Coffee-Table Notes

Queen’s Hall Four stars   “I feel emotional,” says Natasha Khan after reading If You Be the Universe, a poem dedicated to her daughter, towards the end of her Edinburgh International Festival show in her terminally spectral guise as Bat for Lashes. Khan may resemble a Victorian sprite in her ornate white dress, but it is motherhood that fired The Dream of Delphi, the first Bat for Lashes album since 2019, just as it becomes the primal drive behind much of Khan’s performance.    Flanked by Laura Groves on keyboards and Charlotte Hatherley on guitar, Khan opens with an elaborate mime during the instrumental introduction to At Your Feet. The title track from the new album sees all three women offer up some kind of choreographed offering to some sacred deity on high.   Khan rewinds to 2019’s vampire girl gang opus, Lost Girls, for the nocturnal wanderings of The Hunger, perching on the edge of the stage for the big time sensuality of the piano led Mountains. She wie...

Edinburgh International Book Festival   Four stars   Sinners of one form or another may be partying hard all over Edinburgh just now, but it is the more diabolically inclined breed hiding in plain sight down back alleys and other dark places you have to watch. So it goes in this very twenty-first century take on James Hogg’s 1824 gothic yarn, Confessions of a Justified Sinner.    Put together for Edinburgh International Book Festival by Grid Iron Theatre Company director Ben Harrison and novelist Louise Welsh, the result is part walking tour, part podcast, as those taking part tune in to a download on their smartphone. Through headphones, our guide, aka The Editor, leads us over an hour or so from kirk to kirk and down Old Town closes. Horrible histories of local landmarks are interspersed with filmed scenes that condense Hogg’s tale into YouTube friendly bite size chunks.    This set up stays true to Hogg’s original, with Welsh herself relishing every word...

The Studio Five stars   The first thing the three Afro-Brazilian women and a man who sit at tables in front of a triptych of screens do is applaud the demise of Brazil’s Bolsonaro regime and the country’s return to democracy. As opening statements go in writer/director Christiane Jatahy’s multi-faceted dissection of the long-term fallout of slavery, racism and blatant power grabs in Brazil, it speaks volumes. As the women recount first-hand litanies of land grabs, assassination and abuse of Brazil’s indigenous black culture, it is as if we are witnesses at some truth and reconciliation hearing.   What follows in Jatahy’s dizzying construction is a remarkable mash up of historical fiction, archive film footage and community ritual that mixes live performance with onscreen re-enactments and surround sound music in an aesthetic fusion that brings its points home with devastating power.   Jatahy’s production draws from contemporary Brazilian writer Itamar Vieira Junior’s...

Royal Lyceum Theatre Four stars   David Ireland’s new play for the National Theatre of Scotland takes its name from Alcoholics Anonymous’s twelve step programme to recovery. The fifth step, in which addicts open up and admit their wrongs to themselves and those around them, is regarded by some as the hardest of all. Ireland takes this notion into assorted rooms with a couple of emotionally stunted men and lets them run with it.    Luka is an alcoholic mess, a damaged and strung out young man just starting out on the AA programme. James is his sponsor, older and presumably wiser, but with a lot of baggage of his own. Whatever resembles small talk between these two unreconstructed men soon turns into freeform riffs on sex, sexuality and meeting Hollywood celebrities with ‘the hands of an aristocratic lady or a sad child,’ and who may or may not be Jesus. As Luka and James spar over six short scenes, the power dynamic shifts as loyalties are breached and taboos broken, so an...

Assembly  George Square Studio One   4 stars   A little knowledge goes a long way in Cathrine Frost’s solo meditation on birth, life and near death in an ebullient account of her real life experience of pregnancy. While actress turned nurse Frost understands the science with first hand intimacy in a way that ancient Greek philosophers never mentioned, she also opens up with some half naked karate moves, while a volunteer Socrates gets what he’s deserved for centuries. This makes for a highly charged and hugely entertaining emotional outpouring that falls somewhere between performance lecture and stand up confessional.    Directed by Mats  Eldøen for Norway’s Det Andre Teatret, and with a script by Frost,  Eldøen and Marie Ulsberg, Frost’s show and tell sees her recount an experience life changing enough to put her back on the stage. As she casts audience members as various parts of her anatomy, it suddenly dawns on you that many in the room – men, basi...

