Coffee-Table Notes

When a live staging of Derek Jarman’s final film was presented at Tramway in Glasgow last month, it heralded a major new exhibition of Jarman’s work at the Hunterian Art Gallery. Blue Now saw four performers read Jarman’s text for Blue (1993), in which extracts from Jarman’s diaries as he came to terms with losing his sight from an AIDS related illness were heard over an Yves Klein hued blue screen as the film’s sole hypnotic visual.  Digging in Another Time: Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature is the first Jarman exhibition in Scotland since 1992. Despite the thirty-two year gap, it marks a continuation of the late filmmaker’s connection with Scotland dating back decades. While this comes largely through a headline making 1989 show in Glasgow as part of the National Review of Live Art (NRLA), other tangential connections left their mark, with Jarman going on to influence a new generation of artists shown alongside him at the Hunterian.   Digging in Another Time features works from a...

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh Four stars   A row of giant vegetables are lined up like they’ve just won first prize in the local village fete as the audience enters this very special silver jubilee celebration of Magnetic North Theatre Company’s assorted off-kilter adventures over the last 25 years. The smiles on the vegetables skins give the gave away, however, as this rogues gallery of very fresh looking life size produce are actually characters in `Pass the Spoon, a ‘sort of opera’ first produced at Tramway in Glasgow back in 2011.    This TV cooking show set collaboration between composer David Fennessy, artist David Shrigley and Magnetic North director Nicholas Bone is introduced by our hosts, June Spoon and Phillip Fork, before an overripe banana and a depressed egg appear as they await gluttonous guest star Mr Granules. With the vegetables mere appetisers, the result resembles an absurdist Masterchef/It’s a Knockout mash up scripted by Alfred Jarry.    T...

Jeff Merrifield – Writer, musician, arts administrator, Seeker   Born March 9 th 1943; died October 31st 2024    Jeff Merrifield, who has died aged 81, was a writer, musician, arts administrator, archivist and publisher who played a key role in assorted underground scenes across more than half a century that a simple job description can’t come close to capturing. Ultimately, Merrifield made things happen. This was the case whether as co-conspirator with theatrical maverick Ken Campbell on his assorted capers, sorting out Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD festival enough for it to survive a loss making first year, or setting up an improvising orchestra on Shetland, where he settled in 2008.   To co-opt the title of his brick-sized biography of Campbell, published in 2011, Merrifield was a Seeker. His tireless pursuit of artistic enlightenment saw his free thinking evangelism offset by a practical can-do sense of what was required to bring projects to fruition. There were plays, b...

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Four stars   Charles Dickens  has never  just been for Christmas, but at this time of year his seasonal masterpiece comes fully into focus. This was proven over the weekend in glowing fashion by Guy Masterson, the indefatigable Edinburgh Festival Fringe veteran, whose solo rendition of Dickens’ tale adapted by director Nick Hennegan gets back to the storytelling heart of Dickens’ own live renditions of his work.   Hennegan’s production for Theatre Tours International and Maverick Theatre Company is no piece of ornate Victoriana. Masterson embodies Dickens’ bustling world with gravitas and grit, using little more than a wooden chair and an old grey raincoat hanging from the rafters. Once he puts the latter on, it gives his  performance a swish, a swoop and a sweep that are captured like rapid fire snapshots in the moody lighting that accompanies it.    Masterson moves from narrator to the Dickens universe of characters with...

Edinburgh Playhouse Four stars “I did it in a loincloth,” declares Donny Osmond as a rock and roll Pharaoh while observing Adam Filipe’s more modestly attired Joseph kicking off this latest tour of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s now fifty-two year old musical. Osmond is clad in a gold coloured kilt as he makes this nod to his own tenure in the show’s title role during an American revival that ran for six years.     Osmond’s prodigal’s return is a rites of passage of sorts in Laurence Connor’s well drilled larger than life production of Rice and Lloyd Webber’s biblically inspired concoction. Felipe has this all to come as Joseph, the precocious dreamer whose brothers sell him into slavery, only for him to network his way out of prison and become Pharaoh’s economic saviour.   Things begin with the Narrator setting the scene by way of a storytelling session with the cast’s junior members before leaping into a kind of cosplay heaven as the child actors don false beards to...

Scottish theatre has eight million stories. Some of them can be heard in A History of Scottish Drama in Six Plays, theatre critic Fergus Morgan’s boldly named six-part podcast that starts this week. Developed from a bursary from the Scottish Society of Playwrights’ SSP @50 Fellowship Awards, Morgan’s take comes from a desire to discover for himself the sometimes lost history of the world he is now steeped in as The Stage’s Scottish theatre critic.   ‘ The idea,’ says Morgan, ‘was to tell a history, not the history. Obviously you can't tell a definitive history when there are so many different strands to each story, but I wanted to try and tell a hopefully fairly comprehensive history of Scottish drama, principally from the point of view of playwrights, but weaving in all sorts of things along the way.’   To this end, Morgan bookends his series with A Satire Of The Three Estates (1540) - or Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaites if you will - and Black Wa...

