Coffee-Table Notes

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars “But we can’t live as if we believed in nothing anymore!” John Michie’s world-weary academic, Rennie, implores, well into his cups in the second act of Peter Arnott’s new play. “We have to live at least as if we believed in something.”   Arnott’s self-styled attempt at Scottish Chekhov sees him gather his clans in a Perthshire country house on the eve of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. And my, how civilised the world looks compared to the extremes thrown up in the decade since.   The occasion is Rennie’s retirement do, and he has a very special announcement for the focus group of Scotland’s liberal media and academic establishment in waiting who make up the guest list. These include his wife Edie, his London based art curator daughter Emma, Benny Young’s exiled actor Moon and Rennie’s former students Frank and Charlie, who have turned out very differently indeed.     Charlie is a TV populist, while Frank’s partner Kath is a youthful fire

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   Swatting flies probably wasn’t on John Cale’s agenda prior to his Edinburgh International Festival appearance, but such an irritating insect circles Cale over several songs in. The elder statesman of avant pop classicism finally appears to repel the assault from behind his keyboard, necessitating a roadie to come on and reposition his microphone.   This gives an extra edge to an already mighty Guts, from 1975 album Slow Dazzle, one of several sojourns through Cale’s 1970s post Velvet Underground purple patch. This sees Cale’s superb three-piece band led by long term guitarist Dustin Boyer breathe fresh life into the title tracks of Cale’s Paris 1919 and Helen of Troy albums, from 1973 and 1975 respectively, as well as Barracuda, from 1974’s Fear record.     Fleshed out by understated electronic textures that go beyond rock and roll to something more progressively propulsive, there is even a magnificently demonic take on 1980 single B-side, Rose

Four stars   When seventeen-year-old Juliane Koepcke took a flight with her mother from Lima to Pucallpa in Peru, little did she know she would be the sole survivor of the plane crash that followed. Over the next eleven days, Juliane navigated a rainforest where hidden depths hide crocodiles and other creatures, fell 10,000 feet, was almost eaten by maggots, and somehow lived to tell the tale.     This remarkable true story is brought to life by Sophie Kean in a near gymnastic display as Juliane. As the script moves back and forth with Juliane’s reminiscences, Kean’s movements seem to embody her life flashing before her in Emma Howlett’s deftly realised production. Moving from the row of aeroplane seats that make up the bulk of Eleanor Wintour’s ingenious set, Kean utilises paper planes, origami creatures and toyshop miniatures to bring the jungle to life. A glossary of some of the local bestiary is flashed onto a screen behind her, as if accompanying a museum exhibit as Sarah Spencer’

Playhouse Four stars Alison Goldfrapp’s eyes are staring out at the audience in giant size close up beamed from the full length of the stage’s entire back wall. In the flesh, Goldfrapp, keyboardist Evelyn May and drummer Seb Sternberg are battering out Strict Machine, Goldfrapp’s now classic piece of glamtastic electronic squelch as the climax to the disco diva’s Edinburgh International Festival extravaganza.  For the last hour, Goldfrapp has been vamping her way through The Love Invention, her first full-blown solo shebang after decades in partnership with sonic sculptor Will Gregory. Sired during lockdown, The Love Invention saw Goldfrapp co-opt pop mavericks Richard X, James Greenwood, songwriter Hannah Robinson, Norwegian duo Röyksopp and German house double act Claptone for the record’s machine age dancefloor friendly opus. The experience thus far has been a slow burning epic, opening with Hotel 23 and the record’s title track, with Goldfrapp slinking her sparkly way across the st

Royal Lyceum Theatre Four stars A moment of peace, then pandemonium reigns in this rollicking new look by Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s seventeenth century Spanish classic. Brought to life by England’s internationalist inclined maverick auteurs Cheek by Jowl, here, reality morphs into a spectacular fantasia for its incarcerated hero after being unleashed into the world.   Such is the lot of poor Segismundo, the Polish prince locked up like Rapunzel in a tower since birth lest he turn out to be a wrong ‘un. Once his regal old man Basilio guilt trips himself into cutting his son some slack, an initially befuddled Segismundo launches himself into society like a man who fell to earth running riot as he explores the undiscovered extremities of the big bad world he just landed in. Why? Because he can, and he was always going to turn out that way, anyway. Or was he?     Freedom is a funny thing in Declan Donnellan’s Spanish language production, which puts the lights up on the audience as Alfre