Pleasance Courtyard Four stars When Britt met Otto, it was love at first laugh. Both clowns doing shows in Adelaide in 2019, the pairembarked on a delirious long distance romance that looks set to end in an on stage wedding to which we’re all invited. As it’s a clown’s wedding, plastic bananas are handed out at the door instead of confetti, and you might even end up a bridesmaid.    While we’re waiting for Otto, Britt has a tale to tell, not just of long distance love, but of  lockdown, citizenship visas and festival shows without her. Britt Plummer does this with little more than a couple of coffee cups, a mop and a jacket to tell her true life story in Jess Clough-MacRae’s production for Plummer’s suitably named Frank. Theatre.    Returning to Edinburgh following a run in 2023, it’s a glorious double bluff of a show  with bags of attitude, as Plummer utilises the DIY puppetry at play to make for an exuberantly executed hour that is  funny, ...

Pleasance Courtyard Bunker One Three stars Jessica Regan is unpacking her props box at the opening of her solo memoir of a life in London flats. This is what Regan has effectively been doing for the last twenty years. Moving from Cork to Acton as a hungry young drama student expecting the streets to be swinging, to her soon to be ex abode in Walthamstow, these are the bookends of a life in boxes and the accumulated baggage along the way.     The names of all sixteen of Regan’s former neighbourhoods are pinned up behind her as if waiting for the highest bid as she invites the audience to select one. What follows depending on which district is picked is a selection of yarns that jump across time as well as place to make up a patchwork of temporary addresses, broken relationships and empty rooms.    Regan invites us in to her world with an easy charm as she’s fixing things up. There are a few gaps that need filled in to give things context, but Regan is totally ope...

Summerhall, Edinburgh  5 stars   The heat is on for Stacey Gross, the terminally sunny side up TV weather girl and walking feelgood factor in American writer Brian Watkins’ full force whirlwind of a play. Stacey may be hot stuff for the viewers in the smog soaked sweat box of California, but inside she is a Prosecco soaked mess who might break into a million pieces any second.    If she did, judging by some of the hot flushes going on lately, chances are she’d cause a flood verging on biblical. Beyond the big city, Stacey appears increasingly possessed by a higher power inherited from her homeless mother who gave her up at birth. Out of this comes a devastating eco fable that fuses pop culture and nightmare scenario to make a withering assault on the consumer capitalist Ballardian hellscape Stacey inhabits en route to becoming an accidental super heroine.    Tyne Rafaelli’s turbo charged production brings Watkins’ prophecies to life by way of the incre...

Summerhall, Edinburgh 4 Stars   Friendship never ends in Amy Powell Yeates’ play, which charts the relationship between Charlie and Debs over twenty-five years. This moves from their 1990s schooldays hanging on to every word of the gospel according to the Spice Girls, to becoming women on the verge of middle age, with a ton of shared baggage in tow, and Geri Halliwell’s betrayal lingering still.    This makes for an energetic hour in Claire O’Reilly’s production, which charts the two women’s assorted rites of passage throughout a series of bite size scenes that map out the highs, lows and everything between.    Olivia Forrest as Charlie and Rosa Robson as Debs hurl themselves into the action, moving between teenage ebullience to frustrated thirty-somethings trying to hold on to everything that was special but which now seems out of reach.    Presented in a co-production between Nuthatch theatre company and young Glasgow based production outfit, Scissor...

