Coffee-Table Notes

When Anne Wood visited Pakistan to meet the father she had never known, the experience opened up another world that stayed with her. More than thirty years later, the renowned Scottish violinist tells her story in When Mountains Meet, a cross-cultural hybrid of storytelling and song that bridges continents and musical styles. Told as a conversation between Scottish and South-Asian music, a vibrant live score composed by Wood combines alap, raag, reel and strathspey, with vocals performed in a mix of English, Gaelic and Hindustani to tell Wood’s deeply personal story.   When Wood first wrote to her father, ‘He didn’t know I had been born, but replied quickly to my tentative letter introducing myself, completely accepting me into his life as we developed a fiery but loving father-daughter relationship. ’   Wood’s musical pedigree stems from her Sutherland roots, and as a founder member of folk/jazz fusion group, The Cauld Blast Orchestra up to her current tenure as a member of ‘godmother

When Lynn MacRitchie gave a public lecture at Edinburgh College of Art in February this year titled The Participation Art Event 1973: Provocation or Prophecy, it shed light on one of Scotland’s lesser known avant-garde art happenings that might finally have found its time. Instigated by MacRitchie while a student at ECA more than half a century ago, The Participation Art Event (PAE) explored the idea of art being a collective action rather than an individual, studio-bound pursuit. Over five days in December 1973, PAE took over ECA’s Sculpture Court, where a series of participatory actions took place. At the centre of this were David Medalla (1942-2020) and John Dugger (1948-2023). Medalla was a Filipino artist and activist who in 1964 co-founded the kinetic art based Signals London gallery, and was one of those behind hippie/counterculture collective the Exploding Galaxy.   It was through the latter that Medalla met Dugger, an American artist who landed on the scene in 1967. The pair c

Dundee Rep Five stars   The landscape is everywhere in Morna Young’s new version of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic novel. Conceived for Dundee Rep with director Finn den Hertog, the production sets out its expansive and impressionistic store by way of rows of soil that fill designer Emma Bailey’s stage. This is accompanied by the pulsating drone of composer Finn Anderson’s score.    As the show’s eight actors step out from the banks of musical instruments lined up either side of the stage and into the fields, it is as if they are sizing up the place to see if it has any future. Once they come together for a haunting vocal chorale that seems to draw its strength from the earth under their feet, they can rest assured about that in what slowly evolves into a mighty telling of Grassic Gibbon’s story that puts the fearlessly independent figure of Chris Guthrie at its heart.    Danielle Jam plays Chris with a sense of defiant pride in the face of assorted adversities that include death, sexu

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   Take five girls. Put them in the same house together with only one borrowed designer dress to share between them in a world where dreams of poetry, dancing and clothes are on ration, and everyday desires look set to explode. So it goes in Gabriel Quigley’s appealingly breezy new adaptation of Muriel Spark’s 1973 novella, brought to life with a busy flourish in Roxana Silbert’s expansive production.   Things begin in the 1960s, when glossy magazine high-flyer Jane Wright discovers the death of posh boy poet Nicholas Farringdon. This provokes Jane to rewind to 1945, when she, Selina, Pauline, Anne and Jo were living in the May of Teck Club. This was a run down Kensington boarding house set up for ‘the social protection of ladies of slender means below the age of thirty years’ who wished to pursue some vaguely defined occupation.    Half a century after it was published, Spark’s study of young women on the verge in a world where post World War

The Studio, Edinburgh  Four stars   Appearances can be deceptive in the latest episode of Rona Munro’s series of history plays, which, over the last decade since the original James Plays trilogy, has begun to resemble a centuries spanning zeitgeist busting soap opera. Take episode five, brought to life in Orla O’Loughlin’s chamber sized co-production between Raw Material and Capital Theatres as a series of intimate exchanges highlighting matters of life and death before our heroines take flight en route to personal and political liberation.    The production’s young team of actors line up at the start of the play like some Trainspotting film poster homage set to a techno soundtrack on Becky Minto’s candle lined set. In fact, they are acting out some of the fallout of the execution of Protestant reformer Patrick Hamilton at the hands of Scotland’s sixteenth century religious establishment.    As the play’s subtitle hints at, it is left to Hamilton’s rebelliously inclined sister Katherin

Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow Five stars   From Greenham Common to Palestine, Jenny Matthews has long been on the frontline of international protest against warfare. As a founder member in the 1980s of all-woman photographic agency, Format Photographers, and in everything that followed, Matthews’ images have brought to life the women caught in the crossfire of numerous conflicts and atrocities across more than forty years. Two decades on from her book, Women and War (2003), this solo show brings together several bodies of work that immortalise and honour her subjects using the most tender of means to keep them in the frame.   This is as clear in the series of twenty-three quilts lined with images from Matthews’ archive, as much as it is with the thirty-five portraits that use embroidery to mask the faces of Afghan women in Facial Derecognition (2021). It is there too in Torn Apart, an up to the minute series drawn from the crisis in Sudan, and a new series of images from Gaza.    In