Cumbernauld Theatre Four stars   It’s all going on down in Timbernauld, where grand dame carpenter Gepetta tends to her wares, kept company by the grandson she magicked into being with a carving knife and a not entirely pure imagination. While their flea ridden dog Mozart lollops about indoors to its heart’s content, Pinocchio longs to step outside to the big bad world he can only see through the window. A conscientious cricket called Hingmy, meanwhile, only wants to come in from the cold.    Gary McNair’s seasonal spin on Carlo Collodi’s much Disneyfied children’s story is both faithfully familiar and knowingly irreverent in its cheeky reimagining for this four-actor version brought to bright and energetic life in Laila Noble’s production.    As Julia Murray’s wide-eyed Pinocchio embarks on an adventure that sees him conned by radges and kidnapped by human traffickers, Cole Stewart’s Gepetta holds court with Caitlin Forbes as Mozart and Stephanie MacGaraidh as ...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It’s a rum old do down at Admiral Benbow’s Home for Reformed Pirates, where Duncan McLean’s new adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s swashbuckling romp first embarks. The seemingly washed up old sea dogs cared for by young Jim Hawkins band together to tell their story, as Jim, Lean Jean Silver and a puppet puffin set sail from Leith for the Orkney islands in search of buried booty.    Such is the playfully irreverent license taken by McLean in Wils Wilson’s rollickingly riotous production, set on Alex Berry’s galleon sized set of ropes, ladders and sails. What follows is a supremely daft take on Stevenson’s yarn that sees McLean tap into the ridiculous spirit of The Merry Mac Fun Co, the punky 1980s theatre troupe he co-founded, performed with and wrote for.    This is evident in some of the verbal riffs between the six actors on stage as well as some very silly song lyrics set to composer Tim Dalling’s Tom Waitsian junkya...

Dundee Rep Four stars   Oor Wullie without his bucket is like Christmas without a comic book annual. Dundee Rep’s revival of Noisemaker duo Scott Gilmour and Claire McKenzie’s musical reimagining of Scotland’s’s favourite cartoon boy is something of a double whammy in this respect.     As our spiky haired hero has his bucket poached from beneath him, prodigal daughter Nilo returns to Dundee to see her dad, though not before she is gifted an Oor Wullie annual by a mysterious woman on the train who goes by the name of Ms Watkins. As the book’s cover star steps out of the annual’s pages and into Nilo’s domain, Wullie rides again.    Andrew Panton’s production has been substantially rejigged since its first outing in 2019. While the quest for the missing bucket by Wullie and his pals remains the same, the changes in plot and characters maintain the show’s very meta take on family and friendship.    Much of this comes through the script’s Peter Pan like por...

When Kirsty Findlay finishes up playing the lead role in The Sound of Music at Pitlochry Festival Theatre at the end of December, it will be the end of a very special year for the Glasgow based actress. Prior to becoming the solution to the problem of Maria, Findlay appeared in three Pitlochry productions over the Perthshire theatre’s  summer season.  While Findlay shone in both Sense and Sensibility as Elinor, and as small town bad girl Ariel in Footloose, it was her magnificent embodiment of singer/songwriter Carole King in Beautiful that showed off Findlay’s full range as actress, singer and musician. Findlay was on stage throughout in Sam Hardie’s production of Douglas McGrath’s play, and despite playing piano in front of an audience for the first time ever, rarely has an actor looked so at ease with what she was doing in a bravura performance that might just be the best of the year.   ‘ I never thought in a million years I would get to do all the shows I’ve done over...

14. Carla J Easton & Blair Young First time feature filmmakers Easton and Young garnered huge acclaim for Since Yesterday, their film about Scotland’s lost girl bands, which premiered at Edinburgh International Film Festival. Eight Years in the making and inspired by Easton’s own experience in all woman band TeenCanteen, the duo have created a vital document of hidden history. 17. Sett Studios The artist run Leith Walk gallery and studio space has produced a huge turnover of exhibitions and events over the last year. Founded by a core group of Abi Lewis and Rehan Yousuf, with support from Steve Robb at Settlement Projects, there are currently seventeen artists on board in a vital non-hierarchical space.     31. Flannery O'kafka Flannery O’kafka’s exhibition, For Willy Love and Booker T: Blue babies do whatever they want, made full use of the Sierra Metro gallery’s space during its Edinburgh Art Festival run. The show’s mix of photography, film and a cosily carpeted en...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars    Elizabeth Newman’s final show as Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s artistic director is the last in a hat-trick of in-house musicals that follows Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and Footloose. All three have featured Kirsty Findlay as their female lead. Here she completes a magnificent season as Maria, the untameable force of nature who becomes governess of uptight widower Captain von Trapp’s seven children. Maria’s presence brings the growing pains of all into sharp focus, as love and liberation blossom even as the Nazis muscle in and annexe Austria. For the von Trapps, the hills and exile beckon.   Newman has invested Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s perfectly constructed adaptation of the real Maria Rainer’s memoir with a freshness and a poignancy that makes for a moving and irresistible experience. With a cast of twenty singing and playing all instruments in what has become Pitlochry’s house style, from the show’s tit...

