Coffee-Table Notes

A lot has happened since Apphia Campbell first performed the play that has become Through the Mud. Back in 2017, what was then a solo piece called WOKE saw Campbell and co-writer Meredith Yarbrough’s response to the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, USA, when black teenager Michael Brown was shot dead by a white police officer, become a Fringe hit. Developed and expanded to incorporate a second actress in the form of Tinashe Warikandwa, Through the Mud looks set to do much the same.  Adapted from writer and spoken word artist Altovise Laster’s Poems from the Underground, WOKE and now Through the Mud chart the lives of Black Panther Assata Shakur and a nineteen-year-old student called Ambrosia, who is enrolling at university as the events in Ferguson are kicking off. Forty-two years apart, the two women rise up.   As the killing of Brown and other black men, including George Floyd in 2020, helped foster the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Through the Mud’s co-production be...

As Edinburgh Art Festival celebrates its twentieth birthday, it also marks the tenth anniversary of PLATFORM, the initiative set up to showcase early career artists in the context of a festival environment. This year’s cohort features four artists whose work spans a variety of mediums and has been bubbling for some time now.  Where Alaya Ang works with durational performance, writing and other forms, Edward Gwyn Jones focuses mainly on moving image, text, and printmaking. Tamara MacArthur, meanwhile, uses intricate handcrafted installation activated by performance, while Kialy Tihngang works with sculpture, video, textiles, animation, and photomontage.      Selected by a panel led by EAF curator Eleanor Edmonson, the Platform artists will this year respond to the 2024 festival’s themes of ‘intimacy, material memory, protest and persecution’. The results will be seen on the fourth floor of the City Art Centre, which this year is set to become EAF’s home. This puts Pla...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars When hip kid Ren blows in to small town Bomontfrom the windy city with his mother, as far as action goes, things aren’t exactly swinging. Dancing has been banned following a tragedy five years earlier, and anything resembling rock and roll is considered to be the devil’s work. Ren’s only salvation comes by way of Ariel, a local girl with a lot of baggage of her own. If only she wasn’t the preacher’s daughter, Ren’s life might well be worth making a song and dance about, whatever the law might say.  Herbert Ross’s original 1984 big screen version of Footloose may have just hit forty, but beyond the stone wash denim and chart bothering hit singles, original screenwriter Dean Pitchford and Walter Bobbie’s twenty-year-old stage musical looks very much like a play for today. This is never overegged in Douglas Rintoul and musical director Richard Reeday’s new production, a collaboration between Pitlochry Festival Theatre and Suffolk’s New Wolsey...

When blind dates don’t work out, anything can happen. Just ask Van Badham, arguably Australia’s most provocative playwright and commentator, whose new show, The Questions, is one of the flagship productions of State Theatre Company South Australia’s Winter season. It was partly through Badham’s own dating adventures, after all, that led to her writing the play. It was also how she met Richard Wise, clinical psychologist by day, punk folk musician, lyricist and composer of the live score for The Questions by night.  'Richard and I met on Tinder,’ says Badham. ‘We were dating, but it just wasn’t working, and I couldn’t work out why, because we 're so into one another, had so much in common. and liked all the same stuff. We had a lot of friends in common,  and I was obsessed with Richard’s band, and Richard was into my writing, so we had this really profound connection, but as a relationship, it just didn't work.    ‘Then I had this moment of clarity where I realis...

It was autumn 1968 when a twenty-something Edinburgh College of Art graduate called Alexander Moffat (b. 1943) received a telephone call from one of his former tutors. Moffat was told he had to go on to the committee of what by now had become The New 57 Gallery. The artist run Edinburgh space had been going for eleven years by this time, having been set up by a group of artists wanting to present the sort work that wasn’t being shown in staid institutions adorned with landscape paintings.   Founded ‘by artists for artists’, and with architect Patrick Nuttgens (1930-2004) as chair, The 57 set up a subscription based model, taking up residence at 53 George Street on the second floor studio of sculptor Daphne Dyce Sharp (1924-2010). Moffat had visited the gallery as a schoolboy, and been inspired by what he saw. The spirit of innovation continued after the gallery moved to a shop-front space at 105 Rose Street in 1961, becoming The New 57 en route. It was into the Rose Street New...

