Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   Pity poor Rab McVie, the eternal innocent bystander cast adrift in grubby long johns like some refugee Samuel Beckett character caught in the crossfire of an action painting come to life. As music and performance underscore a virtuoso display of live brushwork projected onto the back of the stage as it is created in real time,  Rab watches the world around him with befuddled abandon as it turns to a living hell.   Or at least that is the sense you get in director Maria Pattinson’s production of a collaboration between artist Maria Rud, Edinburgh post punk soothsayers The Filthy Tongues and actor Tam Dean Burn. A loose knit script is drawn from an essay written by Rud four weeks before Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine. This is pulsed by a live soundtrack of songs from three Filthy Tongues albums. Throw in translations by former Scots Makar Edwin Morgan of two works by Russian Futurist poet, Velimir Khlebnikov, and a hybrid dra...

As the criss-crossing cacophony of Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann’s ten-screen installation,   Labour in a Single Shot  (2012-2014), engulfs you from all sides, close your eyes and it’s easy to believe you’re in the heart of some twenty-first century global village. With monitors hung back to back on metal platforms that could double up on building sites, this compendium of 60 moving image snapshots of people at work forms the centrepiece of this first major exhibition in Scotland by German filmmaker Farocki. The resultant bombardment of sound and vision captures all the bustle and noise of a world in messy motion.        Made prior to Farocki’s death in 2014 aged 70,  Labour in a Single Shot  forms part of a larger project begun with Ehmann in 2011 by way of a series of film and video workshops in fifteen cities. Here, participants were tasked with producing videos one to two minutes long, based on the idea of ‘labour’, and filmed in a single sho...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars   ‘The play is cursed I understand that now’ says Lady Macbeth in the second act of Zinnie Harris’ new take on Shakespeare’s Scottish play, which breaks its dramatic straitjacket to unleash hitherto untapped forces. As Liz Kettle’s shape shifting Carlin says in her scene-setting prologue, however, ‘The Story will be told, the way it has always been told.’   This is certainly the case in the first half of Harris’ own production, played out on Tom Piper’s expansive warehouse like set. The prophecy of Macbeth’s ascension to the throne and the bloody murder concocted in collusion with his wife before its ensuing descent into chaos are all pretty much intact. In this way, Carlin’s promise doesn’t so much ring twice as come knock-knock-knocking like some telltale heart of inevitable doom.   There are shifts, however, in a 1930s jazz age tinged rendition that sees Nicole Cooper’s Lady Macbeth wearing very tweedy trousers prior to Adam B...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Roxy is on fire. It’s a new moon, and she and her mates, Bushra, Gina and Joanne, are on the verge of something that burns even brighter, and things will never be the same again. So it goes in Maryam Hamidi’s new play for teenagers and upwards, which charts Roxy and co’s journey into womanhood with hormonally charged abandon, with an extra added frisson of would-be witchcraft for good measure.   Set beside designer Jen McGinley’s mountain of junkyard detritus where Roxy and her coven cast spells without being disturbed, Hamidi’s play cops some of its moves from the more supernaturally inclined branch of teen TV that serves up similarly inclined rites of passage. Hamidi, director Joanna Bowman and their turbo charged young cast bring adolescent angst and everyday dysfunction to bear with a scabrous wit that masks their vulnerability even as it helps cast out the assorted demons they face. Most pressing of these is the illness of Roxy’s ill mothe...

City Art Centre, Edinburgh until February 19   What do you do when you go home and find it isn’t there anymore? One imagines this was a question photographer Paul Duke might have been forced to square up to while making his prodigal’s return to Muirhouse, the north Edinburgh neighbourhood where he grew up.  No Ruined Stone is his answer.    When Duke revisited in 2014 after several decades away, his old house had been demolished, wiped out by several generations of demolition, regeneration and attempted renewal of an area central to the UK’s botched post Second World War civic experiment in urban living. Despite this, the communities that grew out of it have gradually gained strength through adversity enough to survive and cement their relationship with the neighbourhood.   Both facets are evident in  No Ruined Stone , which takes its name from a line in Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem, ‘On A Raised Beach’, in which MacDiarmid writes how ‘There are plenty of ruined ...

David Mach is thinking big. The home studio of the Methil born sculptor and icon of monumental public art more resembles a small factory than a building site, with it’s production line of materials either laid out on a series of tables, or else neatly filed away in folders and drawers that line the whole of one wall.   Echoes of the former Turner Prize nominee’s earlier projects abound. Miniature Sumo wrestlers grapple on one table. Sliced up mini red telephone boxes lay on another workspace. As the wheels of industry turn, this all looks set to feed in to Heavy Metal, Mach’s forthcoming London show of maquettes that acts as a showcase for future projects and proposals which their creator aims to build on the grandest of scales. This includes plans for major works on a London roundabout in Chiswick and an epic construction in Mauritius.   Also on show will be assorted models for Mach 1, a proposed building based work set to be created out of shipping containers and housed at E...