Underbelly (Belly Dancer), Edinburgh 4 stars   Salvation may be hard to come by on the Fringe, but for seekers on a mission to find transformation, you might just have met your Mecca in this hour-long celebration, that begins and ends with comic euphoria, with some serious fun between.    Our leader of the congregation is the almighty RaveRend, a funky soul brother assisted by a guy called Trev. Together, they lead the congregation in a glorious celebration of life that breaks down the liberating force of dance music into a multi-step self help programme to enlighten and amuse.    Presented by the Nottingham based Sheep Soup company, this makes for a glorious double bluff of a show that becomes the grooviest feelgood confessional in town. Audience input to how things go is crucial, with a mass chant of ‘Fuck Tommy Robinson’ and a communal conga particular highlights of Tuesday’s sold out show.   As RaveRend, Ben Welch invests his alter ego with a mix of sho...

  Greenside @Riddles Court, Edinburgh  3 stars   When gun law meets the art world, the survivors take no prisoners in Nancy Hamada’s play, which looks at the long-term side effects of a mass school shooting on a mother and a best friend left behind. For artist Taylor Kriss, it is by making a five feet high bronze sculpture of her best friend Jessie to keep his memory alive. For Jessie’s grieving mother, TV actress Fedelis Spector, the sculpture is a memorial that gives her comfort as it graces her living room where her son once inhabited.    When Taylor wants to hitch a ride with bronze Jessie from New Jersey to Chicago, where it will form part of her debut exhibition, the pair end up on an epic road trip that will put them all in the spotlight.  Especially as Taylor’s swag includes a bag full of fifty guns, one each bought with ease from every state.   This set up makes for an at times comic trip that in Todd Faulkner’s production comes on like a...

Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh 4 stars Life is a cabaret for Leni Riefenstahl in Gil Kofman’s solo play, in which Hitler’s favourite filmmaker takes the stage for one last hurrah to tell her story. As embodied by Jodie Markell in Richard Caliban’s production for New York’s Brave New World Repertory Theatre, here Leni vamps it up like some Weimar diva with the countenance of a mid period  Fassbinder heroine by way of a last gasp Nico.    As some of her greatest hits beam out behind her, Leni’s yarns include the one about how Hitler became afflicted with tennis elbow, and just how much of a mark her propagandist opus Triumph of the Will left on Star Wars.  No slouch in making a song and dance of things, and accompanied on accordion, violin and percussion by Spiff Wigand, Markell’s Leni makes numbers by Melanie, Tom Waits and Mary Hopkin her own. There’s also the chance to become an extra in her final movie. Just watch where you put those arms, mind, as Leni prepares for her...

Fruitmarket Gallery 4 stars Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama’s first solo exhibition in Scotland draws from an archive of his country’s now defunct colonial era railway system prior to liberation in 1957, and transforms its raw material of rusty train tracks, customised leather and formal papers into something that honours those who did the heavy lifting.   Charcoal drawings of men at work are set against a backdrop of papers from the Ghana Industrial Holding Company, resembling murals on repurposed billboards. A series of staged photographs sees a group of men drag a German-built Henschel train along the track. Life size dioramas of those who worked on the railways are lined up like some large-scale team picture. Photographs of the arms of Mahama’s female studio assistants focus on their tattoos, which themselves depict Ghana’s history.  The exhibition’s title is drawn from lyrics to a song by Owl John, the solo project by late Frightened Rabbit vocalist Scott Hutchison, w...

Collective 4 stars   Space is very much the place in this new body of work by Moyna Flannigan housed in the Collective’s City Dome space on the site of the former Royal Observatory. Looking for Pluto is a multi-panelled frieze that sees a gaggle of women with Jackie-magazine eye and Mean Girls attitudes process through history, mobile phones at the ready as they fall in behind a larger monumental figure. As time and space collide, this looks like an animation in waiting culled from some 1970s rad-fem SF comic book. Space Shuffle’s title piece is an array of cut-out shapes balanced on plinths or else hanging from the cosmos held by wires in what looks like fragile film set for some stop-motion fantasia. Images of aeroplanes and horses adorn both works, as they do in the collages from Flannigan’s Cosmic Traces series, in which more solitary figures gaze up at the planets beyond, every one a star.  Collective until 15 September. The List, August 2024 ends  

