Coffee-Table Notes

When Vasile Toch was elected President of the Scottish Society of Artists in March 2023, the Romanian born émigré decreed to give Scotland’s oldest and largest artist led organisations a shake up. The first fruits of this are to be found in the SSA’s annual exhibition, which, for only the third time in its 125-year existence, moves out of its regular venue at the Royal Academy Building in Edinburgh to take over the Maclaurin Gallery in Ayr.   Here, the SSA show will feature some 175 artworks across all forms by its members. The exhibition will also feature work by fifteen recent graduates from Scottish art schools. These young artists are all recipients of SSA awards following visits to degree shows by SSA selectors. A series of moving image works will be staged by artist collective, CutLog, while the exhibition will feature new work by the Maclaurin Gallery’s patron, Peter Howson. Outwith Ayr, an SSA satellite exhibition, Connect and Grow, will run at Cass Art in Glasgow.   W...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars  The lights of Leith are very much on in the cityscape diorama that sits at the top of Adrian Rees’ set for this revival of Stephen Greenhorn’s long lauded Proclaimers jukebox musical. Sixteen years since Greenhorn’s concoction was first seen, and eighteen months after Elizabeth Newman’s production took the Pitlochry stage by storm, the show is as joyous and as heartbreaking as it ever was.   Much of this, of course, is down to Craig and Charlie Reid’s songs, which give Greenhorn’s yarn about ex squaddies Davy and Ally’s prodigal’s return to Leith and their respective romances with Yvonne and Liz its emotional heart. As sung and played live by Newman’s brilliant cast of twelve, musical director Richard Reeday’s renderings of David Shrubsole’s arrangements lay bare the heart on sleeve narratives of each song. Just hearing the show’s main quartet divvy up stripped back interpretations of Letter from America, 500 Miles and many more is e...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four Stars Winter is coming in Morna Young’s brand new take on Hans Christian Anderson’s evergreen folk tale, brought home here to a frosty Victorian Edinburgh in Cora Bissett’s musical production, with Young’s script steeped in Scotland’s fantastical mythology.  Things open quietly, with Wendy Seager’s Seer setting out the show’s store by way of oral storytelling and projected shadowplay. Meanwhile, in the city, young Gerda and her best pal Kei tend to their roof garden as they wait for a solitary rose to bloom. As they bond over the loss of their respective parents, they can barely imagine the adventure they’re about to embark on after Claire Dargo’s Snow Queen kidnaps Kei.  Befriended by Samuel Pashby’s keytar wielding crow Corbie, Gerda is whisked off on a grand tour that takes in a talking fairy garden in Perth, a gang of Highland robbers whose market for overpriced tartan tat has gone bust, a pantomime unicorn, and a wise old king at ...

If the artists’ studio is a sacred place, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert’s photographs of forty-five artists in their workplace are a rare access-all-areas pass into a world where imagination is channelled into hard graft. Sutton-Hibbert’s cross-country - and cross-generational – peek behind assorted curtains doesn’t so much reveal displays of genius at play as make pin-ups of his subjects while on a break from the daily grind. With the rooms pictured awash with the acquired clutter of endless works in progress, from such an up-close and personal set-up, a much bigger picture of each artist’s world taps into the personalities that inform their process.    Tessa Lynch sets the tone with a smile as she holds on to a full-length mirror. The mirror Helen Flockhart looks into causes her image to become part of the wall of pictures that surround her. Graeme Wilcox too could be one of his own head and shoulders portraits lined up behind him.    Reflection comes too from Sekai Machac...

Every face tells a story in Simon Murphy’s frontline portrait of assorted communities in Govanhill, the neighbourhood on Glasgow’s south side he once called home. This is the case whether it is Paisley wearing a No More War badge on her camouflage jacket, hands on hips as she blows bubblegum bubbles, or tattooed Jim wielding an artfully poised cigarette. Then there is Sahar, his hands in fur lined pockets as he leans against a car with studied cool; Dylan hanging tough on roller skates; and Cassidy swathed in matinee idol paisley patterned scarves.   And what about Eliza, on the way to the shops with a cat wrapped round her neck; or Callum and Marek, the epitome of couldn’t-care-lessness as they loiter outside a corner shop looked down on by a sign declaiming ‘Today’. As one young lad brazenly sucks on a fag, the other fails to hide his laughter. Most fantastical of all is Seamus, a street entertainer who looks like he’s on his way home from some surrealists’ ball. This is me,...

When Claire M Singer was told about an organ in Forgue Kirk, close to the Aberdeenshire village where she was brought up, it opened up a world of possibilities for the composer who also works as music director of the organ at Union Chapel in London. Drawing inspiration from her walks in the Cairngorms, the result is Saor, the first of a planned triptych of albums released on the experimentally inclined Touch label.    Having begun her musical life as a cellist and composition student, Singer fell for the organ after experimenting with stops and pedals in a way that saw her manipulating air rather than play the instrument in a conventional fashion. Rather than producing something wilfully arid or austere, there is an emotional warmth to Singer’s work on both Saor and her previous Touch releases that began in 2016 with Solas. This reflects her response to the source of her inspiration.     “ The most natural thing for me to do when I get home is to get in the...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars If you can remember the 1980s, you probably weren’t there. If those who were there need a refresher course, they could do worse than check out this long overdue revival of John McKay’s play, which first graced the Traverse’s old Grassmarket home in 1987. This saw McKay take his work from street theatre combo The Merry Mac Fun Co onto the main stage before embarking on a career as a film and TV writer, director and producer.     McKay’s trajectory might just mirror the future life of young Eck, whose preparations for a job interview with BBC Scotland in 1985 are rudely interrupted by his dad Willie, who makes his unreconstructed presence felt in everything Eck does. This is the case from the interview itself to the local barbers before he joins Eck on his date in a fancy style bar.   This would be mortifying enough for any young shaver with ideas above his station attempting to shake off his roots and make his way in the world. G...

At first glance at the cover image of Alicia Bruce’s new book, one might be forgiven for presuming it to be a coffee table tome immortalising North East Scotland’s epic rural landscape. Look closer, however, and it heralds a vital pictorial document of a community campaign against a predatory attempt to erase it along with its natural surroundings, redrawing the map in the name of big business.   The title of the book is the giveaway, taken from a song by Karine Polwart, who recounts in her afterword how she co-opted the motto of the MacLeod clan. Given the circumstances of the song’s composition, this it is as much anthem as work of art.   The same can be said of Bruce’s book, which features eighty photographs that bear witness to almost two decades of resistance by residents of Menie, close to Balmedie beach in Aberdeenshire, to Donald Trump’s building of a golf club on what was then a Site of Special Scientific Interest. This is a status supposed to save it from hostile dev...