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Showing posts from July, 2025

Linder – Danger Came Smiling

Ten seconds into Linder’s new performance creation, and a baby starts crying. It’s Saturday afternoon in Mount Stuart House, the gothic country pile on the Isle of Bute, and the storm outside has already provided a dramatic backdrop to  A kind of glamour about me  and  its accompanying exhibition, which sees Linder drawing from Victorian photographs of a family dressing up for some kind of Alice in Wonderland cosplay.    The title comes from Walter Scott, who wrote how ‘There is a kind of glamour about me, which sometimes makes me read dates, etc, in the proof-sheets, not as they actually do stand, but as they ought to stand.’ Such notions chime with Linder’s own mystical fantasias.   For a moment at the start of the performance, one wonders whether the infant wail is being conjured up by composer Maxwell Sterling on his electric cello at the side of the stage. Either way, it seems to fit with the maelstrom that follows as a quartet of extravagantly cl...

Ken Currie – Union Organiser (1987) and The Calton Activist (1987)

By the time Ken Currie graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1983 his work was steeped in politically driven socialist realism. The acquisition of two of Currie’s works from that time - Union Organiser (1987) and The Calton Activist (1987) – highlight the significance of such early pieces.     Currie is probably best known today for paintings such as Three Oncologists (2002), a study of three doctors at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee. More recently, Currie’s fascination with mortality and the body saw him paint Unknown Man (2019), a portrait of forensic anthropologist Dame Sue Black. Many of Currie’s works are set against dark backgrounds full of foreboding that suggests his figures are spotlit as if for a film.   Currie’s early career saw him became part of a generation of artists – Steven Campbell, Stephen Conroy, Peter Howson and Adrian Wiszniewski were others – brought together in 1985 for the New Image Glasgow exhibition at the Third Eye Centre, now the site of the C...

The Great Gatsby

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   Happy endings don’t come easy in Elizabeth Newman’s new adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s twentieth century jazz age American classic. Produced for the 100th anniversary of the novel’s publication in this co-production between Pitlochry Festival Theatre and Derby Theatre, Fitzgerald’s ennui laden yarn of vaulting ambition lays bare how money may talk, but it also corrupts.    As with the book, the story is told by Nick Carraway, here a wannabe writer observing the scene he accidentally falls into with an eye for myth making where everything and everyone becomes material. And what a gift Jay Gatsby is, a self-made nouveau riche socialite with a murky background who only wants to impress his former lover Daisy. She may have sold her soul to marriage with nasty Tom, but is tempted back into Gatsby’s social whirl with devastating results.    Sarah Brigham’s production sets out its store on Jen McGinley’s neon tinged set of s...

Fools on a Hill

Theatre 118, Glasgow Four stars   Everyone has their crosses to bear in Chris Patrick’s new play, in which a couple of believers meet in the sort of outdoor venue where decidedly unchristian things might happen in order to curry favour with the big guy upstairs. Our hapless pair aim to do this by way of hammer, nails, some handy DIY and a lot of faith to muffle the screams. When an angel finally does turn up to show them the way, rather than some beatific saviour bathed in a holy glow, this winged wonder is a grumpy naysayer who keeps his halo in his briefcase and is in permanent dispute with his boss.    The Lord moves in mysterious ways in Colin McGowan’s rapid-fire production that sees Patrick’s stream of one liners go beyond what initially looks like an extended routine into a scabrous comic look at the painful extremes of blind faith. Erin Scanlan’s naive disciple makes a kooky comic foil to Ross Flynn’s self appointed right hand man of God, played by Flynn as a...

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow Four stars   Don’t be fooled by the sound of thunder that opens this seasonal outdoor take on Shakespeare’s sauciest rom-com, already seen in several different guises over the last twenty-four years of Bard in the Botanics’ summer takeover of Glasgow’s leafiest gardens. The sound effect is likely just an in-joke on how many times rain has stopped play over the years.    This weekend, however, the gods - and more importantly, the sun - shone on Gordon Barr’s Celtic tinged affair that both sartorially and spiritually seemed to look to the early 1970s free festival scene. This was a time when assorted hippies, freaks and seekers after enlightenment jumped aboard the New Age caravan to get their collective heads together in the country.    Much of this styling is down to Carys Hobbs’ extravagant set and costume design, a magnificent multi coloured patchwork of faux regal exotica. The sound travelling from the two outdoor concerts in Gla...

Doctor Faustus

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow  Four stars    The clock is ticking for the good doctor of Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy of self-destruction, brought to life for this year’s Bard in the Botanics season, tellingly titled Magic – mayhem – and murder.  Jennifer Dick’s three-actor version was first performed in the Kibble Palace back in 2016. Her revisitation is as much a trip into the perils of fantasy wish fulfilment as it was before in an even tauter eighty minutes that sees Faustus throw himself into a tug of love between the two extremes that seem to offer him a lifeline.    Having reached the pinnacle of his profession only to lose his mojo, Faustus’s desires go way beyond the appliance of science. As if by magic, Mephistopheles appears to make him an offer he can’t refuse. Only the Good Angel hanging on his shoulder is standing in his way.   As in Dick’s original production, Faustus is embodied by a returning Adam Donaldson as a frustrated academic wh...