Hyperpop was first used as both a word and a pop concept in 1988 in an article about the Cocteau Twins. More recently, hyperpop as a micro genre of electronic music is more related to artists such as Charli XCX and the late SOPHIE, with Dazed magazine hailing the music’s futuristic maximalist rush as ‘the sound for a post pandemic world’. A use of vocoder and Autotune based voice modulation in particular has allowed hyperpop performers to play with different voices and identities in a way that chimes with a gender fluid zeitgeist.  The hyperpop scene forms the backdrop to HYPER, a new play by Ois O’Donoghue for Ireland’s Jaxbanded Theatre, co-founded in 2020 by O’Donoghue, who also directs, and the show’s composer/sound designer Ruairi Nicholl.  A mini hit at the 2023 Dublin Fringe, HYPER focuses on hyperpop duo Conall and Saoirse, whose forthcoming gig in a gay bar is given an extra frisson of anxiety by Saoirse’s recent transition. A bathroom incident prompts an interve...

Dovecot Studios 4 stars Home is very much at the heart of Chris Ofili’s monumental tapestry that forms the centrepiece of Dovecot’s summer exhibition. Not only is Ofili’s seven-metre wide mix of classicist myth and contemporary stylings drawn from the Manchester born Turner Prize winner’s adopted Trinidad residence. This first Edinburgh showing of a work commissioned by London livery institution the Clothmakers’ Company is making a prodigal’s return to the space where it was created over almost three years between 2014 and 2017 by a team of five weavers at Dovecot Tapestry Studio. The result across the work’s three panels finds a man and woman in repose in a fantastical island Eden. While the man plays guitar, the woman is fed cocktails from on high as birds sing in the trees. While figures at either end of the painting suggest some kind of intervention, there are references as well to Italian footballer Mario Balotelli as well as the Trinidadian pastime of keeping caged birds. The tap...

The Studio Four stars   Water is everywhere in this remarkable collaboration between indigenous artists from North and South America, which charts how the planet’s natural resources are plundered and entire ecosystems destroyed in the name of greed. From Canada, and with Anishinabe and French roots, Émilie Monnet stands side by side with Waira Nina, who is Inga, and from the Colombian Amazon. The title of the play in each of their respective languages means ‘song’, and this is exactly what emerges over this ninety-minute work that is part sound installation, part durational ritual.   The audience are seated on cushions around rock pools and foliage in a fully immersive unspoilt idyll. Monnet and Nina move in and around this, utilising sound baths drawn from the natural environment. The pair caw and spar as they re-enact birdsong. They pile rock on top of rock in a room where even the hot air itself seems to breathe.   When the sound of machines invades the air, however, t...

Lyceum Theatre Four stars   Edinburgh International Festival has seen many Hamlets over the decades. Few, however, have resembled this audacious reimagining of Shakespeare’s play from Peru’s Teatro La Plaza that arrived in town this week. Rather than wallow in the existential crisis of the bard’s sulky Danish teen, writer and director Chela De Ferrari uses the play as a springboard for eight actors with Down syndrome to pass the crown around in order to give voice to their own inner desires.    After lining up to explain to the audience that they might take their time with their lines, the octet launch into a melee that takes in personal stories, filmed sequences and rap. There are even on screen cameos from Ian McKellen and Laurence Olivier, before a final punky explosion sees the cast celebrate their differences in glorious fashion.   Performed in Spanish with English surtitles, with input from associate directors and playwrights Jonathan Oliveros, Claudia Tan...