“Images provoke memories like music provokes memories,” says Fraser Taylor in the foyer of Glasgow School of Art’s Reid Gallery, where his Instant Whip exhibition opened a few days earlier. Shown across four rooms, Instant Whip unveils an archive of printed textiles, garments, sketchbooks, a stage backdrop for Glasgow band The Bluebells and record sleeves for pop contemporaries Friends Again. With much of the work drawn from Taylor’s time as co-founder of influential design collective, The Cloth, the exhibition’s busy array of vividly coloured works look like an inventory of his life transformed into an immersive stage set.   Navigating the spaces with Taylor, his Proustian promenade through his back pages is given extra kick by the fact the archive material on show was missing presumed lost for several decades. Only when three boxes arrived at his studio in 2014 was Taylor reintroduced to a world he thought he’d left behind.   “It was literally like my heart stopped beating for five m

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Five stars Second comings are all the rage these days, as pension plan heritage rock tours cash in on a band’s influential legacy to claim their place in history. While such a fate is unlikely to befall the long lost quartet of David Keenan’s epic novel about the most famous band you’ve never heard of, judging by this scaled up revival of Graham Eatough’s bold stage version, they are already the stuff of legend.   Or at least Ross Raymond seems to think so. As brilliantly brought to life by a wide eyed and restless Paul Higgins, Ross is the former fanzine writer who was at the centre of what passed for a music scene in Airdrie between 1983 and 1985, and witnessed the convoluted crash and burn of local anti heroes Memorial Device. Greeting the audience as if giving a library history talk, Ross unpacks a lifetime’s litany of reminiscences about Big Patty, Richard, Remy, and especially the mercurial power of band frontman and driving force, Lucas Black, represented i

Perth Theatre Four stars Casablanca has come on a bit since Morag Fullarton first adapted Michael Curtiz’s classic 1942 movie vehicle for Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman for the stage back in 2010. That was for a matinee slot as part of Oran Mor’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint lunchtime theatre season in Glasgow.  Fullarton’s bite size three-actor version stayed faithful to the essence of the film’s Second World War set romance while taking an irreverent approach that was part homage and not quite pastiche, as intrigue and in-jokes sat side by side in a show that travelled the world.  Fullarton’s scaled up revival opens out onto design coordinator Martha Steed’s faithfully recreated Rick’s Bar, where we’re greeted by singer Jerry Burns’s French cabaret Chanteuse. Accompanied by pianist Hilary Brooks, Burns sets the tone with a short set of torch song evergreens. This leaves plenty of time for actors to prepare, as Simon Donaldson, Kevin Lennon and Clare Waugh join in as if warming up in

A few weeks ago, artistic directors of Birds of Paradise Theatre Company past and present met up to take stock. It had been thirty years, after all, since the foundation of what has become Scotland’s premiere producers of theatre created and performed by disabled artists. With current company boss Robert Softley Gale gathering alongside his former co-director Garry Robson and their predecessors Morven Gregor and founding director Andrew Dawson on the eve of a tour of Rob Drummond’s dark comedy about the benefits system, Don’t. Make. Tea., this made for quite a summit meeting.   Among the many things discussed, Dawson reminded Softley Gale how he had visited Softley Gale’s school to present a workshop on the then freshly founded Birds of Paradise. Keen to get young people involved, Softley Gale was invited to take part, only to tell Dawson he was far too busy.   While Softley Gale’s interest in theatre developed while a student at the University of Glasgow studying Computer Science and

When Rosalind Main and her dad Graham decided to start Borrowed Nostalgia, a radio programme about Edinburgh’s lost music venues, they had plenty of material to play with. As an artist, model and researcher steeped in the local scene, Rosalind had been spoon-fed war stories of gigs past by her old man. The fact that Graham’s first hand experience came, not just from attending gigs as a music hungry teen dating back to the 1970s but, as bass player with auld reekie’s premiere art/punk combo, Fire Engines, playing some of them as well.   The result in Borrowed Nostalgia, which airs monthly on Edinburgh’s community radio station, EHFM, is a mix of historical inquiry, anecdotes and a series of top tunes associated with whichever venue is being investigated.   ‘Growing up with dad’s music was really important’, says Rosalind. ‘Driving round, he would point out places where he’d seen things, so I’d be listening to David Bowie in the car, dad would point out the Empire Theatre, which is now t

