Coffee-Table Notes

Summerhall Three stars An open door and an East European chorale that tugs five ways but remains emotively harmonious is the scene-setter for the Glasgow-based but Polish-inspired Company of Wolves ensemble's fifty minute meditation on conformity, resistance and community. Involving music from four countries, a frantic physicality and a fractured text drawn from the writings of incarcerated Red Army Faction co-founder, Ulrike Meinhof, Ewan Downie's production begins with the quintet acting in near robotic unison before rising up one by one to rebel against, well, anything that's going, really. This may be just a passing phase of restless youth, however, even as the sound of metal chairs scraped slowly across the floor becomes a little atonal symphony. Later, the same chairs are beaten with uniform ferocity. Only when a man possessed has his demons sucked out of him with a prolonged kiss do things change into something both more individual and more accepting of others. It...

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh Four stars One of the most refreshing things about the second part of the National Theatre of Scotland's compendium of mini monologues by contemporary writers inspired by one of the SNPG's magnificently multi-faceted archive is, as with its predecessor, co-directors Joe Douglas and Catrin Evans' refusal to cast to type. So while Janice Galloway's take on Muriel Spark is performed by Anneika Rose with a vivaciousness that suggests a nation in its prime, Johnny McKnight's version of the Queen finds Colin McCredie playing a woman hurt both by neglect and the fact that she's been portrayed on-screen by Helen Mirren. Linda McLean's Clementina Stirling Graham is a shrewd operator, Liz Lochhead's Robert Burns a partisan firebrand, while Rona Munro's tribute to Dear Scotland contributor Jackie Kay is the warmest of homages. Rob Drummond's Three Oncologists look at some very real matters of life and death, Nic...

When John Byrne decided to do a version of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, it   was a perfect match. While a century or so apart, both writers were   masters of dissecting human foibles in a way that lent a pathos to   their characters even as some of them looked increasingly ridiculous.   The result of Byrne's interest in Chekhov was Uncle Varick, which   relocates Chekhov's nineteenth century tale of love and life to the   rural heart of north-east Scotland in the thick of the 1960s which was   alleged in far off London to be swinging. Uncle Varick was first seen ten years ago at the Royal Lyceum Theatre   in Edinburgh in a towering production that featured Brian Cox in the   title role in an all too rare stage role on home turf. A decade on, and   the assistant director of that production, Michael Emans, is taking the   helm for a major touring revival of the play produced by his   increasingly ambitious Rapture Theatre. “I was very ...

If it wasn't for a plumber's son from Dalkeith, the result of the Second World War may have turned out very differently indeed. British air-force meteorologist Group Captain James Stagg may not be as widely known as many war heroes, but without his advice to then supreme commander of allied forces in Europe, General Dwight D Eisenhower, on what date to strike, the D Day landings in Normandy could have been a disaster. The story of Stagg, Eisenhower and how Stagg's forecast helped carve out history form the backbone of Pressure, a brand new play by actor and writer David Haig, which receives its world premiere at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh this week before transferring to Chichester. With Haig also taking on the lead role of Stagg, the little-known story has clearly become a labour of love for its author and star. “It's a story that is very seldom told,” says Haig, “but about a subject that everybody knows quite a lot about. James Stagg is an ...

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh Four stars Imagine a gallery after dark, when all the silent subjects immortalised on canvas break free from the frame like some live art happening and give vent to their spleen having watched the world  for centuries. That's pretty much what the twenty writers who have penned a series of miniature monologues inspired by a particular exhibit have done for this first of the National Theatre of Scotland's two dramatic guided tours through the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, which give voice to some iconic old masters and mistresses as well as some peripheral figures usually left on the sidelines, AL Kennedy's opening take on Robert Louis Stevenson suggests what might be, before David Greig's The Cromartie Fool raspberries his own brand of wisdom. Dancer/choreographer Michael Clark's own recorded voice delivers Ali Smith's piece written from the point of view of Clark's knee, which peers from a photograph throug...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars At first glance, you could be forgiven for thinking Ben Harrison's production of Hamish MacDonald's new play to be  some dark piece of science-fiction future-shock. The fact that this tale of how haemophiliacs in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s were treated with contaminated and often fatal blood products is culled from the real life testimonies of two of its victims on our own doorstep makes it all the more shocking. It is Bruce Norval and Robert Mackie's stories of being used as what one of them angrily describes at one point as 'human lab rats' that forms the human heart of MacDonald's tale of institutional abuse,or Dogstar Theatre Company in association with Profilteatern, Sweden and UMEA 2014 European Capital of Culture. It is the play's barrage of statistics that dominate, however, whether flashed up on the LED counter at the top of Emily Reid's set, on which assorted images are projected, or through speec...

