Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars In every dream home there is heartache and a whole lot more in Philip Ridley’s 2015 play, which receives its Scottish premiere in Johnny McKnight’s dangerously madcap Tron company production. Here we’re invited in to Jill and Ollie’s remade and remodelled des-res in the tellingly named Gilead Close, where the young couple take stock after being tempted away from the roughhouse estate they were previously stuck in by a pink-clad saviour calling herself Miss Dee.  Like a garishly clad snake in Eden, Miss Dee offers Jill and Ollie a new house for free. Only the much needed renovations of their new abode are the couple’s responsibilities. With the Faustian pact signed, sealed and delivered, Jill and Ollie take their upwardly mobile ascent on board with relish. In an urban wasteland rife with homelessness and crime, their discovery of a short cut to home improvements transforms both their lives and the neighbourhood. With the traditional local demog...

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow Five stars The honeymoon is well and truly over by the time we meet the new Mrs Tesman in Kathy McKean’s fresh version of Henrik Ibsen’s seismic drama, which burst on stage in 1891 to mark the beginning of the end of the nineteenth century in explosive fashion. McKean’s script is a similarly intense affair, especially confined as it is here in Gordon Barr’s up close and personal Bard in the Botanics production to the ornate surroundings of the Botanic Gardens’ Kibble Palace.   Here, the Palace becomes the aspirational des res the Tesmans now call home,  and where Isabelle Joss’ Aunt Julia’ marks her territory by way of her attempt to find a place for everything and put everything in its place. As the roaring boys come calling on the object of their affections they used to know as a bad girl called Hedda Gabler, however, the house’s barely lived in interior will soon be forever marked by tragedy, death and destruction. The latter is insti...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four Stars Love and death are at the heart of Jane Austen’s 1811 coming of age novel, in which the very different Dashwood sisters embark on romances that are all but doomed before they even begin. As the title of Austen’s anonymously published debut suggests, and as France’s Poet’s new stage adaptation makes clear, the responses of both single ladies to their travails are key. Where Marianne is an emotionally charged whirlwind who lays bare her heart with all manner of high melodrama, her sister Elinor is infinitely more grounded, sometimes to her detriment.  As gradually becomes clear too in Poet’s take on things, much of Marianne and Elinor’s respective reactions stem, not just from dealing with the feckless drips who court them up the garden path, but from the man they have already lost. This, of course, is their father, whose funeral opens the play, and whose influence on the two daughters he left behind has clearly left its mark.   Wh...

Botanic Garden, Glasgow Four stars A suitably dreich Botanic Gardens played host on Tuesday night to Jennifer Dick’s brand new adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 proto feminist classic, which opens this year’s largely non-Shakespearian Bard in the Botanics summer season. Judging by the line-up, the very current focus this year is on strong women making their way in the world in the face of overriding misogyny.    With Dick resetting the action of Bronte’s taboo busting nineteenth century novel from the grim north of England to even bleaker Scottish soil, little orphan Jane is buffeted from pillar to post as she embarks on a gradual getting of wisdom. Until, that is, she meets Mr Rochester, a posh boy himbo with a secret in the attic that comes back to haunt him.  Up until then, Jane has carved out her future with ferocious ambition and an unwillingness to suffer fools, even if her bullying cousin John does use knowledge as a weapon when he belts her with a well read pa...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Willy Russell’s classic 1986 study of a working class Liverpool housewife who becomes an independent woman is now just a few years younger than the play’s forty-something heroine. Judging by this speedy summer revival of Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s production, first seen in 2023, Russell’s deceptively chirpy one-woman dramady is showing few signs of middle-aged spread.    As brought to life here by Sally Reid, Russell’s creation remains a warm and powerful portrait of one woman’s wake up call, as a flight to Greece offers a last gasp chance at liberation from her own mid life crises that might just change everything.    The wine Reid pours into her glass at the start of the play marks the beginning of Shirley’s very quiet rebellion, as she takes a leap beyond her litany of everyday drudgery she offloads to the wall, which becomes confidant, confessor and sounding board, crucially never answering back.   Confined to the...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars When Carole King’s second album, Tapestry, was released in 1971, its appearance marked how bubblegum pop music had evolved to become a serious artform. King’s deeply personal set of songs also marked the epochal societal shifts that had liberated her and her peers enough to make a record to call her own.   The late Douglas McGrath’s multi winning musical channels King’s life from her days in Brooklyn as a smart teenager with stars in her eyes, to the musical icon she became. Framing his book with King’s seminal post Tapestry concert at Carnegie Hall, McGrath has the singer going back to her precocious beginnings writing hit singles when she was sixteen, to her fertile professional partnership and tumultuous marriage with lyricist Gerry Goffin.   With equally successful songwriting rivals Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil acting as a more straightforward counterpoint to King’s irresistible rise, King becomes an L.A. woman and lady of La...

