Critics’ choice

What to see this week

THEATRE

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

ROYAL LYCEUM, EDINBURGH, UNTIL 17 NOVEMBER

Fresh from the controversy surrounding his powerful Edinburgh Festival show Wonderland, Matthew Lenton of Vanishing Point takes another journey between reality and fantasy in this wintry new Royal Lyceum production of Shakespeare’s most familiar comedy. The setting may be unconventional, as climate change swathes the characters in ice and snow, but Lenton and his young cast give full weight to every twist and turn of Shakespeare’s magnificent poetry, in a production that takes one of the best-known texts in the canon, and makes it new, for our time.

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JOYCE MCMILLAN

FILM

JOHN CARPENTER’S HALLOWEEN

VUE CINEMAS ACROSS SCOTLAND, 31 OCTOBER

There are plenty of horror films being screened to coincide with Halloween, but few own the night like John Carpenter’s slasher classic. Newly restored, the film retains the air of menace that made it one of the most notorious, influential and profitable indie horror movies when first released in 1979, but seeing it on the big screen again reinforces just how much of the dread was created by the power of suggestion rather than the full force of the violence unleashed in the opening and closing sequences. The gore would inspire countless inferior sequels and rip-offs, but the film is better made than the majority of its progeny, with Carpenter’s opening point-of-view shots a huge influence on the current boom in found-footage horrors and his eerily simple score ratcheting up the creep factor considerably.

• Tel: [phone] / www.myvue.com

ALISTAIR HARKNESS

VISUAL ART

SUSIE LEIPER: THE ONE LIFE

OPEN EYE GALLERY, EDINBURGH, UNTIL 6 NOVEMBER

Susie Leiper is a very unusual artist as she is both painter and calligrapher. It is a combination more familiar in China and Japan than in the west, but she carries it off with great skill, learning from Oriental models but without for a moment looking like an imitator. Her new show at the Open Eye combines mountain paintings, poetry and calligraphy. The works are on canvas, wood and Chinese paper and as always are very beautiful.

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DUNCAN MACMILLAN

CLASSICAL

RSNO: SØNDERGÅRD CONDUCTS SIBELIUS

USHER HALL, EDINBURGH, TOMORROW; GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL, 27 OCTOBER

Danish principal guest conductor Thomas Søndergård returns to the RSNO with a programme of fresh and evocative European sounds. There’s The Garden of Delights, in which living Swedish composer Tommy Andersson creates a wonderful mixture of serenity and passion in response to the painting of that name by Hieronymus Bosch. Then it’s over to Mahler and Sibelius for the latter’s wonderful Second Symphony and Mahler’s Blumine and Songs of a Wayfarer with baritone Roderick Walker as soloist. It’s a programme right up Søndergård’s street, so expectations are high.

• Tel: [phone] (Edinburgh); 0141-353 8000 (Glasgow)

KENNETH WALTON

POP

JOHN GRANT

THE ARCHES, GLASGOW, TONIGHT

Glasgay! goes Americana with this date by the former Czars frontman whose debut solo album Queen Of Denmark received many plaudits for its autobiographical honesty and emotional intensity and attracted many new fans – including Sinead O’Connor, who later covered the title track – when it was released in 2010.

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FIONA SHEPHERD