Early on in Art is Magic, Jeremy Deller’s bumper compendium of his back catalogue, the 2004 Turner Prize winner talks about how he made the shift ‘from making things to making things happen.’ This line sums up Deller’s whole approach as an artist over the last thirty years, whether persuading the Williams Fairey Brass Band to play house music in Acid Brass (1997), reconstructing The Battle of Orgeave (2001), one of the key moments in the 1984 miners’ strike, or reinventing Stonehenge as a bouncy castle on Glasgow Green (2012).   Other works featured in Art is Magic include So Many Ways to Hurt You (2010) – a film about glam wrestler Adrian Street – and Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 (2019) , which filmed Deller giving a history of rave culture to a classroom of teenagers. Deller’s mix of pop culture, social history and civic spectacle has made for a form of very public art that engages with the world with a playfulness at its heart.   In keeping with

“Can you hear me, Deborah?’   Deborah Pearson looks like she’s lip-synching at the start of our conversation about The Talent, the Canadian writer/performer/director’s collaboration with Gemma Paintin and Jim Stenhouse, aka Action Hero, which plays at Summerhall for a week as part of the England based artist focused Horizon Showcase. As is the way of things these days, Pearson and I are attempting to talk over Zoom, the international video communications platform that rose to prominence during the pandemic induced lockdown.   As I shout into the silence, I’m conscious of sounding like Clem Fandango, one of the pompous hipsters directing arch thespian Steven Toast during the old luv’s voiceover gigs in Matt Berry and Arthur Mathews’ TV sit-com, Toast of London. This fits in all too well with The Talent’s focus on a voiceover artist taking direction for a variety of presentations in her recording booth limbo.   “I had this idea of how interesting it would be to see a show which is just a

Four stars Two newsreaders sit behind a desk while a dramatic theme music plays out. Scripts are wielded like weapons by the man and woman as they prepare to dole out the headlines to anyone still seeking some kind of truth beyond fake news. Initially strait-laced - and straight-faced - in their delivery, the veneer of democracy soon starts to fade, however, as a litany of atrocities takes in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the 1980s Soviet-Afghan conflict, and a whole lot more, as any pretence at an objective worldview is consumed into the chaos the pair collapse into.   The foodstuffs that fill the desk are used as props for little miniature scenarios projected live onto a screen at the side of the stage. While caviar and vodka are passed out like holy sacraments, toy tanks are abandoned on the woman’s hair, while tiny figurines are burnt like tin soldiers.   This is quietly ferocious stuff in Petr   Boháč ’s production for the Czech Republic based Spitfire Company, which draws its word

  Five  stars Once upon a time, Fred Deakin was a shy kid who started playing records at teenage parties to try and make friends. Within a few years, as a student in Edinburgh, he was running some of the best clubs in town, and had the best posters to boot. And that was before he became a proper pop star as one half of electronic party people Lemon Jelly and a professor in design. Most of this is in Club Life, Deakin’s very personal late night show and tell concerning his life manning the wheels of plastic fronting legendary 1980s and 1990s clubland concepts. These ranged from the nu jazz of Blue to the Easy Listening irony of Going Places by way of heroically named nights such as Thunderball, Devil Mountain, Impotent Fury, and self-styled worst club in the world, Misery. These are all revived by way of assorted potted greatest hits selections, as Deakin takes us on a tour of Edinburgh nightlife from back in the day. Director Sita Pieraccini transforms Deakin’s testimonies into a parti

Four stars   When smart kid Mark starts at a rough school, the last thing he expects is to buddy up with Darren, a tough talking bully from a damaged background. Opposites attract, however, as sparring eventually spill over into acts of sex and violence that go way beyond the growing pains of adolescent angst. When the pair are reunited when the old school tie has long been discarded, however, the scars still linger for both of them.    Sophie Swithinbank’s blistering two-hander explores the roots of psychosexual pain in a macho world by way of a script shot through with street-smart exchanges that ricochet between the two boys in a way that recalls the two-fisted barbs of Barrie Keeffe, who explored classroom politics in works such as his 1977 TV play, Gotcha. Things have moved on considerably since then, however, and with no grown-ups on stage in Matthew Iliffe’s production for HFH Productions, things take an infinitely turn. Corey Montague-Sholay as Mark and William Robinson as Darr

Summerhall Three stars When Adam Lenson was diagnosed with cancer aged 34, his first world middle class existence was understandably turned upside down. Having upended the path he was on once already after dropping out of medical school to become a theatre director, Lenson found himself taking stock of both his past and potential selves if he had only jumped another way. As Lenson’s life flashes before his eyes by way of a series of TV monitors rewinding the days, the end result in Hannah Moss’s production is a playful offloading of assorted what-ifs amidst the sliding doors of one’s own mortality. Using a microphone and loop pedals to create a kind of karaoke lecture, Lenson channels his experience into a focussed meditation made even more life affirming by the fact that he is even here at all.   In a show developed at Camden People's Theatre, geeks might also pick up on the lesser spotted connection between children’s comedy gangster musical, Bugsy Malone, and Daft Punk (simples,

