Coffee-Table Notes

Rabbie Burns might not know what's hit him once Douglas Gordon gets hold of him. Or rather, the full length marble statue of Burns created in 1824 by John Flaxman and currently standing in the Great Hall of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh might not. The statue, originally housed in Thomas Hamilton's Burns Monument on Calton Hill, is the inspiration for Black Burns, a response to Flaxman's original by the Berlin-based Glaswegian. The result literally breaks down perceptions of Scotland's much revered national bard, who stands as the only full figure in a room full of busts. “My initial idea was to have all the busts turning their back on Burns,” says Gordon, “so you had all the other characters ignoring the central character. Then I began to be intrigued by the way he was ivory coloured, which made me think about his history with slavery, and I thought, why not take this white man and turn him into a black man. “I'd already started working w

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Christmas comes early to Glasgow theatre this year, in the form of Andy Arnold's summer revival of Anthony Neilson's grotesque suburban farce. First seen at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2002, the show opens on Christmas Eve, with hapless bobbies on the beat Gobbel and Blunt forced to do their duty by informing an elderly couple of the woefully unseasonal death of their daughter. Except, as the pair dither on the doorstep before being allowed over the thresh-hold, things don't quite work out like that. What follows is a riotous set of slapstick routines that lob assorted contemporary grenades into a well-trodden comic path. The obligatory vicar is caught with his pants down amidst major misunderstandings galore, but the festive romp also takes in anti paedophile vigilantes, a pair of frisky pensioners and a Lazarus-like Chihuahua. As the boys in blue who bite off more than they can chew, Michael Dylan and Martin McCormick ar

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh until October 29 th Four stars In the shop of Modern 2, the postcard reproductions of some of the eighty paintings brought together for this bumper compendium of 1920s and 1930s British realism are racked next to those of Ladybird book covers and vintage posters advertising Scottish holiday destinations. This may be a happy accident, but in their complimentary depictions of idealised versions of brave new post-war worlds, they are all too appropriate aesthetic near neighbours. While the blast of World War 1 exploded Dada and other abstractions into noisy life elsewhere, here the landscapes look unsullied, their occupants impeccably turned out. Over four rooms we see that world at work, rest and play. From the Italian inspired co-opting of bustling communities and religious iconography in the first, the second room's set of portraits flit from the windswept idyll of James Cowie's much seen A Portrait Group (1933/about

Heathcote Williams – Poet, playwright, visionary Born November 15 1941; died July 1 2017 Heathcote Williams, who has died aged 75 following illness, never rested in expressing his anger at an unjust world. Barely a week seemed to go by without some eloquent epistle appearing, either online in reinvigorated counter-cultural newspaper International Times, or else in YouTube montages, with Williams' words often read by actor Alan Cox. Williams' poems were up to the minute documentary polemics took on the establishment that bred him with forensic laceration and an intellect and wit that punctured pomposity at every turn. This was the case whether attacking the Queen in Royal Babylon: The Criminal Record of the British Monarchy, fellow old Etonian Boris Johnson in The Blond Beast of Brexit: A Study in Depravity, or what he saw as as the obscenity of Donald Trump in American Porn, published this year on the day of Trump's inauguration as president of the United States. I

When John Durnin decided to programme The Ruling Class as part of Pitlochry Festival Theatre's summer season, early read-throughs were greeted very differently by various members of his cast. Peter Barnes' rarely revived 1968 critique of a nation divided by sanity, madness and the aristocracy focuses explicitly on a world riven by social schisms. The split here, however, depended largely on age. “For the younger cast members, discovering the work of this strange and most forgotten of playwrights was a completely new experience,” says Durnin, who has been artistic director of PFT since 2003. “Whereas for the older members of the cast, who already knew the play and Barnes' work, it was a rediscovery of his unique use of language and theatricality.” The Ruling Class charts the accidental rise of Jack Gurney, who becomes the fourteenth Earl of Gurney, despite being a long-term resident in a psychiatric hospital. Gurney he believes himself to be Jesus Christ after developi

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars The stage looks gift-wrapped with a sparklingly expensive bow at the opening of John Durnin's revival of Arthur Kopit's Cole Porter based musical that reinvigorates the starry 1956 film where it originated. With the film itself drawing from Philip Barry's play, The Philadelphia Story, Kopit and Porter's depiction of the Long Island jet set says much about over-privileged party people, but retains a fizz that keeps it going till all passion is seemingly spent. The action is based around the forthcoming nuptials of drop-dead gorgeous society gal and serial bride, Tracy Lord. With her daddy having run off with a show-girl, and ex beau next door CK Dexter Haven set sail for other shores, Tracy settles for George, a stinking rich would-be president for whom stupidity, as someone observes, sits on his shoulders like a crown. Enter Tracy's match-making kid sister Dinah and a pair of reporters for a trashy scandal sheet looking

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars Don't be fooled by the initially kitsch-looking trappings of Alan Ayckbourn's 1972 dinner party comedy. If those last three words alone suggest something cringe-worthily middle-class, what forty-six years ago was painfully current now looks like a devastating prophecy of how property developing spivs came to rule the world. Taking place over three Christmas Eves, the play's conceit is to set each of three acts in the kitchen of the respective des-res where the assorted seasonal shindigs take place. This sees the action move from the suburban new build of the upwardly mobile Jane and Sidney Hopcroft, then to Eva and Geoffrey Jacksons' thoroughly modern apartment, before alighting at the crumbling pile owned by Ronald and Marion Brewster-Wright. As relationships develop, what starts out as a sit-com style bit-of-a-do moves into a more troubling world barely hidden behind the party faces on show. The result in Richard Baron