Skip to main content

Posts

Benno Schotz – Bronze in His Blood

When Benno Schotz (1891-1984) visited his brother in Glasgow in 1912, the Estonian sculptor never really left. The then twenty-one year-old returned to his homeland once before settling in Scotland for good. The result of Schotz’s self imposed exile was an artistic and personal journey that saw him become one of twentieth century Scotland’s greatest sculptors.   As a member of the Royal Scottish Academy and Head of Sculpture and Ceramics at Glasgow School of Art, Schotz would also be an inspirational teacher and champion of other artists. At the heart of his work was a network of family and friends, with his wife Milly, daughter Cherna and son Amiel influencing his figurative work prior to him taking a more abstract path inspired by trees in Kelvingrove Park.   Schotz’s migration to Scotland is the drive behind Benno Schotz and A Scots Miscellany, the current exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy that puts some of Schotz’s key works alongside twelve other first generation m...
Post a Comment
Read more
Recent posts

Bat Out of Hell

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars   America is hell in the late Jim Steinman’s rock and roll love story, reimagined in 2017 from his multi million selling albums for Meat Loaf as a long overdue jukebox musical. Steinman sets out his store in what used to be Manhattan but is now a dystopian dump, with youthful dissent beaten into the underground tunnels that line the city. Brought to life by director Jay Scheib, Steinman’s epic draws from Peter Pan, Romeo and Juliet and the sort of 1980s teen flicks where the good guys wear black leather jackets to make a suitably bombastic morality tale writ very large indeed.   It opens with Love and Death and An American Guitar from Steinman’s own 1981 album, Bad for Good. As delivered by Katie Tonkinson’s goth rebel Raven, Steinman’s spoken word monologue about attempted patricide by guitar is possessed by a low-key menace worthy of a routine by New York’s original No Wave bad girl, Lydia Lunch.    Raven is at war with her wealt...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mary: A Gig Theatre Show

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars    If the history books are written by the victors, no-one told the Mary of Rona Johnston’s whistle-stop ride through the life and times of Scotland’s short lived but much dramatised monarch. Here, Mary, Queen of Scots is a folk punk diva reclaiming her story to tell it in her own defiant image over a fifty-minute riot of spoken word monologue and song. As Mary, Johnston is ably abetted by her guitar, drum and fiddle wielding girl gang sisterhood watching her back at every turn as they join in the action.    It begins and ends with blood, as the six-strong ensemble wield their instruments like weapons in Katie Slater’s perfectly poised production for the young Knot Tied Theatre Company. As Johnston takes the microphone on designer Phoebe Wiseman’s regally carpeted stage, Mary’s short life of incident and colour is packed into a fistful of songs that move between rousing hoolies and tender ballads. These are delivered with vocal ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Derek Jarman – Digging in Another Time

When a live staging of Derek Jarman’s final film was presented at Tramway in Glasgow last month, it heralded a major new exhibition of Jarman’s work at the Hunterian Art Gallery. Blue Now saw four performers read Jarman’s text for Blue (1993), in which extracts from Jarman’s diaries as he came to terms with losing his sight from an AIDS related illness were heard over an Yves Klein hued blue screen as the film’s sole hypnotic visual.  Digging in Another Time: Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature is the first Jarman exhibition in Scotland since 1992. Despite the thirty-two year gap, it marks a continuation of the late filmmaker’s connection with Scotland dating back decades. While this comes largely through a headline making 1989 show in Glasgow as part of the National Review of Live Art (NRLA), other tangential connections left their mark, with Jarman going on to influence a new generation of artists shown alongside him at the Hunterian.   Digging in Another Time features works from a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pass the Spoon - A Screening

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh Four stars   A row of giant vegetables are lined up like they’ve just won first prize in the local village fete as the audience enters this very special silver jubilee celebration of Magnetic North Theatre Company’s assorted off-kilter adventures over the last 25 years. The smiles on the vegetables skins give the gave away, however, as this rogues gallery of very fresh looking life size produce are actually characters in `Pass the Spoon, a ‘sort of opera’ first produced at Tramway in Glasgow back in 2011.    This TV cooking show set collaboration between composer David Fennessy, artist David Shrigley and Magnetic North director Nicholas Bone is introduced by our hosts, June Spoon and Phillip Fork, before an overripe banana and a depressed egg appear as they await gluttonous guest star Mr Granules. With the vegetables mere appetisers, the result resembles an absurdist Masterchef/It’s a Knockout mash up scripted by Alfred Jarry.    T...
Post a Comment
Read more

Jeff Merrifield - An Obituary

Jeff Merrifield – Writer, musician, arts administrator, Seeker   Born March 9 th 1943; died October 31st 2024    Jeff Merrifield, who has died aged 81, was a writer, musician, arts administrator, archivist and publisher who played a key role in assorted underground scenes across more than half a century that a simple job description can’t come close to capturing. Ultimately, Merrifield made things happen. This was the case whether as co-conspirator with theatrical maverick Ken Campbell on his assorted capers, sorting out Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD festival enough for it to survive a loss making first year, or setting up an improvising orchestra on Shetland, where he settled in 2008.   To co-opt the title of his brick-sized biography of Campbell, published in 2011, Merrifield was a Seeker. His tireless pursuit of artistic enlightenment saw his free thinking evangelism offset by a practical can-do sense of what was required to bring projects to fruition. There were plays, b...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Christmas Carol

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Four stars   Charles Dickens  has never  just been for Christmas, but at this time of year his seasonal masterpiece comes fully into focus. This was proven over the weekend in glowing fashion by Guy Masterson, the indefatigable Edinburgh Festival Fringe veteran, whose solo rendition of Dickens’ tale adapted by director Nick Hennegan gets back to the storytelling heart of Dickens’ own live renditions of his work.   Hennegan’s production for Theatre Tours International and Maverick Theatre Company is no piece of ornate Victoriana. Masterson embodies Dickens’ bustling world with gravitas and grit, using little more than a wooden chair and an old grey raincoat hanging from the rafters. Once he puts the latter on, it gives his  performance a swish, a swoop and a sweep that are captured like rapid fire snapshots in the moody lighting that accompanies it.    Masterson moves from narrator to the Dickens universe of characters with...
Post a Comment
Read more