Usher Hall, Edinburgh - Five stars When a dressing gown clad Chilly Gonzales declares Kanye West to be the new Wagner, given that the timpani led ditty the lyric comes from is called ‘Fuck Wagner’, it’s probably not meant as a compliment. It has, however, prompted Gonzales to start a campaign in his adopted home of Cologne to change the name of  Richard-Wagner-Straß e to Tina-Turner- Straße . Such are the pop/classical tensions of the artist formerly known as Jason Charles Beck’s world.    After a restless run of instrumental albums, collaborations, a Christmas record and a French language opus, Gonzales and his three-piece band open with the bongo-led title number from forthcoming song-based album, GONZO, on which forthright musings on art, artistry and audiences are to the fore.    Beyond the new material, Gonzales vamps his way through Satieesque sketches and poundingly propulsive epics. There are showbiz yarns about his collaborations with Drake and Daft Pun...

St. Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh has seen many things over the last 900 years since it was founded in 1124 by King David I. Civil War and the Reformation may have put what was once John Knox’s parish church at the centre of history, but neither Knox or the king could have predicted Luminescence.  This unique collaboration between internationally renowned Edinburgh born saxophonist Tommy Smith and Russian émigré artist Maria Rud will see Smith and Rud improvise their responses both to each other and the building. As Smith’s solo saxophone absorbs the cathedral’s acoustic, Rud will project her live paintings onto stained glass windows on the cathedral wall. The result should make for an ever-changing fusion of sound and vision that utilises the venue’s atmosphere to make something monumental.   ‘I love it,’ says Rud.  ‘St Giles’ is very much the third performer in the show. The architecture dictates what I paint, and the acoustics as well are very special. St Giles’ t...

When Flannery O’kafka learned that the shop front space that houses Sierra Metro gallery used to be a carpet shop, something clicked with her ongoing ideas for her proposed Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition. The result is For Willy Love and Booker T; Blue babies do whatever they want. O’kafka’s show mixes photography and film installation as part of a continuum of a deeply personal exploration of the notion of family albums, offering sanctuary and safety to adoptees like her in this most playful of spaces.  ‘It began when a friend of mine sent me this film of her baby with a blanket on her head,’ O’kafka explains. ‘My friend sent me a message saying I’d love it, and how her baby had been doing this for twenty minutes.  In the film, there's a blue carpet, and then I thought, I've always wanted to carpet a space, because there's a different feeling when you walk into a space with a different surface. The carpet in my bedroom as a child was light blue. The baby in the film is ...

Gary McNair has never been shy about putting his heroes in the spotlight. This has been the case both with the Glasgow based writer and performer’s masterful solo shows, as well as works penned for others. As far as his self performed works go, McNair has paid tribute to an unholy trinity of poets of one form or another.  McGonagall’s Chronicles (Which Will Be Remembered for a Very Long Time) saw McNair hail Dundee rhymester William McGonagall, while Letters to Morrissey dissected McNair’s fandom of the mercurial former vocalist of The Smiths. More recently, Dear Billy was McNair’s loving homage to the man who is arguably Scotland’s greatest comic talent, Billy Connolly.   ‘Talk about the perfect dinner party,’ says McNair, who will be appearing on stage in Edinburgh for the first time in seven years in the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Dear Billy. This comes following a sell out tour that included dates at Glasgow’s Pavilion Theatre.   ‘Juliet Cadzow was t...

Roberta Taylor – Actress Born February 26 th , 1948; died July 6 th , 2024   Roberta Taylor, who has died aged 76, was an actress of huge presence and authority, who appeared numerous times at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s. She later became a familiar face on television, with regular roles in BBC soap EastEnders (1997-2000) and ITV police drama, The Bill (1984-2010). Latterly she had a regular role in comedy drama, Shakespeare & Hathaway; Private Investigators (2018-2022).   Taylor brought a husky voiced grandeur to her inherent common touch in all three of her major small screen roles. In EastEnders she was Irene Raymond, the mercurial matriarch romantically entangled with Gavin Richards’s Terry Raymond. Irene and Terry’s marriage ended in the Christmas Day 1999 episode, when Irene’s extra marital affair with a toy boy was discovered. In The Bill, she was Inspector Gina Gold, an iron lady who made Sun Hill police station her fiefdom. In...