Water is at the centre of Sarah Calmus’s world in Right to Roam, as the Edinburgh based artist follows up on her recent multi-screen intervention, Uisge, viewable on Potterow in Edinburgh, with a full-on immersive experience. Calmus’s exhibition takes its title from the internationally recognised notion of a public right to access public and privately owned land. Focusing on the River Forth, she utilises moving image, sculpture, sound and screenprints to take a deep dive into environmental pollution, climate change and how the natural landscape is threatened. “I wanted to talk about this idea within the lens of water,” Calmus says of an exhibition that has its roots in a residency in Sweden. “I swim in the Forth quite a lot, and I also row, and because of where I live in Newhaven I see the river every morning, so I'm all about the water, so I thought I would hone in on this conversation about the right to roam and really focus on water. We're all made of water, and the tides ...
The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars A big blood red spotlight engulfs the stage as an eerie underscore plays while the lights go down on this trimmed down version of Shakespeare’s Scottish play. Arguably the bard’s best-known saga has been seen in many forms over the last few centuries. His is tale of doomed ambition and men who would be king probably hasn’t been seen that often with such rapid fire brevity as this new version by the Hove based Out of Chaos company. Perhaps with latter day low attention span in mind concerning this set text friendly epic, director Mike Tweddle here oversees a version featuring just two actors who manage to fast forward through the Macbeths rise and fall in a speedy eighty minutes. Hannah Barrie and Paul O’Mahoney may be centre-stage much of the time as the fortune hunting Macbeths, but they also double up as a full supporting cast of assorted monarchs, thanes and soldiers in arms without missing a beat. They also do a turn as the wei...