Coffee-Table Notes

Andrew Panton was at his new desk at Dundee Rep by 7am last Thursday morning. Given his recent appointment as artistic director of the Tayside theatre, such enthusiasm is understandable, especially as Panton was putting the final touches to his first season, which was announced at an event at the theatre on Saturday night. Outside the window of Panton's office, an industrial cherry-picker was already at work, with those inside the vehicle taking down the lettering on the wall beside the entrance to the theatre. By now, a new set of letters will have been unveiled as a symbolic pre-cursor to Saturday's announcement that marks a new chapter in Dundee Rep's history. “It's suddenly made everything feel very real,” says Fife-born Panton, as each letter is removed while the sun shines. “There's going to be a whole new branding, and a new logo, so the whole theatre will look and feel a little bit different. Watching the old branding being taken down is making all of

Leith Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars The sun may have shone on Leith this weekend, but inside Leith Theatre, the stars were looking down on the first swathe of artistic interventions this shamefully neglected building has seen for a quarter of a century. Those stars may have been projected, but they gave a sheen of cosmic glamour to a reinvigorated space that is the sort of large-scale civic hall the capital has been crying out for. Beyond the main auditorium, all manner of performances, film screenings and interventions took hold, from beneath the main stage right up to the makeshift galleries on the roof of the building. Things began early on Friday night, with the theatre's upstairs balcony playing host to Heroines, Charlotte Hastings' three-woman cut-up of speeches by female icons of Greek tragedy. The entire auditorium was utilised by The Mash Collective, a grey-clad ensemble who tapped into Leith Theatre's history with a series of dance routines. In one of the

The Mash House, Edinburgh Sunday May 21st An old Japanese man in a blue t-shirt stands on a dimly lit stage clutching a microphone stand as if his life depended on it. Diminutive in stature and ascetic in appearance, the man babbles into the microphone with transcendent intent. Damo Suzuki has done this a million times before, and over the next fifty minutes loses himself inside his performance once more. As his straggly silver hair snakes across his face, his voice rises and falls, one minute a high-pitched mantra, the next a wordless gurgle. In the gloom behind him, an ad hoc band carve out a slow-burning backdrop. It begins with bowed guitar, adding percussive flourishes and bass and keyboard patterns that steadily flesh out to become a complementary pulsebeat to the incantations they accompany. Suzuki first carved out his niche with Can, the German kosmische hippy classicists he joined after being spotted busking on the streets of Munich in 1970 by the band's bass player H

Somewhere in the midst of the 1980s/1990s indie-pop goldrush, amongst the Baggy casualties and shoegaze superstars, there were a million others of equal merit who fell by the wayside, plagued by bad luck, bad timing or both. Come on down Hugh Duggie and Ian White, who, as Sons of the Descent, are the waggish brains behind this low-key smorgasbord of quietly crafted off-kilter pop gems. Given their respective backgrounds, it was inevitable that Duggie and White would eventually find each other. Duggie served time in late period Lowlife, the band formed by ex Cocteau Twins bassist Will Heggie, before going on to front Mute Records-connected noiseniks, Foil. White, meanwhile, played guitar with Edinburgh band The Wendys, who were signed to Factory Records not long before the late Tony Wilson's musical plaything/utopian folly crashed and burned into financial ignominy, a glorious victim of its own largesse. The result of the pair's collective pedigree is a suitably wacked-out coll

Former Royal High School, Edinburgh Four stars “The state does not commit terrorist acts.” So says Mr Fox, the thrusting home secretary of an un-named European government in Jo Clifford's attempt to cut through a make-believe sham of so-called democracy. Clifford does this by making the situation critical, so both powers are divided, not by political parties, but along gender lines. Even here, alas, while the carefully styled She appears to be strong and stable, it is the spin doctoring duo of Ms Warp and Ms Webb who pull the strings. As Saskia Ashdown's She pulls off her blonde wig and kicks her power heels away, Clifford strips back the public image to get to the messed-up human within. As the new woman-only authority attempts to court the youth vote as well as their weaker male contemporaries, She is in pieces over her estranged activist daughter. While older members of the House are haunted by ghosts, Andrew Cameron's Mr Fox unwinds by exploring the limits of r

Andrew Dallmeyer – Playwright, actor, director Born St Boswell's, January 10 1945; died May 21, Edinburgh Andrew Dallmeyer, who has died aged 72 following a battle with Motor Neurone Disease, was a fiercely individual artist. This was the case both as a writer of an estimated 78 plays, many of which remain unpublished, or as an actor, whose expressive facial tics and looming physicality made him a natural for the range of grotesques and downbeat absurdists he specialised in. This was mirrored in his writing, which similarly set him beyond the mainstream as a seemingly wilful and at times eccentric outsider. This was the case whether playing the title role in the original 1980s production of Liz Lochhead's Scots version of Moliere's play, Tartuffe, at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, or writing about kindred spirits including Salvador Dali in his play, Hello Dali (1982), and Thomas de Quincey in Opium Eater (1984). The latter went on to win a BAFTA Scotland

When Leith Theatre opens its doors as this year's home of the Hidden Door arts festival today, festival director David Martin believes it will be twenty-five years to the day since anyone last performed here. This was only discovered by accident when sound artist Dave House was researching a new work designed to mark what he calls the venue's 'melancholy-yet-beautiful state of disrepair'. Working in situ, House will use field recordings and environmental sound in an attempt to evoke the past, present and future of the building for a piece that will run throughout Hidden Door's ten-day duration. Some of these sounds might well emanate from what happened two days into the festival get-in, when volunteers gutting the main hall discovered what lay beyond the black drapes and what turned out to be a false black proscenium arch. Once this was ripped away, it revealed a far more ornate surround that came complete with a crest at its the centre. This is just one of th