Coffee-Table Notes

Space is very much the place at Hidden Door this year, as Edinburgh’s grassroots festival moves into the John Hardie Glover designed former Scottish Widows building on Dalkeith Road now rechristened as The Complex. Music acts may remain the festival’s high profile public face, but dig deeper, and there is a whole lot more going on with other art forms at ground level and beyond. The hive-like hexagonal shape of Glover’s construction, which opened in 1976, lends itself to all manner of underground interventions.   This should be clear from The Environments, a series of immersive voyages that invites audiences to move through hill, post-nuclear wasteland, garden and forest. This leads to the less familiar sounding terrain of aphotic archaeology – the aphotic zone being the portion of a lake with little or no sunlight - and Holocene, or current geological epoch.   Dance is to the fore in The Environments, with new works by choreographer Roisin O’Brien and composer Rowan McIlvride...

Love and anger are at the heart of create dangerously, this major institutional exhibition by Alberta Whittle, the Barbadian born artist whose irresistible rise across a series of shows saw her representing Scotland at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Both works made for Venice are at the centre of create dangerously, which draws its title from Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat’s 2010 collection of essays concerning immigrant artists at work.   Whittle’s take on things sees her embark on a very personal journey, not just through the eleven rooms housing her work on the ground floor of Modern One, but across continents and centuries of black experience and the forces that continue to colonise and enslave. This global expanse becomes a kind of ceremonial address to the ancestors who are both the fire and guiding hand behind Whittle’s all too current work.   This moves from mini manifestos and slogans lining the corridor that seem to dance off the paper they’re written on, to the vibrant ...

Buried treasure abounds in this very special show of around 40 unearthed printworks by George Wyllie (1921-2012). These are drawn from Wyllie’s original theatrical satire of the same name as this exhibition, which took an irreverent look at power, wealth and the historical roots of capitalist exploitation he dubbed     ‘a great bum steer’.    Glasgow’s maestro of absurdist largesse originally conceived his comic critique as an installation at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre (now the site of CCA). Working with actor Russell Hunter, Wyllie gradually expanded this into a cabaret style show first performed in 1982 Later iterations saw Wyllie form double acts with Bill Paterson for an Edinburgh Festival Fringe run, and with John Bett for a last hurrah at Tramway as part of Glasgow’s 1990 tenure as European City of Culture.   Wyllie’s  deceptively serious inquiry of what he called ‘the greatest ever confidence trick to be played ON the human race BY the human race’ ad...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but without Billy Connolly, Scotland’s culture would be a very different place. Just ask Gary McNair, who performs this 90-minute homage to the Big Yin, the twinkly-eyed raconteur who stumbled out of the Glasgow shipyards and into the folk clubs before becoming an international treasure. Even as Connolly’s patter went global, he gave voice to Scotland’s working class in a way that was funny, smart and unashamedly, scurrilously rude.  Beginning with the premise that everyone has a story about Billy Connolly - and this writer unintentionally proved the point during a pre-show chat while attempting to claim the opposite – McNair has gathered up a series of interviews conducted with anyone and everyone with an opinion on Connolly. Knitted together in Joe Douglas’s National Theatre of Scotland production, McNair’s verbatim vox-pop collage is part stand-up, part oral history project, and part act of collectiv...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   If a life without passionate love is a life unlived, as is debated in Lesley Hart’s new take on Leo Tolstoy’s nineteenth century classic, where does that leave the remnants of the relationship between dashing Count Vronsky and the play’s eponymous heroine by its end?    Sparks fly w hen Anna first meets Vronsky on a crowded railway platform in Moscow. Anna is on a mercy mission to sort out her brother’s collapsing marriage. Vronsky is there to meet his mother. The nature of these visitations speak volumes about what follows, as the pair embark on a tempestuous and ultimately destructive affair. For teenage Kitty and her would-be suitor, Levin, meanwhile, their seemingly more straightforward amour develops problems of its own.    Hart and director Polina Kalinina lead us on a not so merry dance through the well-choreographed world Anna and Vronsky are attempting to take flight from in this co-production between the Lyc...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Five stars How do you bring a broken city back to life? In the case of Imogen Stirling’s epic contemporary reimagining of biblical mythology, you drag a magnificent seven self-destructive sinners out of isolation, then bring down the rain in apocalyptic fashion.    At the centre of the tumult is Sloth, a woman confined in a high rise overlooking a place that looks a bit like Glasgow, only darker. As she finally steps outside in search of redemption, some of the city’s other eight million stories come into view.    Through the figures of Envy, Greed, Gluttony, Pride, Lust and Wrath, Stirling lays bare a litany of quiet desperation that gets under the skin of lives lost to loneliness, addiction, nihilistic excess and other everyday tragedies as they cling on to whatever they can for comfort.  Originally commissioned by Vanishing Point Theatre company and Luke Holbrook as a solo spoken word show, director Matthew Lenton’s production ...

When Fred Deakin started putting on a series of clubs in the 1980s and 1990s, he never expected several decades later to be auditioning actors to help tell his story. Yet this is exactly what the promoter of such iconic nights as Going Places, Misery, Devil Mountain, Thunderball and Impotent Fury has been doing in the run up to Club Life, a quasi autobiographical show-and-tell celebration of an era of Edinburgh clubbing when imagination mattered. Introducing elements that went beyond the music to become total environments, Deakin’s nights were social sculptures in a democratic creative playground where fun and games could be had by all.   From early days promoting nu-jazz night, Blue, at the original Gilded Balloon bar, Deakin and his assorted collaborators moved operations into venues such as Wilkie House (now Stramash), and the site of what is now La Belle Angele at the Designer Frames Gallery. From here, Deakin’s canvas expanded to take in the Fruitmarket Gallery, Murrayfield Ic...

Murray Melvin – Actor, director, archivist   Born August 10, 1932; died April 14, 2023     Murray Melvin, who has died aged 90, was an actor of elegance, sensitivity and sophistication, whose appearance in Shelagh Delaney’s play, A Taste of Honey (1958) became a key marker of British society’s post World War II mores. Delaney’s taboo busting play was produced by Joan Littlewood and Gerry Raffles’ trailblazing Theatre Workshop company at Theatre Royal, Stratford East, and touched on issues of teenage pregnancy, race and homosexuality in working class Salford.   The latter came through Melvin’s character, Geoffrey, the effete art student friend and surrogate mother of Jo, played in Tony Richardson’s film of the play by Rita Tushingham. At a time when homosexuality was illegal, for an actor to play such a role as Geoffrey made a bold statement.   Melvin was cast on the back of a conversation with Littlewood after the first read through of an early draft of the play...