Coffee-Table Notes

Bruce Guthrie was already some way into the planning stages of directing a twentieth anniversary production of Jonathan Larson's La Boheme inspired contemporary musical, Rent, when he visited New York. As he was shown around the city by some of Larson's closest friends and collaborators, he saw where the show's community of starving artists, misfits and outsiders came of age against a backdrop of poverty, AIDS and a city in a state of collapse. “It was a kind of pilgrimage,” says Guthrie, whose production arrives in Edinburgh next week. “I spoke to Jonathan Larson's family, who've seen hundreds of productions of the show, in depth, and I saw loads of places Rent is set in. I saw the diner that only closed a couple of years ago, and I got taken to a couple of places that are still exactly the same as they were then.” Guthrie was also gifted a very special recording of Rent. “It was of Jonathan Larson playing an early version of it by himself on a keyboard,” s

The labels of this vinyl only 45RPM 12” are a giveaway of sorts of what’s in store on this latest eight track opus from these Glasgow-sired purveyors of garage guitar rumble. On the A side is a close-up mug-shot of 7ft 4 inch French wrestler and long-time scourge of Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant. On the flip, a drawing of a ghost-like masked Lucha Libre style figure peers out. Such images act as the perfect trailer for a set of furious lo-fi growlers recorded in one afternoon by a larger than life and potentially dangerous crew of cartoon superheroes. The hyped-up quartet's onstage image of wrestling masks and German army helmets resurrect the sort of pantomime outrage of 1960s schlock-meister Screaming Lord Sutch and trash-psych merchants The Mummies. Bassist Kyle Thunder, guitar man Handsome Al, drum beater extraordinaire Shug and plinky-plonky keyboardist Pete – just Pete – keep their secret identities close to their chests. So it goes for more than a decade of WWE inspire

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When you hear a baby crying towards the end of Satinder Chohan's new play, it carries more poignancy than one might expect. The baby is a woman called Aditi's, except it isn't, because Aditi is also known as Surrogate 32, one of a small female army who quite literally make a living in Doctor Gupta's clinic in Gujarat, India's international centre of surrogacy traffic. Into this world steps Eve, an English woman desperate for a child by her late husband. For all three women who occupy Katie Posner's radiant looking production, the situation which has brought them together offers them lifelines of very different kinds. When surrogacy is banned mid-way through Eve's treatment, they are galvanised into action. Everyone is on the make in Chohan's play, a co-production between Tamasha and the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry in association with Pilot Theatre. As Gina Isaac's Eve attempts to communicate with Ulrika Krishna

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars Given the current state of the world, watching a mob of banner-wielding demonstrators intent on electing a populist demagogue at the close of the first act in Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's greatest collaboration is a slightly odd experience. Given too that the mob are singing about how the voice of the people cannot be divided, the effect borders on chilling. It's unlikely this was Rice and Lloyd Webber's intention when they premiered their finest couple of hours on the West End back in 1978. The staying power of the duo's real-life latin-tinged rags to riches melodrama suggests it taps into something that goes beyond the appeal of the show's best songs in Bob Tomson and Bill Kenwright's grandiloquent production. It begins and ends with a funeral, as Argentinian people's princess Eva Peron lies in state beneath a portrait of her still young self. As things rewind, we watch a small-town girl with big ideas, b

It isn't immediately clear what's going on behind the big wooden double doors that lead into Scottish Opera's Glasgow rehearsal room. Inside, it's known that Vanishing Point theatre company director Matthew Lenton is rehearsing his production of The 8 th Door, a devised work created with Scottish Opera composer Lliam Paterson in a co-production between the two companies that marks Lenton and Vanishing Point's first foray into opera. The 8 th Door forms the first part of a double bill with Bluebeard's Castle, composer Bela Bartok and librettist Bela Balazs' blood-soaked one-act work, which was first performed in 1918. Outside, in the corridor, all that can be gleaned comes from a dissonant orchestral blare that seeps through the pitch-black that can be seen through the crack left between the doors. Once the music stops and the lights go on, things become more familiar. Two large screens are fixed at one end of the room, onto which are projected the close

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh/Dundee Contemporary Arts, March 4-June 4 Making your mark is everything if you're an artist, whichever side you're coming from. This is evident in this expansive body of largely recent work by Mark Wallinger, which runs parallel in galleries across two separate cities. Based largely around the sixty-six works that make up Wallinger's id Paintings, the twin shows focus on a fascination with symmetry that saw him pursue a more instinctive and personalised line of inquiry than his more overtly politically driven works. That period arguably peaked with Wallinger's 2007 Turner Prize winner, State Britain, a recreation of Brian Haw's tented anti Iraq protest outside Westminster. That the twice his height size paintings that resulted are literally hand-made speak volumes about where Wallinger is coming from today. “The id Paintings grew out of a series of works I call self-portraits,” Wallinger says, referring to the group of paintings

SSE Hydro, Glasgow Three stars It's already been quite the year for sequels judging by this month's itinerary of home-grown blockbuster film and theatre. Hot on the heels of T2: Trainspotting comes this second stadium-size outing that puts an extended version of Greg Hemphill and Ford Kiernan's sit-com phenomenon onstage once more following its predecessor's record-breaking 2014 run. Whether their return is down to a collective nostalgic need to revisit and rediscover these twin touchstones of popular culture or not, they have more in common than you might think. Both T2 and Still Game are set in an unreconstructed and largely male dominated world. Both too focus on old pals regrouping for one last hurrah. While the point is never laboured, there is something there too in both about ageing and mortality. So it goes with Still Game 2, which begins with a filmed introduction from Methadone Mick, Hemphill and Kiernan's most recent and most youthful addition