Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre Five stars At first glance you could be forgiven for thinking that butter wouldn't melt in the mouths of the six-strong Catholic schoolgirl choir onstage throughout Vicky Featherstone's National Theatre of Scotland production of Lee Hall's freewheeling adaptation of Alan Warner's 1998 novel, The Sopranos. They sing so sweetly, after all, do Orla, Chell, Kay, Manda, Kylah and Fionnula, Once they're off the leash and with time to kill in the big city before the choir competition they're doomed to take part in, voices of angels morph into a potty-mouthed chorus running riot through any bar that will have them en route to a series of everyday epiphanies. Featherstone and Hall have their unruly charges act out their adventures amidst the glorious tack of the Mantrap, the tellingly named late-night Oban dive the girls call home. From this set-up we see their messy lives in close-up as they cling to each other for comfort in the face of a stre

The first time Andy Moor remembers his band The Ex playing in Edinburgh, it was in a long lost Cowgate dive sometime in 1990. With much of the venue's clientèle in attendance solely to take advantage of its late night opening hours, the sounds of Holland's première underground punk band didn't go down too well. “After four songs our sound man got bottled,” Moor remembers. “It was quite a dodgy place, where most people just wanted a late drink, I don't think we were what some people were expecting.” This incident hasn't stopped Moor and co returning to the city that is arguably the band's spiritual home, and is where they forged strong musical connections with a grassroots DIY scene based around Edinburgh College of Art's Wee Red Bar and other places with more responsive audiences than the weekend drinking crowd of yore. Following a date in Glasgow in 2010 accompanied by Brass Unbound, the free jazz horn quartet featuring saxophonists Mats Gustafsson

A night on the town isn't what it once was. Just ask Jim Cartwright, the author of Road and The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, whose brand new play, Raz, opens at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Raz is a solo piece which, as the title suggests, charts one wild weekend in the life of a twenty-first century dead-end kid called Shane. As Shane moves from bar to bar, the Friday night carnage grows increasingly grotesque until only the morning after and what Cartwright calls “the battlefield of the dawn,” awash with “ambulances and cops and people lying on the floor, crying at the moon” awaits in a frontline portrait of a generation in freefall. “It's about one night in broken Britain,” Cartwright explains in a Bolton accent which, aged fifty-seven, sounds Coronation Street cosy. “We've all seen the scene on a Friday or Saturday once the pubs and clubs have shut, girls with their legs akimbo sitting on the kerb, boys all pissed up and spoiling for a fight, and it m

Collective Gallery, Edinburgh until October 4 th Four stars The noise of money is everywhere in the two films by Beatrice Gibson that make up the London-based artist's Crippled Symmetries show for this year's Edinburgh Art Festival. Where F for Fibonacci juxtaposes archive footage of a mercurial Karlheinz Stockhausen and images of Wall Street city boys at play with an eleven year old boy's computer-generated images of a world owned by fictional superhero, Mr Money, the newly commissioned Solo for Rich Man finds another eleven year old ruffling wads of dosh and dropping coins with composer Anton Lukoszeveize in a Shoreditch adventure playground. Both films are inspired by William Gaddis' 1975 novel, JR, in which an eleven year old boy creates the biggest financial empire on the planet with the unwitting help of his school's resident composer, Gibson's films pits notions of progressive education, abstract composition and work by Fluxus artist George Maciun

As austerity bites, everyone's looking for a way out. So it is with the four tramps eking out their lives at the abandoned railway station in The Titanic Orchestra , Bulgarian playwright Hristo Boytchev's play, seen here in Russell Bolam's production in a new translation by Steve King. As the quartet dramatise their existence by rehearsing what might happen if a train stopped to pick them up, a quasi-Beckettian landscape emerges as they start to lose faith in the things they can barely imagine anymore. When an equally shabby huckster turns up on their patch claiming to be a magician called Harry, things appear to be possible again as the motley crew are co-opted into the ultimate vanishing act. As Harry, John Hannah laces his performance with an affable charm alongside an international cast in the UK premiere of this archly-played curio that questions the nature of reality, fantasy and the things you have to kid yourself about in order to survive. Runs until Augu

A young man plays bat and ball in a messy kitchen at the opening of The History of the World Based on Banalities Johan De Smet and Titus De Voogdt's new play produced by the Koppergeitery company as part of this year's Big in Belgium programme. Without a word being said, notions of velocity and gravity are being proffered up in this most everyday of exercises. When the boy played by De Voogdt starts talking to the audience, about his scientist mother who's lost her bearings through Alzheimer's disease, such a sense of his own isolation sparks up a curiosity that finds voice through a series of free-associating quantum leaps that fall somewhere between alchemy and idealism. Accompanied by a hooded electric guitarist who skulks behind the fridge freezer twanging out some dust-bowl laden dirges, De Voogdt's character acts like he's home alone as he embraces new liberties en route to reclaiming his affinity with his mother from the totems left behind even as she s

In a cluttered Leith Walk rehearsal room it looks a little bit like the end of the world. The Sun may be offering up a rare if welcome shine outside, but for Grid Iron Theatre company, in the midst of rehearsing their new stage version of Shane Jones' cult novel, Light Boxes, for the moment at least, it must remain forever February. For the family played by Melody Grove, Keith Macpherson and Vicki Manderson who plays the couple's daughter, trying to contend with such terminal bleakness isn't easy, and MJ McCarthy's fiddle-led funereal score played live by the cast only seems to make the scene even sadder. “The story of Light Boxes is the story of a town that becomes taken over by February,” explains director and adaptor Finn den Hertog. “Both the month of February and the cult of February, I suppose. February bans flight, and we see how this one particular family from the town deals with that. They get caught up in warfare, their daughter goes missing and we see how t