Beth Gibbons has always sung the blues. This remains evident on the Portishead vocalist’s tellingly titled new solo album, ‘Lives Outgrown’. Recorded over the last decade with former Talk Talk drummer Lee Harris and Arctic Monkeys producer James Ford, thirty years after Gibbons’ emotive voice was first laid bare on Portishead’s era defining ‘Dummy’ album, ‘Lives Outgrown’ sees Gibbons taking stock of motherhood, menopause and mortality.   ‘People started dying,’ Gibbons is quoted as saying in the album’s press release. ‘When you’re young, you never know the endings, you don’t know how it’s going to pan out. You think: we’re going to get beyond this. It’s going to get better. Some endings are hard to digest.’   Since Gibbons and Portishead co-conspirator Geoff Barrow took the leap from dole queue Enterprise Allowance scheme to winning the Mercury Music Prize, two other Portishead studio albums have seen the light of day. The most recent, ‘Third’, appeared in 2008.   Gibbon...

Five stars    When American photographer Milton Rogovin (1909-2011) visited mining communities in Ayrshire, Fife and Midlothian over three weeks in 1982, the images he took of people at work, rest and play captured a time and place just before those communities were upended by the 1984/1985 Miner’s Strike that changed Britain forever.   Forty years on, artist Nicky Bird followed in Rogovin’s footsteps, revisiting the places, the people and their descendents of those originally depicted, marking the changes and memorialising the seismic past that shaped them.   The result in this powerful exhibition puts images by both artists side by side in a way that bridges generations to tell a story that became one of the markers of late twentieth century society. Developed by Bird with the communities depicted, each photograph is captioned with a commentary by those in the thick of the scenes depicted.   From the grubby faced men posing beside the pit or in the living room...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Five stars   The world is drowning in this exquisite dive into troubled waters by Ireland’s Blue Raincoat Theatre Company, touring the fourth of a series of devised shows after premiering in Sligo in 2022. It’s there in the stormy seas conjured up by the five people on stage who use shadow puppets, model houses and all manner of impressionistic techniques to make their point without having to hector or harangue. The company’s slow burning artistry does the talking in a way that transcends words.    Director Niall Henry’s exquisitely realised construction focuses on a pearl diver and her struggles to survive with her daughter in the face of a seismic typhoon. With houses blown away and boats wrecked by the waves, the seabed has become a junkyard, and the chances of finding buried treasure are rare.   Henry and co’s troublingly prescient yarn is loosely drawn from the ideas of environmentalist James Lovelock, who posited the Gaia hypotheses, ...

Homeliness is where the heart is in Lawnmower, Laura Aldridge’s domestically inclined new commission and accompanying exhibition that has just opened as part of Jupiter Artland’s 2024 summer season. You can see it in the Edinburgh sculpture park’s Steadings Gallery, where hand crafted love seats are given the names You & Me I (2024), You & Me II (2024), You & Me III (2024). These are watched over by a series of wall mounted globe lights in coloured skirts that – with names like Housework (Ultra Vivid Scene (2024), and We too form a multitude (my brain is everywhere) (2024) - give the lights the air of blank faced disembodied doll heads.   The seats themselves are decorated with ornaments that offer up appealingly tactile armrests that allow the sitter to view three screens beaming out seventeen-minute video installation, Go Wo Mango! (2024). This was made by Aldridge in collaboration with fellow artists Juliana Capes, Morwenna Kearsley and Sarah McFadyen, with a soundtr...

“George wasn’t too fond of museums,” says Will Cooper as he walks through the two main rooms that form The Wyllieum, the newly opened Greenock based gallery space devoted to George Wyllie (1921-2012), the ‘George’ of Cooper’s observation. “That is something we have to negotiate every day,” says the centre’s director.   Such are the glorious contradictions of the Glasgow born artist and self styled Whys?man who first came to prominence with his playfully theatrical critique of capitalism, A Day Down a Goldmine (1982). The large-scale works that followed occupied similarly non-institutional spaces. They were equally damning too about the managed decline of shipbuilding and industrial culture that was taking place at the time.    The Straw Locomotive (1987), saw a full-scale wire and straw reconstruction of a locomotive hung from Glasgow’s Finnieston Crane before being ceremonially burnt. The Paper Boat (1989-1990), was a 78-foot vessel that sailed the Clyde and beyond....