Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   Everything is up in the air for Jay and Jamie, the two strangers living parallel lives in Visible Fictions’ ingenious meditation on love, luck and the crash landings of everyday life. Jay is one of life’s natural high flyers, seemingly breezing through life unscarred. Jamie, on the other hand, has stumbled her way through her days with a glass is half empty attitude and an aptitude for disaster. As the pair find themselves sat next to each other on a doomed international flight, their lives flash before the audience’s eyes as their very different fortunes are revealed.    While all this would be interesting enough by itself in a more conventional production, director Douglas Irvine and company lift things into the stratosphere. This is done by having actors Zoe Hunter and Martin McCormick not just give voice to Jamie and Jay, but by bringing the entire scenario to life from behind a table using model planes, Barbie dolls and toy animals.    Hunter and

Garry Robson – Actor, writer, director   Born March 3rd 1952; died July 26th 2024     Garry Robson, who has died aged 72, was a force of nature. This was the case whether as actor, playwright or director, all of which he excelled in with an energy, humour and heart that drove everything he did. While his disability was at the heart of Robson’s art, he transcended any notions of being patronised or ghettoised so his mercurial talent could shine through on its own terms. He did this in his own plays, which included The Irish Giant (2003), for Birds of Paradise; and the Ian Dury inspired Raspberry (2008), initially at Oran Mor in Glasgow, then at the Tron Theatre and on tour.Like Robson, Dury had contracted polio, and became a hero to Robson.    As an actor, Robson worked with key disabled theatre companies such as Graeae, with whom he appeared in Ian Dury based musical, Reasons to be Cheerful (2012), and was in The Who’s Tommy for Ramps on the Moon. Robson also worked in mainstream comme

Anya Gallaccio may not have any memory of Paisley, where she was born, but the Turner Prize nominated artist’s new installation currently gracing the Renfrewshire mecca’s High Street is a homecoming of sorts in other ways. Stroke, after all, is the latest iteration of a work first seen in Scotland in 2014 at Jupiter Artland, the sculpture park on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where Gallaccio has a permanent work, The light pours out of me (2012), in situ. As before with Stroke, Gallaccio has painted the walls of a room in chocolate, leaving an ever-changing sensory feast in its wake.   In Paisley, this has seen Gallaccio take over a disused shop, transforming it into an elegant looking chocolaty paradise designed to entice passers by into its sweetly scented interior. Sitting between a branch of WH Smith and Tech Doctor, and with signs for a long closed clothing alterations emporium still in the windows above, Stroke’s ornately painted exterior and flower adorned window is a classy looki

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   Working the midnight shift at the Samaritans is quite an eye opener for Karen, the eighteen-year-old volunteer and would be literary superstar in Harry Mould’s debut play. It’s sometime in the late 1970s, Margaret Thatcher is on the radio, the office is a riot of Formica and multi coloured carpet tiles, and dungarees are de rigueur in Natalie Fern’s period design work. The Samaritans, meanwhile, are equally on trend with the so-called permissive society. The Brenda Line of the play’s title is a code for callers who want to talk dirty rather than offload their troubles in a more conventional manner.    Tonight’s Brenda is Anne, who takes all this in her stride as Karen takes the moral high ground, accusing Anne of all sorts of betrayals to the feminist cause she espouses, with little experience of life on the frontline of adulthood. Anne and Karen may be ages apart, but beyond the ethical ambiguities regarding the Samaritans instigating The Brenda

As one of Edinburgh’s original punk inspired bands, Fire Engines may not have been around for long, but the band’s urgent angular howl left its mark. Over the band’s breathless eighteen-month lifespan between 1980 and 1981, the mercurial teenage quartet of Davy Henderson (vocals/guitar), Murray Slade (guitar), Graham Main (bass) and Russell Burn (drums) released a mere three singles and a mini album before imploding.   These can be heard on ‘chrome dawns’, a double vinyl and/or 2CD compilation that brings together all of Fire Engines studio releases. This opens with the band’s frenetic debut single, ‘Get Up and Use Me’ / ‘Everything’s Roses’, released on manager Angus Groovy’s Codex Communications label.  This is followed by high concept mini opus, ‘Lubricate Your Living Room’, and subsequent singles, ‘Candyskin’ / ‘Meat Whiplash’, and the band’s swansong, Big Gold Dream. All of these appeared on Bob Last and Hilary Morrison’s post Fast Product imprint, Pop; Aural.    Fire Engines’ sma