Sex and drugs and rock and roll may have been a phrase introduced into the world by the late Ian Dury in the post-punk 1970s, but such hedonistic excesses have been around for centuries. Back in the 1600s, for instance, Restoration poet and one of King Charles 11's court, John Wilmot, aka the second Earl of Rochester, took full advantage of the era's post puritan anything goes aesthetic to become the ultimate libertine. Rochester's penchant for self-destructive behaviour, alas, saw him dead at thirty-three of venereal disease. All of this features in The Libertine, Stephen Jeffreys' flamboyant drama made famous a decade ago in a film starring Johnny Depp, and which receives its first UK production in two decades at the Citzens Theatre in Glasgow next week. Given the Citz's own colourful history with decadent period romps, this seems an all too fitting liaison. “Rochester was a celebrity of the day,” says Jeffreys. “He was like a rock star, and because London at the ...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Irish actor Barry McGovern has long proved to be the master of interpreting the twentieth century's most iconic writer, ever since he appeared on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1986 in I'll Go On. This solo adaptation of Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable, was revived for the Edinburgh International Festival in 2013 following a rendition of Beckett's novella, Watt, the previous year. So to hear McGovern read a seventy-five minute selection of Beckett's prose and poetry as the culmination of Uncensored Life, a weekend-long celebration of publisher John Calder, who first introduced the world to Beckett, William Burroughs and many other literary giants, is a thrill indeed. McGovern stands with a folder full of photocopied texts, and begins solemnly, only for Beckett's words to open out their meditations on mortality to reveal a master comedian at work. With work dating back to Beckett's e...

Princes St Gardens, Edinburgh Three stars It's nearly thirty years since Bill Bryden cast David Hayman as a radical Jesus processing through the streets of Glasgow for The Holy City, his contemporary television rendering of the Passion. Something of that play's spirit seems to have trickled down into Rob Drummond's own up to the minute version, which sees an authoritarian regime campaigning for a No vote in a forthcoming referendum. Having already reduced crime figures by bringing back the death penalty, political figurehead Herod, his spin doctor McKayfus and police chief Pilate are gunning for charismatic community spokesman and Yes poster boy Jesus. Only when their nemesis is set up on trumped up terrorist charges do Herod and his cronies appear to gain the upper hand. Opening with two uniformed policemen flanking the Ross Bandstand, Suzanne Lofthus' open-air production for the Cutting Edge Theatre Company in association with the Princes Street Easter...

 As it's name suggests, the Tectonics festival that runs over a long May weekend in Glasgow taps into the seismic shifts that have occurred across the entire spectrum of experimental music over the last decade. Instigated by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's former Chief Conductor and current Principal Guest Conductor Ilan Volkov, who is currently the Chief Conductor and Musical Director of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, alongside AC Projects' Alasdair Campbell, the man behind the Le Weekend and Counterflows festivals, this second edition of Tectonics pulls together some of the world's leading experimental composers alongside a younger generation of musical free-thinkers   from a world where rock, art and classical music collide. “There are so many strands of music now, and I think it's great to have people from different backgrounds working like this,” Volkov says from Reykjavik, where the Icelandic arm of Tectonics has just opened. “We've been doing this ...

McLellan Galleries, Glasgow until April 21st Three stars It's the soft-core gloss that sucks you in first in 'Raspberry Poser', the fourteen-minute billboard-size video projection that forms the heart of Jordan Wolfson's life and death fusion of high-end corporate ad-land stylings and provocative animations. A CGI-generated HIV virus bounces around the neighbourhood like an ever-pulsating nail-bomb, multiplying in a regimented choreographic display that ricochets around the chi-chi bathrooms and bedrooms of the privileged to a soundtrack of Beyonce's 'Beautiful Nightmare'. As a flipside to this,  a condom full of chocolate hearts seems to be serving up something sweeter, but possibly more sickly. A cartoon bad boy looking somewhere between Hanna-Barbera doing Dr Seuss and Sergio Aragones reinventing Dennis The Menace for the counter-cultural age asks the viewer if they think he's wealthy or gay, then proceeds to throttle himself or else cut out his innar...

The Common Guild, Glasgow until June 7th Three stars in case of emergency, natural disaster, nuclear fall-out or biblical engulfment, Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri is probably a very good man to have on your side. By stocking up on blankets, fire extinguishers, boxes of matches, bottles of water and assorted toiletries, then assembling them in assorted sculptural show-and-tells on silver-blanketed pallets in the town-house corridors of The Common Guild, Kuri takes a practical and possibly life-saving survival kit, then reassembles it in a way that suggests it's an in-storage archive with everything in its place and a place for everything, even as it awaits a situation in which it can be used. Downstairs, alongside the two pallet-based pieces, a row of metal compartments containing folded up and piled up blankets resembles both a charity shop and a call centre store-room, the array of unopened goods on the stairs themselves seem to awaiting the cleaner to arrive. Upst...

When Paul Allen's stage version of Brassed Off appeared in 1998, two years after Mark Herman's film about a small Yorkshire community's efforts to win a brass band competition was first released, the Miners Strike that formed the story's backdrop was still a fresh wound on Britain's landscape. Thirty years after a civil war which became a defining moment of Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's calculated assault on trade unions, the play's current revival for a tour which arrives in Edinburgh next week is an all too fitting reminder of one of the late twentieth century's most inglorious eras. The fact that Brassed Off makes its point about how an entire community can be decimated by enforced pit closures through both a romantic comedy and the unifying power of music is testament to the play's staying power. Yorkshire-born Allen, whose work in popular theatre has seen him forge close links with Alan Ayckbourn and the Scarborough-based St...

