Coffee-Table Notes

When Bill Drummond announced that he would be embarking on a twelve year world tour of his The 25 Paintings show earlier this year, it was no belated rock and roll gesture that emulated the life on the road so beloved of ageing icons stuck in a last-gasp music industry groove. Rather, the show's opening leg at Eastside Projects in Birmingham between March and June this year was the latest chapter in Drummond's very personal pilgrimage that has provoked and confused himself as much as the music and art establishments he has subverted over almost forty years. From designing the set of theatre director Ken Campbell's legendary twelve-hour staging of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's science-fiction conspiracy epic, Illuminatus, through to spending his sixtieth birthday standing on a manhole cover in Liverpool, Drummond's restless wanderings have been a very personal Boy's Own style adventure that have explored ways of being as much as seeing. Thi

August 1st-September 26th It's almost forty years since Scottish Conservative MP  Nicholas Fairburn declared those behind COUM Transmissions' Prostitution show at the ICA in 1976 to be 'wreckers of civilisation'. The artist then known as Genesis P Orridge, who was the driving force of the artistic collective that morphed into Throbbing Gristle, still has the power to provoke, however, as this centrepiece of Summerhall's current exhibitions programme makes clear. Life As A Cheap Suitcase (Pandrogeny and A Search For A Unified Identity) charts the love affair between P Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer, who met in 1993 and married two years later on Friday 13th. Over the next twelve years, before Lady Jaye tragically 'dropped her body' in 2007, the couple became a living artwork as they attempted to merge their identities and bodies into a third unified being by way of cosmetic surgery and body modification. This included having matching breast implants on Valenti

November 7th-February 15th 2015 When Stan Douglas decided to explore what happens in rough-house neighbourhoods after a war, the play, Helen Lawrence, which forms part of the 2014 Edinburgh International Festival's Theatre programme, was the result. This film noir writ large is an epic piece of 'cinematic theatre' in which the actors are filmed live as they perform against digitally realised back-drops of Vancouver's Hogan's Alley district and the city's now demolished Old Hotel where homeless war veterans squatted in increasing squalor. It was somehow fitting that the shadows and light of  Hogan's Alley were tucked away at one end of Munich's Kunsthaus as part of Douglas' recent Mise en scene show of his elaborately constructed fictions there. The 3D stylings of both Hogan's Alley and Hotel Vancouver that formed the 'set' of Helen Lawrence now makes up part of the Canadian film and photography-based artist's Fruitmarket Gallery show.

Like all great film noirs, there's nothing black and white about Helen Lawrence, the post World War Two 'cinematic stage production' put together by Canadian artist, photographer and film-maker Stan Douglas in collaboration with screen-writer Chris Haddock. What there is on both stage and screen in this international co-production is a set of familiar noir-based iconography that shows off an altogether bigger if somewhat shadowy picture of life after, rather than during, wartime. “Post-war periods are real periods of flux,” says Douglas, “and I wanted to look at how governments deal with the issue. In Canada, A lot of war veterans came back to Vancouver, and there was a real housing problem. People were living in huts because they had nowhere else to go. Also, there was a lot of corruption. Everyone was a little bit crooked, but after the war that wasn't going to be tolerated. It was a local symptom of a global condition.” Helen Lawrence is set between Vancouver's i

Generically speaking, Contemporary Classical is a gloriously contrary phrase that covers a multitude of bases. Few evoke the idea of bestowing a playful gravitas on new music better than the Kronos Quartet, the San Francisco-based string ensemble founded by violinist David Harrington in Seattle, Washington in 1973. Having commissioned and performed more than 750 works over the last forty years by major composers including Arvo Part, John Adams, Steve Reich and Terry Riley, Kronos have also worked with the likes of Bjork, Tom Waits, David Bowie and Nelly Furtado. For their two EIF 2014 programmes, Harrington and the musicians that make up the current Quartet of John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola) and Sunny Yang (cello) expand the bridges between pop cultural tropes they navigate so exquisitely even further. One programme features a double bill of work by minimalist maestro Philip Glass, whose String Quartet No 6 can be heard alongside Music From The Fountain and Requiem For A Dream

The last time a production of Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie,appeared at Dundee Rep, the part of the story's semi-autobiographical narrator and doomed runaway poet Tom was played by a young actor called David Tennant. That was back in 1996, since when things have panned out rather well for the Bathgate-born star of stage, TV and film. Whether such a weighty shadow puts any pressure on the cast of Jemima Levick's new Dundee production, however, remains to be seen. Whatever happens, as Levick resumes her role as the Rep's co-artistic director following ten months on maternity leave,it is clear that Williams' first successful play, which first appeared in 1944, remains close to Levick's heart. She first directed  The Glass Menagerie back in 2008, after all, in a production at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh. Six years on, as she explains of her revisitation to the St Louis tenement where the dysfunctional Wingfield clan of Tom, his painfully shy

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars The low rumble that pierces the dimly-lit auditorium that looks onto a firmly locked down stage curtain reveals nothing of what follows in  Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan's thrilling and already acclaimed new stage version of George Orwell's dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Things start quietly enough in this co-production between Headlong, Nottingham Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre, with Orwell's Everyman hero, Winston Smith, seeming to be part of a book group analysing some weighty and rediscovered memoir dating from before the world may or may not have changed for the better. As Matthew Spencer's terminally bemused looking Winston is shunted into a world he doesn't recognise inbetween erasing people from history in the Ministry of Truth, his private revolution comes through three words scrawled on a scrap of paper that prove to be the most dangerous of all. The psychological battle that ensues isn't just with the