Coffee-Table Notes

“I’ve always been slightly afraid of actors,” Tacita Dean says, midway through talking about Woman with a Red Hat, her enticingly named exhibition that forms the Fruitmarket Gallery’s contribution to this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival. Given that Woman with a Red Hat, which opens hot on the heels of a trilogy of solo exhibitions running concurrently across London, is based entirely around theatrical performance, this sounds like an odd thing to say. Especially as its centre-piece, Event for a Stage (2015), is an hour-long film featuring a solo performance by Tony award-winning actor Stephen Dillane in a black box theatre space dressed as Oedipus. “Working with Stephen was a huge learning curve for me,” says Dean, whose artistic career began with the YBA generation, and who was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1998. “I don’t think I work with actors in a functional way, and that’s all to do with my inability, willfully or otherwise, to work within linear narrative cinema. I tel

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Three stars If it wasn’t for the Swastikas and the SS uniforms worn by its participants, the meeting that formed the heart of RFT Theatre’s revival of Conspiracy, Loring Mandel’s stage version of his Emmy-winning screenplay for the 2001 HBO film of the same name, might be for a corporate away. As the sixteen men in suits proved over the next ninety minutes of Robin Osman’s production for the lo-fi Formation theatre festival, such everyday power-plays aren’t the only things that look familiar. The play is a dramatic reconstruction of the 1942 Wannsee Conference, in which Germany’s Nazi government co-opted the grandees of assorted agencies into approving the final solution that led to the Holocaust. From the first 'heil Hitler' onwards, there is something chilling about how even the faintest glimmer of humanity is manipulated into submission or else simply shouted down by the loudest voice. B y the end, as slickly realised sparring gives way t

Steven Berkoff wouldn’t recognise the Gorbals these days. As the iconoclastic actor, writer, director and auteur returns to Glasgow this weekend for the first time in what he reckons is at least twenty years, Berkoff certainly wouldn’t recognise the Citizens Theatre, currently undergoing a major period of architectural re-development. It was here he cut some of his early acting teeth in the mid-1960s at the Citz’s now long-destroyed studio space, The Close. It was here too where he took the never before seen photographs that make up Gorbals: 1966, which opens this weekend at Street Level Photoworks. The images on show may be just across the Clyde, but as the Gorbals itself undergoes its latest period of regeneration along with the Citz, they reveal a long lost world that Berkoff captured just before it was razed to the ground. “The Gorbals was kind of a no-man’s land,” says Berkoff. “It was in the process of being pulled down, and I spent days going round this bizarre and slig