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It may be a tad early in the year for Shakespeare's sunniest rom-com to come blinking into the light, but that hasn't stopped the all-male Propeller company from hitting the road with the frothiest of double bills, with Ed Hall's productions of the Dream and The Comedy of Errors playing the King's on alternate nights. Neither does it stop the array of long-john clad fairies, who drape themselves about a netting-lined stage before a stripey-tighted Robin Goodfellow, as Puck is credited here, bursts out of a box feet first as if from an upside-down toybox come to life. As the cast of fourteen flit between the play's three worlds, what follows resembles a 1980s alternative comedy troupe doing an elaborately choreographed role-play. At first, Joseph Chance's Robin seems to call the shots, click-clacking chaos into the four young lovers all-night exploits with a wooden rattle. Soon it's Darrell Brockis' Oberon...

Dundee Rep Three stars Life in a hospital ward can play tricks on you. Especially when you've had a stroke like ageing matriarch Catherine, the tough cookie at the heart of Stuart Paterson's new play, directed by Philip Howard in a temporary studio space that seats the audience on the theatre's main stage either side of the action. Used to calling the shots running her own haulage firm, Catherine is now in a bed-ridden haze of medicated confusion, in which a steady stream of old loves seep from her dream-state with lifelike clarity even as she can barely recall her grandson's name. Doctors and nurses treat her with a professional briskness as her husband Duncan and daughter Margaret attempt to salvage a few precious moments. At the centre of this life in decline is a towering performance from Ann Louise Ross, who invests Catherine with a hard-headed steeliness that slips at crucial moments to reveal an emotional vulnerability, before she pulls herself toget...

In 1493, a youthful King James 1V of Scotland embarked on a curious experiment, in which he decamped two infant children to Inchkeith Island on the Firth of Forth in the care of a mute woman. The point of the exercise for the curious monarch was to determine how the children might learn language while isolated from the rest of the world, and if, in its pure state, their utterances were in fact the language of the gods. Fast forward five hundred years or so, and a couple of artists equally as curious as King James pick up on what remains a bizarre incident. Things become even stranger when the artists look into what happened when British troops were stationed on Inchkeith during the Second World War. A Freedom of Information request lodged with the Ministry of Defence about their own interests in language deprivation casts up some apparently startling material, which the pair determine to make public. The result of all this is The Forbidden Experiment, the latest dramatic inquiry ...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars It's the voice of God you hear first in Vanishing Point's exquisitely realised impressionistic evocation of the life and times of the poet and song-writer whose influence on popular culture over the last half century is only now being fully recognised. It's a jolly voice compared to the deadpan melancholy of Ivor Cutler's own, but this unseen presence points up Cutler's own uneasy relationship with religious beliefs of all persuasions, even as this co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland is as much a spiritual meditation as any liturgy. Using a framing device of an actual meeting between actor Sandy Grierson, who plays Cutler, with Cutler's partner Phyllis King below the Kentish Town flat where Cutler once lived, the first half is a celestial radio play that shows how a dreamy boy from Ibrox went from life as a pilot and a teacher to an underground cult figure and star of TV and radio. These scenes give us...

The squall of feedback that pierces across the auditorium of Eden Court Theatre in Inverness may only last a few seconds, but, it’s enough to cause a brief commotion among anyone in the room. The cast and band are in the thick of rehearsals for The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutler, Vanishing Point theatre company’s impressionistic music homage to the Glasgow-born poet, singer and stalwart of the late John Peel’s radio programme, which - quite literally - speaks volumes. Cutler was, after all, a member of the Noise Abatement Society, and claimed to loathe amplified music in all forms. The feedback is a consequence of a late-running sound-check caused by a piano’s exterior splintering in a way that rendered it unusable. A replacement piano found at short notice, a piano tuner was also required to before work could proceed. The band is led my musical director James Fortune, and includes multi-instrumentalist and recipient of a Herald Little Devil award Nick Pynn. Pynn, who ...

Time was that if you lived in Edinburgh it felt like you could see drummer Chris Corsano play live pretty much any night of the week. During his time living in the capital in the mid to late noughties, the New England-sired drummer whose collaborators range from former Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore to free jazz saxophonist Evan Parker was a ubiquitous figure here. Having hooked up with the city's fecund Noise scene, shows ranged from teaming up with assorted affiliates of the Giant Tank disorganisation, to duos with pedal steel vixen Heather Leigh Murray or bass player Massimo Pupillo of Italian power trio, Zu, to taking part in Arika's Resonant Spaces project. All this while touring the world with Bjork, whose Volta album Corsano appeared on. One particularly busy couple of weeks in 2007 saw Corsano play Edinburgh with female Noise duo Hockyfrilla, another Edinburgh date in a duo with former Geraldine Fibbers and Evangelista vocalist Carla Bozulich, supportin...