Coffee-Table Notes

Just like Waiting for Godot’s existential double act Vladimir and Estragon, Samuel Beckett has waited a long time to be fully embraced by into the metaphorical kirk of Edinburgh International Festival. For an artist whose sense of exile and outsiderdom has his detractors as much as his champions, perhaps it should come as no surprise that Beckett’s theatre work has largely been seen on the Fringe, where even then it has felt hidden away in back-street venues. The appearance of Druid Theatre’s internationally acclaimed production of Waiting for Godot at this year’s EIF, then, suggests that Beckett’s work has at last come out of the wilderness. This has been brewing for a few years now by way of a series of productions under former EIF director Jonathan Mills’ tenure. Since the baton was passed to Fergus Linehan, however, the links feel umbilical. Growing up in Dublin with an actress mother and an arts journalist father, Beckett’s shadow loomed large. While Linehan’s mother Rosaleen

“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