Coffee-Table Notes

When Jo Clifford's play, War in America, opens at the former Royal High School in Edinburgh in just over a week's time, the scenario it depicts might seem worryingly familiar. Clifford, after all, has imagined a world whereby America is in turmoil, while the unelected female leader of a European power is taking her country to the brink of disaster. Meanwhile, in the real world, the post Trump, post Brexit landscape becomes increasingly dramatic by the day. Given such a back-drop, one could be forgiven for presuming that Clifford had knocked out such a contemporary-sounding state of the nations saga in response to recent events. In fact, Clifford wrote War in America in 1996 as one of a mooted five play series that fused the personal and the political. In hindsight, the play could either be considered out of step with the time it was written in, or elsew a prophecy of things to come. “You couldn't make it up,” says Clifford, on the morning of the latest eruption fro

When Rachel Maclean was chosen to represent Scotland at this year's Venice Biennale, the world appeared to have just been turned upside down, and not in a good way. As so-called fake news dominated the discourse of a post-Brexit world in which promises were broken pretty much immediately by the pro-Leavers, the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President appeared to have been countenanced by misinformation on a grand scale. The liberal fairytale, it seemed, had turned into a nightmare. The result of this for Maclean following a ten-day script-writing session in Venice last December is Spite Your Face: A Dark Venetian Fairytale. This new thirty-minute film was commissioned and curated by the Scottish Borders based Alchemy Film and Arts in partnership with Talbot Rice Gallery and the University of Edinburgh. Maclean's recognisable tropes drawn from the pop cultural ephemera of girls magazines, MTV videos by the likes of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, Disney films and computer games

Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow until September 17 th Fake News alert. All is not what it seems in this group show that questions the con trick of authenticity through a series of appropriations of history as modern myth-making. Taking Hito Steyerl's seven-minute film, Abstract (2012), as its centre-piece, a much bigger picture is revealed by the show's seventeen artists, who explore notions of colonialism, slavery, the arms trade and identity politics. This in turn subverts received hand-me-down narratives dressed up as truth. In this respect, Polygraphs questions the show's own existence within the context it sets down for itself and GOMA's perceived complicity in the yarns it spins even as it critiques them. A polygraph, after all, is a lie detector, that pulse-racing gizmo beloved of pulp crime thrillers and daytime TV quiz shows, and itself questionable in terms of reliability. From Peter Kennard's subversion of Constable with his now classic anti-nuclea

“It's a girl!” These are the first words uttered in Sally Cookson's audacious staging of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte's taboo-busting 1847 novel concerning the book's eponymous heroine's journey from headstrong orphan to an independent woman living and loving on her own terms. Those words may not be lifted from Bronte's story, but in a production that uses music, movement and theatrical spectacle as key tools in telling a similarly multi-faceted story, the words bring Jane kicking and screaming into the world with a sense of purpose that suggests that, while her sex is important in everything she does, she is much more besides. “Jane Eyre was a story I'd been interested in turning into a piece of theatre for a long time,” says Cookson,who first created the play in 2014. “When I first read Bronte's novel as a young woman in my twenties, I was struck by the power of this woman who knew what she needed to do to have a satisfying life, be that physically or

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars It was a ghost in the machine, it seems, who inspired an already curious Daphne Oram to pursue her fascination with electronically generated sounds. The most famous result of the seance held by the Wiltshire teenager's parents was Oram's key role in the founding of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958. As Paul Brotherston and Isobel McArthur's restlessly engaging dramatic portrait of Oram makes clear in words and music, however, Oram was much more than that. On a stage peopled with pukka post-war sorts, McArthur's Daphne takes the microphone to address the audience in immaculate cut-glass tones. As her amplified words are distorted, it becomes the perfect illustration of how Oram's pioneering experimental compositions were by turns mocked, sidelined and airbrushed away by a patriarchal BBC. This is played out by a wonderfully engaging McArthur and the four male actors who pivot around her central presence with a cartoon-like p

Daphne Oram spent less than a year working as studio manager with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the body she co-founded in 1958 after persuading the BBC to invest in experiments with electronic sound and music concrete. By that time, Oram had already composed the sine-wave based score for the 1957 radio production of Jean Giraudoux's play, Amphitryon 38, which was the first piece of electronic music to be commissioned by the company. The same year, Oram worked on the debut recording of Samuel Beckett's radio play, All That Fall, which led directly to the setting up of the Workshop. Having begun her career at the BBC as a junior studio engineer in 1942, Oram's abrupt departure nevertheless paved the way for the likes of Delia Derbyshire, who had a major hand in creating the original theme music to Dr Who. Beyond her extensive exploratory work with something she dubbed Oramics, Oram's relationship with drama continued after she left the BBC in TV, film and theatre, as

Station Hotel, Perth Four stars Outside the grand entrance to the Station Hotel, a row of ten women stand in silence. Some hold wooden placards, which are tellingly blank and slogan free. As welcoming committees go, it's a powerful pre-cursor to the second part of Oliver Emanuel's 306 trilogy of plays, designed to open up the largely hidden history based around the 306 British soldiers executed for cowardice during World War One. Where the first part focused on the men themselves, this follow-up looks at the lives of the women left behind and forced to fight battles of their own. Where Gertrude struggles to survive once her husband is killed by the state, Mrs Byers waits in vain for a letter from her son, also a victim of the government. Mrs Byers' daughter Nellie is a munitions factory firebrand, whose husband is in prison for being a conscientious objector, but who won't be silenced, whatever the cost. Jemima Levick's production is a beautifully conceived