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars As Ian Rankin’s ever expanding Inspector Rebus universe runs on apace, after twenty-four novels, with a twenty-fifth due any day now, and with the latest TV adaptation by Gregory Burke still fresh, the toughest case to crack for Rankin and his unreconstructed hero so far has been theatre.   Following Rona Munro’s adaptation of a new Rebus story in 2018 with Long Shadows, this latest effort sees Rankin collaborate with playwright Simon Reade on an inspired wheeze that has a whole lot of fun with classic murder mystery fare. In Loveday Ingram’s production originally seen at Cambridge Arts Theatre, Rebus moves upmarket to an Edinburgh New Town dinner party where money talks the loudest, however it was acquired.   Gray O’Brien’s louche Rebus is the unexpected plus one of Abigail Thaw’s lawyer Stephanie Jeffries at a murder mystery night hosted by Teresa Banham’s Harriet and her second husband Paul, played with pukka largesse by Neil McKinven. Also at

Fire Engines were one of Edinburgh’s most influential post punk bands. As a definitive compilation, chrome dawns, is released, the Herald presents an exclusive extract from Neil Cooper’s accompanying essay, in which the group’s Davy Henderson talks about the band’s early days.     “ Good evening. We’re from the 20 th  century…”   The life of Fire Engines as a band might have been over before it had barely begun, but the all too brief existence of Edinburgh’s punk sired provocateurs blazed with incident and colour. ‘Boredom or Fire Engines – You Cannot Have Both’ went the legend. The small and imperfectly formed back catalogue they left in their wake sounded like they had crawled out of a cellar and come blinking into the inner city light in a parallel universe somewhere between Leith Walk and C.B.G.B. Boredom wasn’t an option.   Fire Engines were in the thick of Edinburgh’s fertile post punk scene. Formed by the teenage quartet of vocalist and guitarist Davy Henderson, guitarist Murray

As its name implies, Sonica is about rocking worlds. Over eleven days in September, the Glasgow based Cryptic company’s eighth edition of its festival ‘for curious minds and restless spirits’ mixes up a smorgasbord of international audio-visual artworks from Egypt, Ukraine, Quebec and more. These are seen and heard alongside a plethora of homegrown fare from the likes of the Scottish Ensemble, the RSNO, composer Michael Begg and more, infiltrating the city across multiple venues great and small. Sonica sets out its store from the start with Nati Infiniti, the Scottish premiere of a new work at Tramway by Allesandro Cortini of Nine Inch Nails. Other highlights include Songs for a Passerby, Celine Daeman’s Venice Film Festival Award-winning VR opera for a sole headset wearer; a cyborg pop concert of the future from Danish ensemble, NEKO3 and German multimedia composer Alexander Schubert.   Scottish and Scotland based artists in the programme include the world premiere of Ela Orleans’ La

Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me was the final single to be released by The Smiths, the mercurial Manchester band who for a certain breed of sensitive young men helped define life in the 1980s. One of these was Ben Harrison, who went on to become the co artistic director of the Edinburgh based Grid Iron Theatre Company. Growing up in a small English town, for Harrison, the Smiths, and Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me in particular, became a soundtrack to his life.   Harrison was a hopelessly romantic middle class teen who undertook a very quiet rebellion against his background by way of the trappings of Cold War communism and radical chic. He also fell for the Smiths just as he fell for girls at bus stops and older women at the local am-dram group who offered some kind of salvation in a humdrum town.   It should come as no surprise, then, that Harrison has co-opted the title of the Smiths swan song for his autobiographical look back at the decade in which he came of