Festival Theatre Five stars   Love and money are everything in Australian maverick Barrie Kosky’s audacious new look at Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s ‘play with songs’, drawn from Elisabeth Hauptmann’s translation of John Gay’s eighteenth century romp, The Beggar’s Opera. Almost a hundred years on from its 1928 premiere, Kosky’s Berliner Ensemble production breathes new life into the show, as he does away with Weimar style trappings and drapes it in an infinitely more modern looking if still decadent gloss. Set in a poverty strapped world where appearances matter, Kosky opens proceedings in front of a full length silver curtain, where local gang boss Peachum holds court before Macheath and Peachum’s daughter Polly make their entrance. The revolt into style that follows resembles a 1980s Soho-set pop video dreamt up by an unholy alliance of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Julian Temple. Gabriel Schneider’s Macheath, aka Mack the Knife, is a big suited city boy spiv forever on the make or

Unlike the 1960s, if you can remember the 1980s, you were almost certainly in the thick of some protest or other. Breach Theatre’s Ellice Stevens and Billy Barrett’s new verbatim musical looks back in showtunes at the implementation by the UK government in 1988 of Section 28, a hysteria-led legislation which prohibited the so-called ‘promotion of homosexuality’ by local authorities.   By making a song and dance of things using four performers, two musicians playing a brand new synth-led score played live by Frew and Ellie Showering, Barratt’s production excavates an important piece of social history before celebrating those who protested against it prior to its eventual repeal in 2003 (2000 in Scotland).     The result, as Stevens, Tika Mu ‘tamir, EM Williams and Zachary Willis lead us on a whistlestop tour of invading TV studios, abseiling into the House of Lords, and the irresistible rise of marching for gay and lesbian rights, is a piece of old-school pub theatre agit-prop, but with

Church Hill Theatre Edinburgh International Festival Five Stars The wind blows hot and cold in the assorted worlds brought to life in this ingenious 75-minute comic meditation on the climate crisis, presented in a collaboration between award winning Belgian mime and puppetry companies, Focus and   Chaliwaté . As white clad human figures pop up aloft a similarly pristine terrain, they don’t so much inhabit as become the picture postcard landscape, with miniature houses and forests embedded in upturned boots that become mountains seen from a distance.   A TV crew drive through hazardous conditions in an epic display of car seat choreography set to a Paul Simon soundtrack, only to fall prey to the elements twice over. A beautifully realised puppet polar bear and its cub come blinking into the light, only for the icebergs they are settled on to split. Meanwhile, in a more domestic interior, the walls may not quite be sweating, but when the furniture starts to melt and a hurricane makes Sun

The sound of a heart beating breathes out across a room that seems filled with memorials in David Eustace’s exhibition of sculptures, prints and funereal photographs that wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of a Joy Division record. The sound also recalls  Breath (1969), Samuel Beckett’s miniature piece of proto sound art that charted matters of life and death. Here, the steady rhythms of Eustace’s heart casts a kind of raging calm across the exhibition, its occasional missed beats leaving a fleeting silence in which to contemplate the void.  A tombstone engraved with the exhibition’s title sits at its start, in front of a platform filled with what initially look like screwed up paper cranes. On closer inspection, these are revealed as photocopies of a letter offering Eustace for adoption the day after his birth in 1961. Eustace made 1,961copies of the letter to be taken away and given new life, just as he was.   Much of what follows is about mortality, even as Eustace writes about

According to Wikipedia, Fereydoun Farrokhzad was an Iranian pop sensation who, between 1962 and 1992, was a household name in his home country. His life as a TV star, showman and sex symbol saw him sell out a series of multiple shows at the Royal Albert Hall in London.   As a political activist not shy of speaking out against the Islamic government following the 1979 revolution, Farrokhzad was forced into exile, and latterly lived in Bonn, Germany. It was here his body was found in his apartment in 1992, having been stabbed repeatedly in the face and upper torso. While his killing was widely believed by many to have been sanctioned by the Islamic government, his murder has never been solved.     This is the starting point for Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Javaad Alipoor’s latest exploration of the relationship between real life and the digital world. Jumping down assorted online rabbit holes, Alipoor takes in Iranian pop music and the murder mystery podcast boom in a

