Coffee-Table Notes

At the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow, Lynda Radley is sitting beside a group of American exchange students who have just spent the morning taking part in a workshop led by theatre-maker Kieran Hurley. After lunch they'll be getting on with rehearsing Radley's new play, The Interference, which was written specifically for them. As Radley talks, their voices rise and fall behind her. They could be any students from anywhere, with all the excitement and high spirits being abroad brings with it. When these young people from the Malibu-based Pepperdine University step back into rehearsals, however, they will be squaring up to a troublingly prescient issue issue which could conceivably affect every single one of them. The Interference is set on an American university campus, where a female student is raped by a sports star. While her predator is clearly guilty of the crime he has been accused of, it is his victim who is treated as though she is the one on trial in a

I had a postcard of this for years. At first glance, it initially looks like the figure in the painting has two heads that are separated by a row of guitar strings, then when you look closer you see it's just one massive head on this long neck and skinny body. Even though the figure is standing disembodied on this kind of khaki-ish background, which he both blends into and stands out from, like he's looking into a mirror, there's a movement and musicality about it, like he's shaking his head so the guitar strings twang in this blur of motion. I imagine him as a character in a 1950s Halas & Batchelor cartoon set against a blaring jazz soundtrack that plays as this strange little figure goes about the world having adventures and getting into absurdist scrapes while looking for inspiration, which he then goes home and paints. The List Edinburgh Festivals Magazine, July 2016, commissioned as part of a multiple-authored piece I response to the Scottish National Portr

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars The London Docklands des-res is as blandly immaculate as the soundtrack that accompanies it at the opening of the first in Alan Ayckbourn's Damsels in Distress trilogy of plays. For teenage schoolgirl Sorrel and her nice but dim best mate Kelly, however, it's about to get very messy indeed. First seen in 2001 and revived here for Pitlochry's summer season, the play's initial aspirational gloss is soon picked at by director Richard Baron to expose a dark-hearted twenty-first century farce of cracked morality, where everything is up for sale. Sorrel's dad has walked out on her and her mum Lynette, who's taken a cleaning job after the dot com crash. The enterprising Sorrel, meanwhile, has set herself up in the online sex business, and, co-opting Kelly as her maid, sets up shop for some very special homework. The shenanigans that follow as Sorrel and Kelly prepare for their first client could have been lifted from Feydea

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars The felt-tip and sticky-taped on V shapes that adorn the dilapidated living room occupied by the two warring siblings at the centre of Martin McDonagh's 1997 play say everything about their relationship. As daubed on by a bear-like Valene marking territory from his biscuit tin of booze to his mantlepiece of religious figurines, the V could be for victory, however pyrrhic , over his equally volatile brother Coleman. If not, it could be marking out the v that divides gladiatorial combatants before they go into battle. This is evident from even the most casual of sparring as Coleman and Valene return from their father's funeral with Father Welsh to act as referee as much as failed spiritual guide. Temptation for them all comes in the form of teenage wild child Girleen. Left to their own devices, however, Coleman and Valene continue a tug of war that increasingly becomes a very dangerous matter of life and death. Andy Arnold's new

As the name implies, once you step through the gates of Jupiter Artland, you are in another world. While Edinburgh city centre is a building site driven by a money-driven cartel of property developers, hoteliers and supermarket chains in collusion with the local authorities, a half hour bus ride out of town to West Lothian offers sanctuary of the most imaginative kind. For a decade now, Jupiter Artland's science-fiction styled sculptured landscape has played host to a series of temporary and permanent architectural interventions that allow contemporary artists' work to breathe in a way that the restraints of a walled institution wouldn't allow for. Beyond the verdant greens and lush blue pools of Cell of Life, American architecture theorist and critic Charles Jencks' manufactured landform that greets visitors, are more than thirty permanent works. These include piece by the likes of Nathan Coley, Andy Goldsworthy, Antony Gormley, Jim Lambie and grand-daddy of environmen

Karine Polwart has spent a lot of time watching the geese fly above her home close to Fala Flow, a windy peatbog in Midlothian, south east of Edinburgh. The end result of Polwart's observations is Wind Resistance, a music-led performance piece produced by the Royal Lyceum Theatre company in association with Edinburgh International Festival, where the show makes its world premiere next month. While it forms part of EIF's contemporary music programme, Wind Resistance is a theatrical piece overseen by stage director Wils Wilson, and with dramaturgical work by playwright and the Lyceum's new artistic director, David Greig. For an artist like Polwart, who is best known for her folk-based songs but steeped in an oral storytelling tradition, this isn't as big a leap as it first appears. It is telling, however, that Greig and Wilson's last collaboration was on The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, an intimate music theatre piece that reinvented the Border ballad traditi

Paisley Arts Centre Three stars When you're handed a flyer supporting the workers while DJ Big Div plays civil rights tinged 1960s soul records, one might think Bruce Morton's new play is looking at a more recent protest movement than it is. Especially when a series of paisley pattern projections hinting at trippy Happenings to come punctuates each scene. In fact, Morton's hour-long comedy presented by producers Jim Lister and Stephen Wright's grassroots FairPley company is set in 1856 Paisley, when the weavers who produced such swirly patterns were fighting for a living wage. The play focuses on Davie McKenzie, who starts both his day and the play by punching a horse, and ends it by resisting the financial advances of works foreman Andrew Galbraith, his integrity intact. Inbetween, he comes into contact with real life emancipated slave and funk-soul brother Frederick Douglass, all the while running the gauntlet of his much put-upon wife Hannah. All this is p