Coffee-Table Notes

The innocuous-looking black door that leads to the Southside Studios may be in Glasgow, but the oasis of creation behind it has more of the feel of an alternative arts lab in Berlin, Prague or New York. Since last summer, Southside Studios have also been the base for Team Effort, an initiative driven by producer Gilly Roche to bring together six artists from different disciplines to work collectively and organically, without any specific end in sight. The artists involved in Team Effort include writer of hit play, Roadkill, Stef Smith, co-founder of the Fish and Game company, Eilidh MacAskill, and writer and performer Martin O'Connor. Also on board is musician, composer and former member of the group, Zoey Van Goey, Kim Moore, while from the visual art world comes painter Fergus Dunnet, and Rose Ruane, who works with sculpture, video and live performance. With this group having worked closely over the last few months, the Team Effort event that takes place at Tramway i

It's not easy getting Lucy Bailey on the phone. For a director who is reviving her production of Frederick Knott's play, Dial M For Murder, in which a telephone call plays a crucial part in a botched domestic homicide, this may be for the best. When contact is eventually made, it transpires that actor Iain Glen has been forced to drop out of Bailey's production of Turgenev's Fortune's Fool at the Old Vic theatre in London, and the headache of recasting and redirecting that show inbetween overseeing technical rehearsals for Dial M For Murder has left her little time for talking. Only when things settle down does Bailey have a chance to take stock on a show she first directed for the Fiery Angel company at West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds in 2009. “It's very exciting,” Bailey says in Colchester, where Dial M For Murder opens prior to arriving in Edinburgh next week. “Sometimes going back to something you can get a bit haunted by what you were doing before,

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Everyone knows that it's in the kitchen where parties really start cooking up a storm. So it goes in Miss Julie, August Strindberg's revolutionary nineteenth century play about the cross-class lust between the eponymous daughter of the manor and her father's servant, John, who Julie grew up beside. Zinnie Harris' version may relocate the action to the post First World War Scottish Highlands in the midst of a strike among the village workers, but the simmering essence of Strindberg's original is retained in a brief but fiercely intense exchange in Dominic Hill's blistering production. The schism between the two worlds is delineated from the off via the stark grey interior of Neil Haynes' design that's highlighted even more by the sickly yellow lighting that contains them. This contrasts sharply with the party noises off and occasional flashing lights beyond. It is not Julie we see first, however, but the m

Tav Falco may make his living as a Tango teacher in Vienna, but the role of dancer and choreographer are just two more notches on the Curriculum Vitae of an artistic polymath who can also include writer, actor, film-maker and artist on what is no-doubt a sepia-tinted document that's been passed around town like a dirty postcard more than once. Top of the list, however, must be Falco's status as avant-blues singer, musical iconoclast and leader for more than thirty years of the ever-changing band of low-slung retro-nouveau rockers known as Panther Burns. For his first dates in Scotland in a couple of lifetimes, Falco brings an all-European band to town in a show that may more resemble an old-time revue than a fleapit or garden gig, featuring as it does a top notch Tango display by Falco himself, while a band that wouldn't look out of place at a bump n' grind burlesque night in a David Lynch film plays on. Falco may have crawled straight out of Memphis, th

The potency of cheap music is something Martin Duncan is more than well-versed in. The last time the veteran director of theatre and opera was last in Edinburgh was in 2007 with a production of Dale Wasserman, Joe Darrion and Mitch Leigh's lesser-spotted 1965 musical, Man of La Mancha, featuring the now classic standard, The Impossible Dream. Now Duncan returns to the Royal Lyceum Theatre with a new look at Noel Coward's honeymoon-set rom-com, Private Lives, in which one of Coward's most popular songs, Some Day I'll Find You, makes an appearance. During his time as co artistic director of Chichester Festival Theatre between 2002 and 2005, Duncan directed the likes of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers and Cole Porter's Out Of This World, and won a Best Musical award for How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying. Elsewhere, Duncan directed Sondheim at 80 for the BBC Proms, as well as touring his production of The Rocky Horror Show to Munich and Mi

Pop entryism moves in mysterious ways. When Lloyd Cole appeared on televisual cultural relativist musical barometer Later...With Jools Holland in October 2013, sandwiched between John Newman and Anna Calvi, the veteran lord of velveteen louche sang a song called Women's Studies. A typically literate Cole number, Women's Studies is a song steeped in knowingly half-hidden references, and given extra swagger by a backing band called The Leopards. Towards the end of the song, Cole sang how 'If Josef K Was From Edinburgh / And Fast Product From Prague / Well Baby That Would Be Kinda Funny / Or Maybe Not That Funny At All...' The Leopards, featuring former Jazzateers and Bourgie Bourgie guitarist Mick Slaven and ex Aztec Camera bass player Campbell Owens, have a pedigree which includes at different times backing separate solo ventures by guitarist Malcolm Ross and vocalist Paul Haig, both former members of Edinburgh-sired, Kafka-styled post-punk existentialist

When Rob Churm, Raydale Dower and Tony Swain opened up Le Drapeau Noir for the duration of the 2010 Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, the nightly word of mouth happenings that took place in the former hairdresser's shop down a city centre back street became as legendary as the forbears they emulated, paid homage to and reinvented for the moment via a series of gigs, performances and events in a speak-easy environment tailor-made for underground conspiracy. Le Drapeau Noir drew inspiration from Dada-ist nightclub Cabaret Voltaire, founded in Zurich by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings in 1916. With Le Drapeau Noir translating as The Black Flag, referencing the anarchist flag as much as American hardcore band, Black Flag, the spirit of anarchist talking shops and any late night boho dive where dreamers and schemers have plotted assorted invisible insurrections for centuries were also in the minds of Churm, Dower and Swain. All of which should make Continue without