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   The Pains of confinement come in many forms in this contemporary chamber pop song cycle – gig theatre if you prefer - devised by director Liam Hurley and singer songwriter Jo Mango. Working with a group of songwriters, they draw from material developed during Distant Voices: Coming Home, a four year research project set up by criminal justice based arts organisation Vox Liminis and three university partners. The fourteen songs co-written with a host of unnamed participants channel the real life experiences of those within the system preparing to return home.    Cosiness abounds on designer Claire Halleran’s array of rugs, lamps and armchairs spread out on a stage filled with musical instruments.  Here, Mango and fellow singer-songwriters Louis Abbot of Admiral Fallow, Kim Grant, aka Raveloe, Jill O’Sullivan of Sparrow and the Workshop, Bdy_Prts and more, Dave Hook, aka Solareye, plus bassist Joseph Rattray, bring empathy and warmth to a moving c

Four stars The figure of Eduardo Paolozzi towers over the contemporary art world as much as his seven-metre tall sculpture of ‘Vulcan’ (1998-1999), Roman god of fire, does in its permanent residence in Modern Two’s café named after the artist. The Leith born pop auteur’s presence is similarly embedded into Edinburgh’s cityscape, be it through public sculptures, the locally brewed beer named after him, the football shirt for Leith Athletic, or the magnificent recreation of his studio in Modern Two.   The latter is the perfect conduit for this centenary exhibition, which rolls out sixty works that not only channel the throwaway detritus of Paolozzi’s collages, but show how his ultra moderne designs made their mark beyond the gallery. This is spread across two ground floor rooms, a library and a couple of corridor showcases. The first room, Paris & London, shows off some of his 1950s collages, sculptures, screenprints and experiments with ink. The second room, Pattern & Print, lea

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   “Immigrants,” West Indies born Alexander Hamilton and French émigré the Marquiss de Lafayette freestyle in unison in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s globe trotting hip-hop history musical. “We get things done.” American history has gone wild in the nine years since Miranda’s show came rhyming onto the stage like an old-skool block party on a grand scale. As Thomas Kail’s production arrives in Edinburgh for a two-month stint as part of its UK tour, Hamilton still possesses some of the unbridled optimism the Barack Obama era brought with it.   Here, after all, is the American dream writ large, as ‘bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman’ Hamilton hustles his way to power after arriving in eighteenth Century New York. Ushered into society by Sam Oladeinde’s Aaron Burr, who acts as MC, rival and eventually killer, Shaq Taylor’s Hamilton wants to be number one. As he networks all the big hitters,  words are his weapons, as he winds up in a double act of

A wealth of radical mavericks spans the centuries in this year’s Adelaide Festival opera programme. On the one hand, Igor Stravinsky’s The Nightingale is reinvigorated in a new production by Canadian auteur Robert Lepage. On the other, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera is brought to vigorous new life by former Adelaide Festival director Barrie Kosky.   Just as Stravinsky, Weill and Brecht broke moulds and pushed boundaries in their respective eras, Lepage and Kosky have produced a succession of major works that have applied their own respective contemporary visions onto productions drawn from the classical canon.   Lepage’s take on The Nightingale – first presented by Stravinsky in 1913 -  is an international co-production between his own Ex Machina company with Opéra national de Lyon, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Canadian Opera Company and Dutch National Opera. In tune with this internationalist approach, Lepage is working with  Argentinean conductor Alejo Pérez, Am

As the longest running and most pre-eminent survey of contemporary Australian art, the Adelaide Biennial has always attempted to showcase the most interesting work of a particular moment, with a themed approach giving the event a loose-knit narrative that goes beyond individual artists. By naming this eighteenth edition of the Biennial as Inner Sanctum, curator JoséDa Silva is suggesting a meditation of sorts on where we are now.  “ Inner Sanctum came from a simple proposition of wanting to think about what the human condition might be like in 2023 and 2024,’ Da Silva says. “How might we think about the human condition after having lived through three or four years of COVID and all of the experiences of lockdown, and how that might have affected the way we think about our lives, our homes, and our communities.   “It became clear to me very early in the thinking about this show, that there was a way of grouping certain ideas and certain artists together in distinct ways, and that you mi

Laurie Anderson has always sounded like the future. Ever since she scored a global hit in 1981 with ‘O Superman’, the New York based artist has been at the cutting edge of melding her music, words and performances with the latest technology.    It should come as no surprise, then, that Anderson has embraced Artificial Intelligence in I’ll Be Your Mirror, her hi-tech exhibition that arrives in Adelaide after premiering in Stockholm in 2023. While Anderson won’t be present physically during the exhibition’s run, as she has in previous Adelaide appearances, AI Laurie Anderson very much will. This comes by way of machinery that has absorbed everything the real Anderson has ever said to create a writing machine made from her specific way with words and how she delivers them. Activated by viewers feeding in short phrases, new works are created in Anderson’s voice and style.    As the Velvet Underground referencing title of the exhibition suggests, I’ll Be Your Mirror does likewise with an AI