Summerhall Four stars    OCD is the great misunderstood illness, with sufferers misdiagnosed and treated as a joke by many who should no better. Charlotte Anne-Tilley’s new play goes some way to redress the balance by way of Lucy and Claire, two women generations apart, but who go through very similar things.    Lucy is in the last stages of labour, with the prospect of looking after another human blighted by the fact that she’s falling apart. Twenty-five years on, Claire is about to drop out of art school after being unable to cope with panic attacks.    Anne-Tilley’s set up dovetails between Lucy and Claire’s parallel lives with a fluidity that sees Anne-Tilley as Claire and fellow performer Maddy Banks as Lucy double up in Ed White’s production as assorted mothers, grandmothers and lecturers. On one level these are peripheral characters, but in Lucy and Claire’s minds they become obstacles to living free of anxiety.    What follows is both moving and enlightening in a play that high

C alto Four stars   Growing up in Belfast during the 1970s, when the Troubles were at their height, was a traumatic time for Ruairi Conaghan.  Especially when his uncle, a judge, was assassinated on his doorstep by gunmen. By the time of the 1984 Brighton bombing, when a device exploded in the hotel then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was staying in during the Conservative Party conference; Conaghan was set on escaping for an actor’s life in London.   When he is asked to play the man responsible for the bombing in a brand new play that, unlike the victims of violence, might have another life, the experience of meeting him opens up a long buried wound for Conaghan. What follows in Patrick O’Kane’s production is part memoir, part exorcism, as Conaghan squares up to his own past and a brush with near death in a fearless performance that doesn’t flinch from the damage done. As Conaghan comes to terms with old ghosts, his powerful and deeply personal purging reveals a matter of life and d

Summerhall Four stars   Bert and Nasi have something to tell us, and they want to make it as clear and simple as possible. This is why this increasingly manic double act take a moment at the start of their new show to explain to the audience exactly what they’re about to do. Which is essentially an extended restaurant routine between a waiter and a customer, with the waiter keeping on pouring into the customer’s wine glass even though it is overflowing. As they do so, alas, the duo manages to tie themselves in semantic knots before they proceed.    Once they get started, they do exactly what they promised with umpteen variations on a theme. Under the directorial guidance of Forced Entertainment’s Tim Etchells, Bert and Nasi become a fantastical living cartoon, taking the everyday absurdities of human behaviour to the limit.    The whirlwind of repetitive action is a hypnotic glimpse into Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas’ Sisyphean Groundhog Day style construction, which stays wilfully s

Summerhall 4 stars   There’s a riot going on from the start in Apphia Campbell’s dynamic dissection of parallel times, from the 1960s and 1970s civil rights movement to the dawn of Black Lives Matter. These are seen through the eyes of Black Panther on the run Assata Shakur, on the one hand, and a female student, Ambrosia, who is starting college forty years later.    Both women find themselves caught in the state sanctioned crossfire of civil unrest. With Assata on the frontline from the start, Ambrosia’s rude awakening comes by way of the same forces that closed ranks following the fatal shooting of black teenager Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.   Assata and Ambrosia are brought to life with a sense of righteous anger in Caitlin Skinner’s production, with Campbell herself as Assata and Tinashe Warikandwa as Ambrosia. The play’s dramatic fusion of words, music and recorded voices shows how history can repeat itself while laying down a gauntlet for chan

Edinburgh Playhouse Five stars   When Martyn Bennett started performing his radical fusion of Scottish traditional music and contemporary beats and samples around underground Edinburgh clubs in the mid 1990s, little did he know where it would end up. Almost two decades since Bennett’s untimely passing, and just shy of ten years since Greg Lawson pulled together an orchestral rendition of Bennett’s final album, GRIT, and the more than eighty strong Lawson led orchestra is still going strong as Bennett’s legacy burls on.    This makes for an epic way to end the 2024 Edinburgh International Festival in a set that builds on Bennett’s already expansive originals to become a musical expression of a global village.   Vocal lead comes from Fiona Hunter and Karen Matheson, with Hunter setting a rousing tone on the opening take on Ewan MacColl’s ‘Move’. This continues with the theatrical fun of ‘Aye?’, jazz saxophone on ‘Wedding’/’Swallowtail’, and a choir and strings as big as a western theme o