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Roman Ondak – Some Thing

The Common Guild, Glasgow, October 12th-December 14 th If things go in cycles, Slovakian artist Roman Ondak isn't shy about encouraging and manipulating such dizzying turns of events. Where previously he has had museum-goers mark their height on the gallery walls and broken down national barriers at the Venice Biennale by having grow through the Slovak pavilion, for his first show in Scotland thinks look a lot more personal. Ondak will present a series of still lifes he painted when a teenager, placing them beside the original object the work was taken from. While on one level this smacks of middle-aged show and tell, there are, according to Common Guild curator Kitty Anderson, more discreetly political and philosophical intentions behind the display. “I like the idea of exposing parts of the past which are not normally seen,” she says, “but there's also this idea about loops and cycles that keep on filtering into Ondak's work, endlessly returning to the same

Oliver Emanuel - Dragon

When playwright Oliver Emanuel was approached by artistic directors of Vox Motus theatre company Candice Edmunds and Jamie Harrison with a proposal for a new play, Emanuel jumped at the idea. The Glasgow-based writer of works that have included The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish and Titus and the pair behind The Infamous Brothers Davenport, The Not-So Fatal Death of Grandpa Fredo and Slick had wanted to work with each other for some time, and this new idea seemed a golden opportunity for them all. For Emanuel, Edmunds and Harrison's brief sounded particularly enticing. “They said, we want to do something about a twelve-year old boy who's grieving for his mother,” Emanuel says of that initial conversation. “Oh, they said, and we want there to be a dragon. Oh, and we want it to be done without words.” Three years on, the end result of that conversation is Dragon, a collaboration between Vox Motus, the National Theatre of Scotland and Chinese company, the Tianjin

In Time O' Strife

Pathhead Halls, Kirkcaldy Five stars The bar is open, the tables are out and the band are playing like dervishes at a living-room hoolie as the audience file into the community hall where Joe Corrie's grim realist play about the effects of the seven month miner's strike that followed the 1926 General Strike had on the Fife pit-head community. A framed picture of Corrie hangs above the serving hatch and there's a speak-easy vibe to proceedings. When a little girl stands at the microphone after fiddler Jennifer Reeve has introduced Corrie's play and starts singing sweetly about hanging black-legs before the seven-strong cast of this thrilling new take on the play dance in vigorous unison to a thunderous indie-folk arrangement of one of Corrie's songs, you know it's as vitally contemporary and as far removed from old-time melodrama as is possible. Director and adaptor Graham McLaren has put music and dance at the play's heart, with a live soundtrack, composed a

Fiddler on the Roof

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars When Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick and Joseph Stein's Russia-set musical first appeared in 1964, the world, and America in particular, was waking up to a tidal wave of dissent. Women were being liberated, revolution was in the air and young people were speaking their minds, especially to their parents. All of this is reflected in the narrative about small-town milkman Tevye's travails in marrying his daughters off at the turn of the century fag-end of the Czarist regime, if not always in Craig Revel Horwood's new production for the Music & Lyrics company in association with the Mayflower Theatre, Southampton. The first half especially feels particularly cartoonish, as a largely young cast try too hard to be funny where subtlety and depth are required to make the humour really work. Things are on much surer ground with the song and dance routines, which are delivered by a cast who play instruments onstage, an inventive and

Live_Transmission – Joy Division Reworked

Usher Hall, Edinburgh Four stars For those who actually saw Joy Division, the Mancunian post-punk quartet who were still on the margins at the time of lead singer Ian Curtis' suicide in 1980, which put an abrupt end to the band's brief four year existence, the industry that has grown up around them and their record label Factory has been bewildering to watch. Books, films, cover versions and increasingly ludicrous merchandise abound, while Joy Division bassist Peter Hook and his band The Light have performed both the band's albums in full. This epic electro-orchestral deconstruction of Joy Division's austere and urgent canon, however, might well have been something the band's late producer Martin Hannett dreamt up. Electronic auteur Scanner, the thirty-strong Heritage Orchestra plus drummer Adam Betts and guitarist Matt Calvert from post-rock instrumentalists Three Trapped Tigers and Ghostpoet bassist John Calvert perform an eighty-minute suite that takes

Graham McLaren - In Time O' Strife

If history had worked out differently, Joe Corrie's 1926 play, In Time O' Strife, would be a staple of the international dramatic repertoire, spoken of with the same sense of reverence as early twentieth century peers such as J.M. Synge and Sean O'Casey. As it is, both Corrie and his gritty study of a Fife mining family's hardships during the General Strike that took place the year the play was written have all but been airbrushed out of that history. The last major revival of In Time O' Strife was in 1982, when John McGrath's 7:84 company rescued it from obscurity and presented it at the Citizens Theatre as part of the company's Clydebuilt season of plays. It was a season that also included included Ena Lamont Stewart's equally neglected working class epic, Men Should Weep. This week, however, director Graham McLaren takes Joe Corrie home to Fife in a brand new take on In Time O' Strife for the National Theatre of Scotland. Rather than stick t

Paul Michael Glaser - Fiddler on the Roof

Things have come full circle for Paul Michael Glaser. As a young actor in the 1960s Glaser was appearing in a play in a New York theatre next door to where Fiddler on the Roof was playing. Glaser happened to be dating one of the Fiddler on the Roof cast, and each night once his show finished would race next door and watch the last five minutes of her show. A few years later, Glaser's first film role came in Norman Jewison's 1971 big-screen adaptation of Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick and Joseph Stein's Russian-set musical, which saw Chaim Topol recreate the lead role of Tevye the milkman, which he first played in the 1967 West End production following Zero Mostel's turn on Broadway. Glaser played Perchik, the Bolshevik revolutionary who falls for one of Tevye's five daughters. Now forty-two years on, Glaser is stepping into Topol's shoes to tackle the role of Tevye in a new touring revival which arrives in Edinburgh this week. “He's a wonderful cha