring production of Jo Clifford's reimagining of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic split personality tale. If such amplified rumblings sound like they've been dredged up from Quatermass's pit, such allusions to dark futurescapes are all too fitting in Clifford's version, set in an shiny 2020 where all the measures right-wing fundamentalists aspire to have been set quietly in stone, steel and glass. Here cancer specialist Dr Jekyll is a celebrity saviour, a publicity-hungry charity runner who, away from the cameras, can't control his desires. Once he tests his wonder drug on himself, the rush of testosterone turns such everyday abuse into something even more predatory. Jekyll's alter-ego Mr Hyde is like a feral werewolf on heat, at one point humiliating his prey in what looks like a scene from Fifty Shades of Grey rendered as music ha

When the Sell A Door theatre company's touring production of Jo Clifford's futuristic take on Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde opens in Livingston tonight, theatre regulars could be forgiven for doing a double take at the schedules. Clifford's version, after all, arrives just a month before another new version, this time by Morna Pearson, appears in a production by the Lung Ha's company in association with Drake Music Scotland. Both playwrights take radical but very different approaches to Stevenson's classic split personality tale, which has seeped into mass consciousness by way of numerous interpretations of the story on stage, film, radio and television. Where Clifford has reimagined the story in an oppressive futurescape where Dr Jekyll is recast as a high-flying cancer specialist testing a new drug, Pearson has kept her version in a Victorian locale, but has chosen to relocated it to Edinburgh. Here she focuses