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The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars          When the Edinburgh New Town dwelling Jekyll clan pose for a family portrait at the start of Morna Pearson's loose-knit large-scale reinvention of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel for Lung Ha's Theatre Company, they look like pillars of respectable society. Scratch the surface, however, and beyond Dr Jeremy Jekyll's scientific dissections of the human brain, his wife Jane sees her life through an ever refreshed wine glass, while son William wastes his days in lieu of his inheritance. It is book-reading daughter Miriam who is most frustrated by her lot, however. Physically restrained by a too tight corset that becomes a symbol of a society that would rather keep women in their place, her fierce intelligence and ambitions for university combined with a blossoming womanhood sees her led astray by a black clad alter ego who unleashes her libertine spirit. Pearson has constructed a fascinating feminist reimagining of

Paul Vickers and The Leg – The Greengrocer (Pumpkintone/Alter Ego)

Four stars Don't be fooled by the troubadourish mediaevalisms of the jaunty guitar flourish that opens the third and much belated opus by the wildest junkyard auteurs to ever embark on a galloping collision course of surrealist lyrical fantasms and stumblebum musical fury. There may be church bells and rivers flowing inbetween the ten manic vignettes contained therein, but it's open all hours in this food-stuff-based quasi concept album co-released through King Creosote's new micro-label, and which can't help but inspire words like 'opus' and 'therein' as they tap into Vickers' wilfully archaic fairytale-kingdom sooth-saying. Within seconds, Vickers is phlegmatically regaling us with the poignant tale of 'My Trifle' with the guttural urgency of Kevin Coyne accompanied by the three-pronged assault of The Leg's Dan Mutch on guitar, Pete Harvey on cello and Alun Thomas on drums. Nothing more is to be taken as lightly, from the dera

The History Boys

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars It's an interesting time for the enterprising Sell A Door company to be reviving Alan Bennett's boy's school smash hit a decade after it first appeared before going on to global acclaim on stage and screen. In a post Yewtree environment when barely a day passes without reports of establishment-based indiscretions with minors, having a maverick teacher who touches up his teenage pupils on the back of his motorbike at a play's centre probably means something different today to how it did back then. Not that Bennett's 1980s-set play, in which Richard Hope's literature loving English master Hector prepares his very own crème de la crème for Oxbridge entrance exams, aims to shock. It is so pithily written, in fact, that Hector's downfall, when it comes, is treated with almost apologetic understatement. Kate Saxon's production heightens things from the off, with Hector's motorbike hanging at the centr

Christine Borland and Brody Condon – Circles of Focus

CCA, Glasgow, April 4th-May 17 th Donating body parts after death has long been a staple of the scientific world. Yet, despite occasional conceptual appropriations of blood and guts, art hasn't attracted a similarly civic-minded set of card-carrying citizens. Christine Borland and Brody Condon's 'Circles of Focus' project may go some way to change that, as the pair show off the fruits of their long-term researches in the shape of pit-fired ceramic sculptures, performance documentation and legal paperwork which will also function as a proposal to potential body donors who the artists have worked with over the past two years. “The work with clay began after spending time with a local experimental archaeologist in Orkney focused on the reconstruction of Neolithic pots, and later with similar jar coffin experts in Korea,” explains Condon, whose previous collaboration with Borland, 'Daughters of Decayed Tradesmen', was seen at the 2013 Edinburgh Art Festival. “

Possibilities of the Object: Experiments in Modern and Contemporary Brazilian Art

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh until May 25 th Four stars Revolutionary spirit in abundance pervades throughout this compendium of eighteen contemporary Brazilian artists, many of whom have been rarely seen outside their volatile homeland since the 1950s which some of the earliest works on show date from. It's all too telling in the downstairs gallery that each of the ten black cubes scattered around the centre of the room that make up Antonio Dias' 'Cabecas' ('Heads') (1968) have a slot in the top. While they look as if they're awaiting a kiddy-sized bus party, they also have the air of stolen ballot boxes put into a more fun environment that redefines politics as playtime. Elsewhere the bits and pieces of the show are denuded completely, with Jac Leirner's 'Vago 51' ('Vacant 51') (2008) a plastic bag not only flattened on the wall behind glass, but its innards gutted, rendering it useless other than the remaining handle which

The King's Speech

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four stars When a rather serious looking man comes out from behind a solitary blue curtain into an old-school wood-panelled BBC sound studio wearing just a vest, socks and undershorts, only his stately gait suggests he's about to become King of England during one of the most volatile periods of twentieth century history. Exposed in this way at the start of Roxana Silbert's revival of David Seidler's play, it really is a case of emperor's new clothes as a bustle of servants burl about the man known to his intimates as Bertie, dressing and feeding him while he looks on with bemused surrender. When Bertie opens his mouth he's left even more vulnerable by a terminal stammer that renders his already stilted social graces even more disempowered. By flatly refusing to doff his cap to such stuffiness, vulgarian Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue is the only person who can help the future King George VI find his voice and give him the au

Michael Green Obituary

Michael Green - Actor, producer, curator, theatre-maker Born January 21 1957; died February 10 2015 Michael Green, who has died in a car crash aged fifty-eight, was a theatrical visionary, whose fearless radicalism pretty much reinvented the theatre scene in Calgary, Canada with One Yellow Rabbit, the company he co-founded in 1982, and was co-artistic director of. Working with like-minded free spirits, Green and One Yellow Rabbit introduced a hitherto rarely seen wildness to a previously staid Calgary scene, whether playing a Nazi colonel in Ilsa, Queen of the Nazi Love Camp or an alien abductee in Alien Bait. Both of these shows, as well as other One Yellow Rabbit creations such as Doing Leonard Cohen and Somalia Yellow, toured to Scotland, playing either the Tron Theatre in Glasgow or the Traverse in Edinburgh, where the company's audacious mix of absurdist counter-cultural vaudeville found fans and friends among each theatre's artistic leadership. Green blazed a