Coffee-Table Notes

Platform, Easterhouse   Four stars Once upon a time, the idea of running a regular bus service to some of Glasgow’s outlying areas might have seemed a fanciful notion. These days, while things have changed enough so it is possible to take a trip to see Ellie Harrison’s glorious piece of agit-prop theatre, it has been something of a bumpy ride getting here.   Bus Regulation: The Musical (Strathclyde) cops its moves from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Starlight Express to whizz through more than half a century of civic calamities on the road to the mess of bus privatisation that exists today. This is done largely through the narration of Nellie the Clippie. Played with effervescent brio by Katie Thomson, Nellie steers us through the rocky road from municipal ownership of buses to the deregulation that ushered in the mess of privatisation that exists today. This is illustrated by an eight-piece ensemble of skaters drawn from three local roller derby clubs; Glasgow Roller Derby, Mean City ...

Fruitmarket Warehouse, Edinburgh Four Stars Take a sad song and make it better. This is the premise behind Magnetic North Theatre Company’s hour-long meditation on how pop ditties can end up becoming the soundtrack of your life, infused with new meaning alongside every heartache, betrayal and everyday epiphany they accompany. As Noel Coward observed with such throwaway profundity, strange how potent cheap music is.    Directors Nicholas Bone and Marisa Zanotti take this idea and run with it in a moving and graceful mash-up of words, music and movement that draws from a range of sources. These include Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Rear Window, the short stories of Katherine Mansfield and the final scene of Anton Chekhov’s play, Uncle Vanya from which the show takes its title.    Five performers occupy a series of spaces set apart from each other in private isolation, where a collective sense of loss emerges in near ritualistic fashion. After a frantic rearranging of furnit...

Piers Haggard – Film, television and theatre director and campaigner   Born – March 18, 1939; died January 11, 2023     Piers Haggard, who has died aged 83, was an award-winning director, who moved from theatre into television and film with a can-do sense of craftsmanship and getting the job done. This was the case both behind the camera on works such as Pennies From Heaven (1978), and The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970), and as a campaigner for freelance directors’ pay and conditions.   The latter saw Haggard at the centre of several organisations, which latterly included Stage Directors UK. As he explained in an interview with the Herald in 2016, SDUK had more members from Scotland than any other part of its geographical constituency. His voice of experience was an inspiration, and it was for this he was awarded an OBE.   On screen, Pennies From Heaven and The Blood on Satan’s Claw were probably Haggard’s best-known works. The Blood on Satan’s Claw was a seventee...

Gallery Malmo, Edinburgh  Franki Raffles would have fitted in well with the soon to be demolished former supermarket in North Edinburgh currently showing a small selection of her photographs. Since 2018, the space has been where the DIY-run Gallery Malmo has called home, and is the sort of roughshod space that Salford born Raffles might well have scrutinised with her lens, especially if were filled with the communal life of women at work.   In her short life, Raffles became best known for her images illustrating  Zero Tolerance , the then Edinburgh District Council’s 1992 campaign that laid bare the uncomfortable truths of male violence against women. The Zero Tolerance charity, co-founded by Raffles with Evelyn Gillan and others from EDC’s Women’s Committee, continues its work today.   In the decade prior to the campaign, Raffles developed a practice that took her from the Isle of Lewis to Zimbabwe, the then Soviet Union, China and Tibet, her images documenting the ...

To Begin at the Beginning   It’s the quiet ones you have to watch in The New Vocal Club, Benjamin A. Owen’s fusion of sound and vision that held court at Perth Theatre’s foyer for a week in November 2022. Drawn from five years experimenting with live soundtracking in care settings and with community groups, Owen’s fifty-three minute film was punctuated at its opening event by a live performance from the Vocal Chord well being choir. Further interactions with the film came from improvising musicians, double bass player Seth Bennett and pianist/composer Shiori Usui.    Both Bennett and Usui appear in the film, as do many of Vocal Chord’s members. As words and music overlap in both the film and at the event, Owen tunes in on an array of criss-crossing stories that highlight the remarkable lives that made them.   With the choir gathered around the piano beside a hand made banner that might have been created for a radical street theatre ensemble, the most striking juxtapo...