Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars The world has changed in the decade since Jo Clifford first performed The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven, her trans reimagining of the gospels, and not always in a good way. One of the better changes has been the way the play has travelled the world in a multitude of languages and interpretations. The worst is how some of those presenting the play have risked life and limb just by performing it. Such was the case with Renata Carvalho, when she opened Natalia Mallo’s production of Clifford’s play in Brazil. A multitude of law suits and a new right wing government has made any further performances there in the foreseeable future unlikely. This is an undoubted travesty, as anyone lucky enough to witness Carvalho’s one-night-only Glasgow date as part of a tenth anniversary mini-season celebration of Clifford’s play will testify to. Arriving onstage in a jumble sale dress, carrying a vanity case and accompanied by the sort of club ...

Amsterdam is a long way from Vietnam, where the Oslo-based Verdensteatret cross-artform ensemble revisited after ten years to create HANNAH, their playfully elliptical fusion of watery-looking visuals, kinetic sculptures and 1950s cartoon-style soundscapes they bring to Glasgow next week. The two performances of HANNAH will form part of the fifth edition of Sonica, the Cryptic company’s annual showcase of international visual/sonic artworks. Back in February, however, the morning after the first performances of the show at the Sonic Acts festival that tales place mainly at the Stedelijk Museum of contemporary design, the company is feeling the effects of what appears to have been a pre-Scotland research trip into a Dutch whisky bar. This hasn’t stopped four of them meeting for coffee outside the museum’s twenty-first century Benthem Crouwel Wing, a vast building in Museum Square which opened in 2010. The cross-generation ensemble who make up the membership of Verdensteatret – ...

Edinburgh Printmakers until January 5 2020 Four stars Hangovers of Empire hang heavy over Alberta Whittle and Hardeep Pandhal’s work, seen here in tandem responding in part to Edinburgh Printmakers’ former tenure as the North British Rubber Company. They’re there in Alberta Whittle’s two short films, What Sound Does The Black Atlantic Make? and Sorry Not Sorry, that form the centre-piece of her contribution to this exhibition curated by the Mother Tongue organisation. They’re there too in Pandhal’s short animation, BAME of Thrones (trailer) and his Happy Punjabi Gothic series of eight etchings. Both of Whittle’s films are collages that join the dots of the black experience, from colonial cannon fodder serving queen and country, to the Windrush generation patronisingly welcomed off the ships with requests to sing calypso. Fast forward a few years on, and marches by the National Front and inner city riots look like troubling pre-cursors to where we are now. Today’s institution...