Coffee-Table Notes

“Look at the size of it,” says actor Sandy Grierson in the top floor rehearsal room of the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow after dropping a telephone directory size document onto the floor with a thump. Grierson is in the midst of the massive undertaking of bringing Alasdair Gray's epic novel, Lanark, to the Edinburgh International Festival stage in a new dramatisation by David Greig contained in the script which Grierson has just sent on a downward trajectory. Under the guidance of director Graham Eatough, and in the shadow of a city which has been reimagined enormously since Gray first mythologised it as a grim dystopia he called Unthank, Grierson and a cast of largely familiar faces from Scotland's acting scene have just been running through the play's opening moments. Grierson plays Lanark's eponymous hero, who, on arriving in Unthank with no memory of his past and unaware of who he is, embarks on a voyage of discovery en route to becoming an artist in a collapsin

Simon McBurney has just had a baby. Or rather, two days before he talks to the Herald, the 57 year-old Lecoq-trained actor, director and co-founder with Annabel Arden and Marcello Magni of the globally-renowned Complicitie company was at his wife's side as she gave birth to the couple's third child. This is evident in McBurney's weary-sounding demeanour as he talks about the background to The Encounter, his solo performance which he and Complicite are bringing to Edinburgh International Festival in co-production with EIF and a host of international partners. “It's chaos in my house just now,” he says, dealing with everyday domestic events as he goes, in constant but slowish motion. This includes locating a phone charger, making his wife a cup of tea and taking it to her in bed, and being interrupted by his young daughter asking how tall she is. One way or another McBurney is living in the moment, even as his free-flowing tumble of conversation is by turns philosop

When Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down in Ukrainian airspace in July 2014, the ambiguities over who was responsible for such an atrocity, with the warring Russian and Ukrainian governments blaming each other, left its 298 victims in limbo. As they were found, the bodies were put into body bags, loaded onto trucks and taken to the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv for identification some 170 miles from the crash site. With a Dutch forensic team leading the operation, some 274 bodies were finally flown to Eindhoven a week after the crash. Further searches were suspended due to ongoing conflicts around the site. Such a tragic by-product of war had a special resonance for Ivo Van Hove's production of Antigone, which opens at Edinburgh International Festival this weekend following a London run earlier this year in co-production with the Barbican, EIF and a host of European partners. Apart from the very obvious parallel with Sophocles' eponymous heroine's attempts to bury the

In a basement laboratory of the University of Edinburgh's science-fiction styled School of Informatics building, a soprano is being wired for sound. The soprano in question is Clare Hewitt, a member of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, who will be celebrating their fiftieth anniversary by performing as part of The Harmonium Project at Edinburgh International Festival. In what amounts to EIF's opening gala this year, The Harmonium Project is a free outdoor multi-media spectacular that sees the Royal Scottish National Orchestra join forces with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus for a performance of John Adams' epic choral work, Harmonium. Throughout its thirty-five minute duration, the late-night performance will be accompanied by a series of animated projections created by hi-tech auteurs 59 Productions and beamed onto the walls of the Usher Hall. In developing the project, 59 Productions' Richard Slaney and his colleagues have been spending time after-hours holed-up in

Bomb Culture was the name of poet and painter Jeff Nuttall's personal analysis of the 1960s counter-culture from a frontline which, in 1968, when his book was published, was still very much in place. Its title referred to how the threat of nuclear war had influenced a post-Hiroshima generation who embraced anti-nuclear sentiments through the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament (CND), founded in 1957 with a unilateral opposition to what would now be termed Weapons of Mass Destruction. Much of that spirit of dissent can be found in Here Comes Everybody and Pop and Boom: 70 years of nuclear culture, two exhibitions which combine activism and art in a way where protest and people power becomes both mass spectacle and a work of art in itself. Where Here Comes Everybody shows off a series of photomontages and digital prints by kennardphillips, the collaborative duo of Peter Kennard and Cat Phillips, Pop Goes Boom is a compendium of pop cultural artefacts inspired by the nuclear threat, a

When German playwright Manfred Karge wrote Jacke Wie Hose in 1982, the Berlin Wall was very much in place. This was still the case five years later when a young Tilda Swinton performed Karge's remarkable solo study of Ella Gericke, a woman who survives Nazi Germany and beyond by adopting the identity of her dead crane driver husband Max. The production at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre by the theatre's then associate director Stephen Unwin of what in Tinch Minter and Anthony Vivas' translation was now known as Man to Man went on to become one of the era's defining theatrical moments, transferring to the Royal Court in London before being made into a film. Unwin followed up by directing a couple of youngsters called Ewan Bremner and Alan Cumming in another Karge play, Conquest of the South Pole, a play about a gang of unemployed lads re-enacting Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen's expedition which was also turned into a film. A year later the Wall came down an

Liverpool in 1983 was a wilfully contrarian place. On the one hand here was a crumbling post-industrial empire still scarred by the Liverpool 8 riots two years before and in the throes of civic and political unrest that would see the hard-left city council come into direct confrontation with Margaret Thatcher's Tory government. Yosser Hughes, the moustachioed anti-hero of Alan Bleasdale's TV drama Boys From the Blackstuff, had entered mass consciousness the year before as a tragicomic icon of a working-class community having its heart and soul ripped out, while a new wave of tripped-out dole queue dreamers had already claimed the city's primary-coloured post-punk landscape as its own. But when the debut single by a band who'd yet to play a gig made the charts in July to define that year's summer, you can see why more barricade-manning lyricists openly mocked the song's images of flowers screaming their joy. In truth, from the pastoral exotica of a band call