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars   The world has been turned upside down several times over in the sixteen years since Matthew Zajac first performed his remarkable solo work in honour of his Polish/Ukrainian father who settled for the quiet life of the Highlands following the turmoil of the Second World War. A decade and a half on, and after more than 300 performances across the globe, the acquired baggage of Ben Harrison’s production for Zajac’s Dogstar company has gained a vital currency.    Following a sold out four week season in London, it is serendipitous that Zajac’s show arrives in Edinburgh for a brief run the week of Polish Independence Day. With Russia’s assault on Ukraine ongoing, Zajac’s play may be a deeply personal work, but as he embarks on a pilgrimage in search of his own roots, it becomes a hymn to much bigger histories. As illustrated on the map projected behind him on Ali Maclaurin’s set, those histories may have shaped the world, but they also ...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Three stars   Someone had clearly let the dogs out before Wednesday night’s delayed curtain up of this new canine musical. Not that the young audience seemed to mind once things eventually got going after the runaway hounds had presumably been rounded up.    First on the scene was Pongo, the abandoned mutt whose adoption by puppy loving Danielle takes them on a walk in the park, where they become entangled with fellow pedigree Perdi and her human, Tom. From here this perfectly matched happy family embark on an adventure that sees them almost lost to the high fashion ambitions of Cruella de Vil. When dogs and cats combine forces, however, they knock spots off her.    Drawn from an original stage adaptation by Edinburgh based playwright Zinnie Harris, the show’s book by Glasgow panto legend Johnny McKnight with songs by Douglas Hodge look to Dodie Smith’s 1956 children’s novel rather than the 1961 Disney animated feature or its 1996 John Hu...

A collegiate approach prevails over this group show of six graduates from Collective’s 2024 Satellite Programme of emerging artists. Taking its title from an Irish proverb that loosely translates as ‘people live in each other’s shadows', pass shadow, whisper shade is disparate in approach, with shared themes of personal history throughout. Tellingly, almost all artists make reference to their parents, grandparents or older ancestors.     Emelia Kerr Beale draws inspiration from her father’s now demolished factory with a large scale grid of graphite drawings of ‘clock’ patterns, parts of a mechanical knitting machine and an industrial soundscape by Clara Hancock that sounds like a factory sampled.    Hannan Jones’ looped 16mm based moving image piece, Hiraeth: Pandy Lane (2024) looks to Jones’ grandfather’s attempts to buy a suit in a piece that resembles a 1970s folk horror public information film.    There is folk horror too in GASTROMANCY (2024), Katherin...

Lochgelly Centre Three stars If ever a strong political voice for the arts was needed, it is now. The fact that there isn’t currently one emanating from either Holyrood or Westminster brings shame on both Houses. What better time, then, to be reminded of Jennie Lee, the Fife firebrand who became the first ever Minister for the Arts, and who founded the Open University, championing education for all.    Lee had quite a life before such epoch making activity, as is brought home in Matthew Knights’ epic dramatic biography, which premiered at the weekend a stone’s throw from his subject’s birthplace 120 years ago. Coming at a time when arts buildings are fighting to survive, it is telling too that Knights’ play opened in a venue that might not have existed without Lee’s vision.    Knight sets out his store in Emma Lynne Harley’s production for the Angus based Knights Theatre in the variety theatre and hotel where Lee grew up, as the show’s three actors raid the dressing ...

Tramway, Glasgow Four stars   Sound and Vision are the heart of director Neil Bartlett’s theatrical reimagining of Derek Jarman’s final film, completed four months before his death from an AIDS related illness in 1994. Featuring an Yves Klein hued blue screen for the film’s full 74-minute duration, Blue features a collage of voices speaking excerpts from Jarman’s diary as he gradually lost his sight.    As Jarman ruminated on friends and lovers lost to what had been demonised as ‘the gay plague’, this opened up a bigger picture of a world that had been decimated. This was offset across several sections by a more impressionistic narrative.   Thirty years on, Bartlett brings a new quartet of voices to recount what has now become a (self) portrait of a major moment in late twentieth century social and political history. More than that, as the cast of Travis Alabanza, Joelle Taylor, Jay Bernard and Russell Tovey line up on stools beneath the screen, it becomes a rhapsody...