Coffee-Table Notes

Bob Heatlie – songwriter, musician, record producer Born July 20, 1946; died April 8, 2023     Bob Heatlie, who has died aged 76, was a songwriter and producer whose works topped the charts several times over. His first number one came in 1981 with Japanese Boy, an oriental-tinged one-hit wonder by the kimono-clad Aneka, who in actuality was Edinburgh folk singer Mary Sandeman. Heatlie went on to score the 1985 Christmas number one for Shakin’ Stevens with the Dave Edmunds produced Merry Christmas Everyone.   Japanese Boy came about after Heatlie had recorded several folk albums with Sandeman, who declared her desire to sing a pop song, and encouraged Heatlie to write one for her. Heatlie resisted this, putting off writing anything despite several reminders. When Sandeman booked studio time, Heatlie’s hand was forced, and he stitched several lyrics from previous works around the chorus of what became Japanese Boy.   With Sandeman recast as Aneka, her recording of the...

If the best things come in threes, the third and final series of Guilt completes an unholy trinity to savour. Since it first aired in 2019, Neil Forsyth’s dryly dark Edinburgh set drama has charted the fallout of what happened when Mark Bonnar and Jamie Sives’ Leith-based brothers Max and Jake accidentally ran someone over. With lawyer Max doing a spell in choky while record shop anorak Jake decamped to Chicago, series two saw Max embark on further murky adventures, with Emun Elliot’s hapless Kenny in tow.   With the siblings reunited, series three sees them ditch the job lot of fezzes purloined for Moroccan Monday at their Chicago bar to make a prodigal’s return to Leith. Beyond Kenny’s stress related sperm count and talk of vegan raves, Edinburgh’s banking fraternity are brought to the fore.   “ It’s very much driven by the brothers again,” says Forsyth of Guilt 3 over Zoom. “I think it was good for them to have that time apart in series two, because having them back togethe...

  MURRAY Melvin couldn't go to Joan Littlewood's funeral two Sundays ago, even though the death a few weeks ago of the woman whose Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East redefined post-war British theatre forever with the mighty Oh What A Lovely War visibly grieves him still. His eyes well up at the mere mention of her name, but he can't help himself talking about the often-fierce woman who gave him and an entire generation of actors a go in the spotlight. ''Her death was the passing of my youth,'' Melvin says gravely. ''It wasn't expected. We're all quite devastated by it, because we thought she'd outlive us all, she was such a domineering character in our lives.'' Story after story, each peppered with hushed asides and punctuated with prim, precise, near-Tai Chi-like gestures, gushes lovingly from the archetypal Littlewood actor; a back-street unknown who went from sweeping the stage to the West End, Broadway, and beyond, an...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Dreams don’t so much fade away as melt in a sticky puddle of liquid sugar in Laurie Motherwell’s new play, as the would-be Mr Whippys of its title attempt to make a million on the back of a second-hand ice cream van, some leftover cones and the dodgiest of high interest loans.   Sean has just buried his mother after dropping out of Uni, and doesn’t know which way to turn. Enter Daro, Sean’s old school pal and wannabe wheeler-dealer with big ideas and a mouth to match. Where Sean sees an ice cream cone as a nostalgic totem of a more innocent time, Daro recognises it as an opportunity.  Things don’t work out as planned, alas, as Sean and Daro attempt to tap into some hitherto untapped market like some junior KLF - justified, but far from ancient -  and wind up after hours on the edge of clubland.  Motherwell’s Glasgow dramady is an all too familiar tale of working class aspiration thwarted by the world of big business and the...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   When badass bounty hunter Màiri MacNeill moseys into the half empty hotel of a one-horse town in 1888 Quebec, it looks like the end of the trail for her former partner in crime, Donald Morrison. For the Gaelic speaking Scots settlers who live there, it looks like the history about to be made will put them on the map forever after.    Having left Màiri in the lurch in Texas seven years earlier, Donald is a wanted man several times over. The Pinkerton Detective Agency is on his trail, and it looks like they might save everything, including Jean Baptiste and Uilleamina’s hotel, where the  local bigwig known as the Major still rules the roost.  The  storm that’s brewing sees everyone holed up in the hotel bar, alas, where a new set of myths are about to be whipped up.    This is the merry dance that ensues in Calum L.MacLeòid’s new play for Glasgow based Gaelic theatre company, Theatre Gu Leòr. P...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four stars Bromance isn’t dead in this glorious reinvention of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic historical romp, brought to life by the creative team behind the similarly audacious take on Jane Austen in the award winning Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of).  Director  Isobel McArthur and composer Michael John McCarthy’s new creation is subtitled A Swashbuckling Rom-Com Adventure. This is a considerably more concise pointer of things to come than Stevenson’s own sixty-nine word spoiler that accompanied his nineteenth century rites of passage saga concerning young Davie Balfour as he goes on the run with Jacobite rebel Alan Breck Stewart.    Given ambitious main stage legs in this National Theatre of Scotland production, it stays true to Stevenson’s original, even as it moves way beyond the story’s Boys’ Own style adventure to make something much more of the moment. For starters, the show is introduced by Frances, a tough talking Country singer who ...

Richard Strange is a pop cultural renaissance man, who has moved from fronting pre-punk band Doctors of Madness and hosting 1980s multi-media salon, Cabaret Futura, to acting in Hollywood films, curating the National Review of Live Art and much more. Much of Strange’s back catalogue is documented in his 2005 memoir, Punks and Drunks and Flicks and Kicks. Strange returns to Scotland for the first time since 2011 to perform An Accent Waiting to Happen, an evening of songs, stories and scurrilous gossip.      Hi Richard, how’s the tour going?   It’s such a joy to be out on the road again after the last three brutal years of uncertainty, fear and restrictions. I am a performer first and foremost, and without an audience a performer is a man looking into a void, a black hole.   What’s prompted An Accent Waiting to Happen?    I have never really toured the show before. I have done a few isolated gigs but never got it into a shape where it works every ni...

If money makes the world go round, its out of control axis is addressed at a historical and global level in this urgent and expansive new group show. Drawing its title from French thinker and writer Georges Bataille, nine contributors address the idea of debt in different ways, with the spectres of war, colonialism and economic exploitation ever present.     Congolese artist Sammy Baloji reconstitutes fifty copper mortar shell casings as plant pot accessories for ideal homes. A 1948 recording of a choir becomes similarly troubling once you learn how Christian missionaries made the singers hold copper crosses in front of their hearts.   Western influences are there too in  Terra Rationarium  (2018), Cian Dayrit’s trinket filled wooden cases, where toys and totems point up a damning history of exploitation in Dayrit’s native Philippines.  Working with marginalised communities, Dayrit’s series of tapestries map out strategies of change.   Moyra Davey’s...

When a woman wearing a going-out dress knelt on an Edinburgh pavement on King Stables Road outside a former municipal lighting depot and put a large chunk of chalk in her mouth, it was the prelude to a five-hour trip that saw the woman crawl in a circle onto the neighbouring streets, before arriving back on King Stables Road. As the woman marked out her path with the chalk still in her mouth, the white line on the pavement resembled a snail trail.   This was  Magdalene, Are You Satisfied with the Experiment?  a durational ‘installaction’ by Polish performance artist Karolina Kubik. Presented in honour of seminal theatre director Tadeusz Kantor, the event opened the 2015 edition of Hidden Door, the multiple arts festival that burst onto the scene the year before when it transformed a row of abandoned vaults on Market Street into ad hoc art spaces.    As an opening statement of a festival resembling an arts village in some radical republic, Kubik’s appearance was ...