Tate Britain’s announcement in April that Jasleen Kaur (b.1986) has been shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize continues Scotland’s relationship with the high profile art award. Kaur appears on the list for the Turner’s 40 th  year for Alter Altar (2023), the Scottish-Indian artist’s large-scale exhibition at Tramway, Glasgow. Also on the shortlist are Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson and Delaine Le Bas. With a £25,000 prize at stake, this year sees the Turner return to Tate Britain for the first time in six years.  For Alter Altar, Kaur was praised by the Turner judges for an exhibition that channelled her experience of growing up in Pollokshields, the multi-racial area of Glasgow where Tramway is situated. The exhibition used sound, sculpture and pop cultural references across continents to look at colonialism and cultural identity in a deeply personal fashion. Components included family photographs, an Axminster carpet, Irn-Bru and kinetic handbells. At the exhibition’s centr...

Two very different exhibitions inspired by the 1980s inner city landscapes of Edinburgh and New York have been relocated to Glasgow to become highlights of GI 2024. At the Modern Institute’s Bricks Space, five large-scale works by Keith Haring chart the rapid-fire perpetual motion of life underground in all its bustling busyness in the Big, if slightly rotting Apple. Across the river, in the top floor of the former school of 5 Florence Street, photographs by the late Sandra George bring things closer to home by way of a series of black and white documentary portraits of Auld Reekie life on the margins.  Despite being created oceans apart geographically, in sociological and political terms, Haring and George’s respective canons reveal them as frontline near neighbours, who ended up being regarded in vastly different ways. On the one hand, Haring’s street-smart guerrilla interventions were already lionised by the hipster art establishment prior to his early passing in 1990, aged 31. ...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars When little orphan Mary imports her bratty ways from India to Yorkshire following the death of her parents, the occupants of Misselthwaite Manor don’t know what hits them when this ten-year-old human dervish breezes in. Outgoing Pitlochry Festival Theatre artistic director Elizabeth Newman’s adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel stays faithful to its source in director Ben Occhipinti’s speedy revival of his 2023 open-air production. Beyond Mary’s rites of passage and eventual mellowing out, however, its themes of social isolation make a near perfect post-pandemic fable. As Mary  gets wind of another world beyond Misselthwaite’s front door, she charms the birds, or at least a friendly neighbourhood  robin, into giving her the key to a long locked up sanctuary. As she steps into the garden, the noises that haunt her from another locked room are revealed to be coming from the sickly Colin, who Mary gradually draws into her g...

Kibble Palace, Botanic Gardens, Glasgow Four stars The sexual shenanigans of men in power have long been at the heart of the business of bad government. So it goes in Shakespeare’s so called comedy, in which the bard’s dissection of everyday morality and standards in public office are honed by director/adaptor Jennifer Dick into an intense 100 minute chamber piece. This gives the final Bard in the Botanics production of the season the uneasy tension of a 1970s Hollywood thriller. Like those, Dick’s production slow burns its way towards unresolved ambiguity in what remains very much a man’s world.  As the upright Duke Vincentio goes on sabbatical, leaving his deputy Angelo in charge, young Claudio has fallen victim to the new puritans after being sentenced to death for getting his girlfriend pregnant. Angelo may be out of his depth, but the power goes to his head and other parts besides as he craves a piece of the action. This comes in the form of Claudio’s sister Isabella, a n...

Françoise Hardy – Singer, songwriter, writer, actress   Born January 17, 1944; died June 11, 2024     Françoise Hardy, who has died aged 80, was a singer and songwriter who first came to prominence in the 1960s, when her downbeat compositions and exotic appearance subverted the British pop charts and made her an international star. Her appearances on Top of the Pops and Ready Steady Go made her an icon, even as she seemed to shy away from the fame that came with having hit singles such as All Over the World (1965), which spent fifteen weeks in the UK charts.    As a singer songwriter, Hardy made more than thirty albums, and sold more than seven million records. She released her debut aged eighteen. As with many of her records, it was titled eponymously, but came to be known as Tous les garçons et les filles (All the Boys and Girls) (1962). ‘I walk down the streets, my soul in sorrow’ she sang on the title track.   Hardy also inadvertently helped define what...