Coffee-Table Notes

Few artists have altered the physical landscape more than Andy Goldsworthy. For half a century now, the Cheshire born sculptor has used natural materials to alter outdoor spaces in ways that are both temporary and monumental. To mark the occasion, Goldsworthy’s work is celebrated at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh with Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years, a major exhibition that opens in July 2025 with a mix of old and new creations that combine to create its own environment.   Prior to this, in April, Jupiter Artland sculpture park outside Edinburgh will show WORK BEGAT WORK: Ian Hamilton Finlay & Andy Goldsworthy. This will display Goldswothy’s permanent commissions alongside work by Finlay, bringing together two of Jupiter Artland’s great inspirations in tandem with Finlay’s own National Galleries of Scotland retrospective as well as Goldsworthy’s RSA show.   “ We've been working on it now for a couple of years, so it's a bit more than an exhibition,” Goldsworthy says...

Leith Theatre , Edinburgh Four stars   Irvine Welsh’s new novel, Men in Love, is on sale in Leith Theatre’s foyer, its soundtrack album is launched in Leith next weekend, and a new Welsh based documentary, Reality is Not Enough, will close this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival next month. As an example of local boy done good, this brief run of Davie Carswell’s stage version of Welsh’s 2002 sequel to Trainspotting is a welcome addition to this spate of high profile activity surrounding the Leith born novelist.    Having begun its life on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2022 five years after Danny Boyle filmed Welsh's book as T2, Carswell's adaptation became a West End hit. Bringing it all back home for what probably won't be the last time is living testament to the ongoing power of Welsh’s ever expanding back catalogue.    The handy translations of Leith patois projected onto the back wall of the stage lest a passing west coaster stumble into the bui...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars    John Buchan probably couldn’t have predicted the liberties  maverick film director Alfred Hitchcock would take with his 1915 novel, in which dashing Richard Hannay takes flight to Scotland after a night at the theatre throws him into a world of intrigue and adventure. Hitchcock too might have raised an eyebrow regarding how writer Patrick Garland transformed his 1935 big screen adaptation into a pocket sized stage pastiche requiring just four actors to do the business.    Garland’s irreverent hybrid of Hitchcock and Buchan’s creations has run and run for two decades now and counting. Ben Occhipinti’s new Pitlochry Festival Theatre production breathes fresh life into a show that has tremendous fun with the existing material while managing to put a personal stamp on things.    This is led by Alexander Service as Hannay, who flaunts his character’s matinee idol looks with a nice line in self parody as he flees...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four stars   Now, here’s a funny one. Take three comedians, household names the lot of them during the 1970s, and all used to dying a death on the variety circuit during their early years. Then, like some celestial impresario, put them on the same bill, and see who comes out laughing.    Such is the premise behind Paul Hendy’s play, revived for a UK tour following a west end run after being a hit of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Hendy’s conceit is to put Tommy Cooper, Bob Monkhouse and Eric Morecambe in a grotty dressing room where the wall is adorned by photographs of other greats of the comedy world no longer with us.    Over the next eighty minutes, professional competition develops into a philosophical dissection of what people find funny. This is punctuated by some well-honed gags that sees each man go some way to reveal the personal drive behind their acts, be it Cooper’s ramshackle magic show, Morecambe’s double act with Ernie Wise...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   The football season may theoretically be over for the summer, but as diehard fans know in their bones, it never really ends. With this in mind, this latest and apparently final run of Davie Carswell’s loving homage to one of Celtic Football Club’s greatest heroes, whose life was so cruelly cut short by skin cancer in 2008 aged just 51, could probably be seen as either a pre season warm-up.    And what a match Carswell and director Adam Felix O’brien have knitted together. Burns is brought to life by way of a series of dramatised anecdotes that make up the story of a man who came up from Glasgow’s Calton district to become a top-flight player and manager of the team that was already in his blood. As the play makes clear too, Burns never forgot his own description of himself as ‘a supporter who got lucky.’   Football may be at the play’s centre, but Carswell’s script focuses on the man beyond, be it as husband, father, devout Cathol...

Theatre 118, Glasgow Three stars   Serial killers have been a mainstay of true crime TV for decades. Julie Calderwood’s new play puts the makers of such programmes in the dock as much as their subjects in a work that looks at men in power and the abuses they wield on the women who get in their way.    Calderwood sets her play in a maximum-security prison, where man of the people TV host Hugo Cameron prepares for his exclusive interview with Thomas Cullen. Cullen is incarcerated for the murders of five women, but the interview is his last chance to convince the world of his innocence, with his on camera plea aimed especially at his daughter.    Before all that, researcher Grace has had to navigate her way between the two evils that confront her. On the one hand, putting up with Hugo’s old school obnoxiousness seems to be part of the job description. On the other, Thomas’ initial charm points to a different side of a man with nothing to lose.    On camer...