Coffee-Table Notes

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars One could be forgiven for presuming the loneliness of the long-distance vacuum cleaner salesman to not exactly be the most dynamic raw material for top-drawer adventure yarns. This didn't stop Graham Greene, however, whose 1958 pastiche of very British spy stories was filmed a year later by Carol Reed. Clive Francis' stage version dates from 2007, and in Richard Baron's new production mines an ongoing vogue for doing pocket-sized modern classics with one eyebrow archly raised. Baron's cast of four open the show with a nod to Greene's own tenure in the spying game as each shares the narration between them to unveil the fast-moving story concerning Jim Wormold, the down-at-heel salesman who's been ditched by his wife for an American and left in Cuba with his precocious teenage daughter Milly in tow. Inexplicably enlisted by the London secret service to keep an eye on any nefarious activities Johnny Foreigner might be

King's Theatre , Edinburgh Three stars One fears for the worst when a curiously past-it looking Algernon drops a cue in the opening scene of Oscar Wilde's evergreen rom-com concerning mistaken identity amongst courting couples who flit and flirt between town and country. Within seconds, however, it becomes clear that Lucy Bailey's touring production is throwing the audience a googly. This comes in the form of the Bunbury Company of Players, the fictitious home counties am-dram group used as a framing device to justify Bailey's casting of older actors in roles usually reserved for ingenues. As scripted by Simon Brett, the Bunbury Players have been revisiting Earnest since their first production of the play in 1970, so it is now the preserve of the company's elder statesmen and women rather than starlets. While the rehearsal room role-call of offstage affairs, reluctant butlers and cricketing distractions add an extra layer of hammed-up identity crises, they

Traverse Theatre , Edinburgh Three stars When Charlie met Mari, they could've changed the world. That's not quite the case in Dave Fargnoli's two-handed rom-com presented by the young Urban Fox company, but it would make a great tag-line, worthy of both the movie that's just made Mari a star, and for the high-profile charity that Charlie fronts so successfully. It could only be used, alas, if the former teenage activists who got sucked up in a world of spin, soundbites and hard sell can survive the online meltdown that might just destroy them both. As the first of the Traverse's week-long Hothouse season of work by locally sourced grassroots companies, Fargnoli's hour-long play opens with the couple on the run to an isolated cottage and already at each others throats in Amy Gilmartin's neatly minimalist production. As the pair rewind to their first meeting manning the anti-war barricades and beyond, we see how their mutual idealism became corrupted

Mike Bartlett may be no monarchist, but he's doing pretty well off the royal family just now. As his Olivier Award winning play, King Charles III, arrives in Edinburgh mext week, Bartlett is in New York with the cast of Rupert Goold's original 2014 Almeida Theatre production overseeing a safe transfer in a country which fawns over the royals possibly more than happens on home turf. What American audiences will make of a play that imagines that Prince Charles takes the throne following the death of the Queen, let alone the five-act Shakespearian-style historical epic in blank verse which Bartlett has written, is anybody's guess. The appearance at one point of the late Princess Diana's ghost might also raise an eyebrow or two, though such seemingly seditious material involving, not just Charles and Di, but William, Kate, Harry and Camilla too hasn't seen Bartlett carted off to the Tower of London just yet. Not that it was his intention to provoke. If anything, rat

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Three stars It's been quite a week for Robert Louis Stevenson at the RCS. Running alongside a devised post-modern take on Jekyll and Hyde, the rarely explored backstage area of the New Athenaeum Theatre became the venue for a look at his Boys Own style response to the 1745 Jacobite uprising like no other. With the audience herded into a room awash with metal platforms, hanging ropes and stainless steel ladders, Graham McLaren's production rips into Stevenson's yarn with hell-for-leather abandon, as an ensemble of fourteen final year students from the BA Acting course jump into David Balfour and Alan Breck's dissident world. That they do this by way of flying ships, upside-down aerial acrobatics and Vicky Manderson's joyous choreography makes McLaren and co's take on things no ordinary adaptation. The ghosts of both Bill Bryden's post-industrial spectacles and Ken Campbell's lysergically charged epic

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Three stars A crazed Mr Hyde straddles his bed-bound creator pleading with him not to kill him off because he's the only interesting character who's sprung to life from Robert Louis Stevenson's gothic tale of duality and barely repressed madness. This is a tellingly knowing nod to the twenty-first century's ongoing fascination with horror. It's there too in Lucien MacDougall and Benedicte Seierup's production, devised with nine final year students from the RCS' BA acting course, in some of the jump-cut film footage that cops its moves from the likes of American Horror Story in terms of its power to shock. With Stevenson here cast as plain old Louis, he is woken from his medicated dream in a hospital ward and tended to by a pyjama-clad chorus who watch enraptured from the sidelines as the main action unfolds. What follows is a psycho-active explosion in Louis' head reminiscent at times of the hallucinoge

Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh Three stars Two nights before Remembrance Sunday, and a woman is onstage surrounded by a hotch-potch of cardboard boxes, each one containing a totem of a remarkable story. She pulls a pair of tacketty boots from one, an ornate ladies hat from another. From one a seemingly endless reel of ticker tape unfurls its hidden messages. These messages and more are relayed in Alice Mary Cooper's evocation of a time capsule from The Great War packed by Dundee postal workers in 1921 and only rediscovered in 2013, a year before the centenary of the war's start. This timing is handy, because, while the actual box, crammed full with letters, photographs and documents, now sits in the McManus Gallery in Dundee, its accompanying instructions that it wasn't to be opened until the centenary allows Cooper's hour-long show and tell to put flesh on the bones of a piece of hidden history that goes beyond mere war stories. Commissioned by Harlow Playhouse