Sue McKenzie and Ingrid Sawers drew a big crowd to the very beautiful St Andrews and St Georges West at lunchtime yesterday for a saxophone and piano recital from Bizet to Nyman and beyond.  As you would expect the playing was perfect and all four of the main members of the saxophone family; soprano, alto, tenor and baritone were deployed for our delight.

Like Sara Kane's 4.48 Psychosis, which the Grads produced very successfully a few years ago, Martin Crimp's Attempts on her Life does not allocate dialogue to specific characters nor even define what or how many characters there may be.  So it's a wonderful vehicle for a theatre company to let their imagination loose on.

This company uses two men and two women dressed in black business wear but barefoot in a black draped set containing only four chairs.  Their footwear stands in a neat row at the side.  They appear in various combinations and guises in the seventeen scenes of the play, each of which is an attempt to define Anne or Annie or Anya, the name varies.  We are led to believe at the start of the play that she has committed suicide.  Was she an artist?  Was she a porno star?  Was she a terrorist? Was she in fact a luxury motor car swishing elegantly along winding Mediterranean roads?

Crimp himself said " Attempts is not political ....but each scene, or attempt, is really an attempt to grab capitalism and really grapple it to the ground, but then it gets up again and it presents another form. So I think the play is a kind of wrestling with the joys and the horrors of capitalism."

That's not a thought that struck me as I watched though I can see what he means.  But never mind that.  It's a joy to listen to the text and the actors are terrific.  Go.

Attempts was in Adam House and I then slipped next door to the Jazz Bar in my more usual role  there of punter to hear a dozen Kurt Weill songs sung by an American called Bremner.  He seems to have dispensed with a first name, at least professionally.  Mack the Knife was there of course but so were songs with lyrics by Ira Gershwin and Ogden Nash to name but two.  He was ably supported by piano, double bass and multiple reeds.  The latter all being played by the very able Dick Lee going by his Sunday name of Richard.  An enjoyable show for cabaret fans with CDs for sale to remember it by.  I resisted temptation.

If Attempts on her Life has a meaning under its surface, The Last Hotel, a brand new opera in the EIF,  is content to just tell a story. The music is intense, urgent, expectant and the singing matches it.  A man, his wife and the other woman meet in a rundown empty hotel.  There's a suitably manic hotel porter, silent throughout bar a scream or two, who cleans up, serves food and drink and handily doubles as stage crew while the protagonists twist and turn in their dance of duty, guilt, dreams, life and death advancing via karaoke and buffet to the other woman's suicide.

Sounds pretty grim and it's certainly not a comedy but it's a gripping and exciting ninety minutes proving that contemporary opera is not all bad.