Four stars When a middle aged married man called Iain turns up at Zara’s Edinburgh New Town des-res in a block overloaded with AirBandBs, Zara mistakes him for an intruder. Given that Zara’s take on temporary accommodation is to front her flat as a cooperative brothel, the negotiations that follow take an interesting turn. Especially as Iain is her former teacher, and has booked a session with a ‘boy’ who turns out to be just turned thirty Jay.     Business is business in Kieran Hurley’s new play, a dark farce given a rollicking production for the Traverse by Roxana Silbert. With a cast led by a brilliant Conleth Hill as Iain, the unholy trio is completed by Dani Heron as a fierce Zara and Anders Hayward as Jay.   As Zara takes charge, she reveals a working knowledge of the contradictions inherent in the system, and can call out Thomas The Tank Engine and other kids classics as explorative tools of the state with ease. Jay, meanwhile, has his own problems, as the indoor playground all

Four stars  " Booze makes everything better", says Lindsey Mendick in her voiceover to   Shame Spiral  (2023), her twenty-minute warts and all gonzo film documenting a big night out and the morning after. "Until it makes everything worse". These lines are the driving force of Mendick’s debut show in Scotland, which charts her topsy-turvy relationship with alcohol. This is done in a monumental display that mines the dark underbelly of what lies beneath the surface of everyday politesse once a messy night on the lash has unleashed the beast within.   In the show’s title piece, Mendick draws from Dante’s Divine Comedy to create a ceramic-based model of a nightclub, one half of which shows off the calm before the storm as businessmen and hen parties unwind. The other half lays bare the depraved nightmare of what altered states can reveal. A full-size reimagining of a club bathroom sees similarly monstrous forces inveigle their way into assorted sinks as well as the unde

Michael Boyd – t heatre director   Born July 6, 1955; died August 4, 2023      Michael Boyd, who has died aged 68, was a theatre director whose visionary work put the Tron Theatre, Glasgow on the theatrical map, before going on to reinvent the Royal Shakespeare Company on a grand scale. During his decade in Glasgow from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s, Boyd cast Iain Glen in the title role of Macbeth (1993), and directed a radical staging of Janice Galloway’s novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1995), and   Boyd was also instrumental in bringing the work of Quebecois writer Michel Tremblay to Scotland. Working with contemporary Scots translations by Bill Findlay and Martin Bowman, Boyd directed Scottish premieres of The Guid Sisters (1989) and The Real Wurld? (1991), with The Guid Sisters touring to Quebec, setting in motion a Scots/Quebecois cultural exchange that continues today.   Boyd also oversaw a remarkable flowering of artistic talent, with Alan Cumming, Forbes Masson, Peter

Five  stars The power of suggestion is everything in Tim Crouch’s remarkable construction, which draws its title from Michael Craig-Martin’s Michael Craig-Martin’s 1973 artwork, which put a glass of water on a gallery shelf and said it was an oak tree. Like Craig-Martin, Crouch asks his audience to have faith in order to find meaning in what follows.  Crouch sets up a story where he plays a stage hypnotist who killed a twelve-year-old girl after he ran her over. A year later, the girl’s father visits the hypnotist’s show, and volunteers to join him on stage. Rather than dramatise a naturalistic confrontation, Crouch invites a different actor who doesn’t know anything about the show to play opposite him, feeding them lines by through various means and effectively directing them. On the first Saturday of the run, Crouch’s foil was award winning star of Scotland’s stages, Nicole Cooper, Cooper was, as Crouch quite rightly pointed out, brilliant. As too is Crouch’s revival of a show he fir

Festival Theatre Four stars The pains of war are plain to hear in theNational Changgeuk Company of Korea’s fresh look at Euripides’ ancient rendering of the Greek myths. It may have been in the company’s repertoire since 2017, but given the current state of the world, this brutal tale of a ravaged nation and the women left behind looks and sounds as pertinent as ever. Especially as the women are key players rather than collateral damage.  In Ong Keng Sen’s mighty production, Hecuba, Queen of Troy, her witchy daughter Cassandra, Andromache, the widow of Hecuba’s son Hector, and of course Helen, whose kidnap by Hecuba’s son Paris arguably kicked off the war, are the stars of the show. As they enter in turn from set designer Cho Myung Hee’s tunnel-like white monolith, each occupies the spotlight while sparring with assorted messengers and deities.  In a show performed in Korean with English surtitles, Ong sets out his store in an audacious fusion of Pansori and K-pop. Pansori is the Korea