Coffee-Table Notes

Since 2008 or thereabouts, MuseumsEtc has published more than 100 titles that fuse photography, social history and politics in a series of beautifully bespoke editions. This month sees the publication of three new books that sum up the quietly radical ethos of the Edinburgh based but avowedly internationalist independent imprint.   Jo Spence: The Unknown Recordings compiles transcripts of tapes made by the feminist writer and photographer that reveal an unflinching and at times painful look at Spence’s life and work as a low paid working class artist. The texts are accompanied by images taken in her cramped Islington flat that make for an intimate and unsettling self-portrait of one of the late twentieth century’s most singular of artists.   The Erasure of Palestine collects more than 80 images taken over three years by photographer Ahmad Al-Bazz of what remains of the hundreds of towns and villages depopulated and destroyed during the creation and expansion of Israel from 194...

The Pavilion, Glasgow Four stars   If ever an unsung Scottish heroine was crying out to be reimagined in a high-end historical drama it is the figure of Flora MacDonald. Here, after all, was a young woman living in eighteenth century Skye who stumbled into the history books after aiding and abetting the Jacobite cause when she helped smuggle Bonnie Prince Charlie out of the reach of government troops after he and his party were trounced at Culloden. Other than a 1948 film and a more recent appearance in an episode of Outlander, alas, Flora has remained an oddly neglected figure.    Cue Belle Jones’ suitably heroic musical romp, which arrives in Glasgow this week to reclaim Flora and give her the due she deserves after opening in Inverness last weekend. Here we see Flora across the decades, with Karen Fishwick embodying the younger woman, while Annie Grace watches over Flora’s place in history with a wizened eye. What follows in Stasi Schaeffer’s big-hearted production for...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   If we all have our crosses to bear, say a prayer for Alice Lockwood in James Reilly’s new play that makes up the latest incarnation of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s lunchtime theatre season at Òran Mór. Alice is a primary school teacher in a Catholic school, or was before she was suspended for reasons yet to be made clear. In order to get to the bottom of the incident, Alice has been seconded for a session with ex GP turned secular therapist Dr. Freer. When Father Mackin shows up to hear Alice’s story, truth becomes stranger than fiction.    Alice, you see, has been seeing saints. Fifteen of them have shown up in her classroom, proffering suitably saintly advice, with St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things and souls, even helping her find a missing ear ring under the fridge. Trouble is, she is the only one who can see her new spirit guides, and the wonderland of ecclesiastical encounters is occupied her alone. Even worse, while ...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars    When senior public figures publish a warts and all memoir, it is customary for them these days to go on a high profile promotional tour. Some enjoy meeting their public so much that the stars in their eyes get the better of them, and they join the showbiz sleb set, with everything they might have previously achieved lost in the razzmatazz.    So it goes with Scottish Police Chief Commissioner Cameron Miekelson, the hapless breakout star of comic cop mock doc, Scot Squad. As brought to life by veteran comedy auteur Jack Docherty, the Chief, or Cam the Bam, as he is known disaffectionately among what he might call his online community, has penned No Apologies. This tome is based on the befuddled Commissioner’s terminally unreconstructed way of saying the wrong thing on a public platform.    As the title implies, Miekelson manages to bluster his way into an ever-deeper hole with every utterance. This shows off an...

The shock of the new stands firm in this exhibition by Simon Phipps, whose long-term documentation of Brutalist architecture has given already dramatic constructions a sense of era defining largesse from what may or may not have been a golden age of town planning.   Throughout the gallery’s two rooms, a panoramic display resembles production stills from the opening credits of a late 1960s/early 1970s TV drama about sharp suited urbanists intent on creating new worlds made out of concrete and glass. In actuality, Phipps has mapped out a space age psychogeography already predicted by Fritz Lang and mythologised by J.G. Ballard as it transformed the post Second World War built environment in monumental fashion.   Here, Phipps presents a travelogue of civic spaces designed for a brave new world beyond the tenement slums of yesterday to the clean line abstractions looking out onto tomorrow. This comes in the solid form of office blocks, car parks and cathedrals, shopping ...

Yield Strength is an engineering term that defines the amount of stress a material can take before it is permanently changed. It is also the name given to the 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art by this edition’s curator, Ellie Buttrose. Rather than impose a theme from the start, the name was chosen after the twenty-four artists who make up the showcase were selected.   With the Biennial spread across the Art Gallery of South Australia as well as the Samstag Museum of Art and Adelaide Botanic Gardens, Yield Strength seems to capture the spirit of some of Buttrose’s discoveries during her selection process.   “As I was travelling, I noticed that there was kind of a general return to artists really playing with materials,” says the Curator of Contemporary Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. “There seemed to be a lot of push and pull going on in the work, and this sense that things cannot go back to the way they were after you've pushed...

The Pavilion, Glasgow Four stars  When a country celebrates itself, it is a show of confidence and strength. When it does it too much, it’s probably time to worry. As the all singing, all dancing comic troupe delivering Scott Gilmour and Claire McKenzie’s irreverent potted history of Caledonia in song suggests from the off, however, this is Scotland. It does things differently. Most of the time, anyway.  Jemima Levick’s production begins and ends in the toilet, that centre of the universe from whence all manner of human waste is purged. It is also one of Scotland’s many great inventions. Here, this monumental porcelain pan immortalised as something more regal on Kenny Miller’s set manifests itself in the flesh by way of the lanky form of Tyler Collins. Dressed like a giant baseball capped condom in Saltire patterned pants, Collins becomes our host for the evening in a fast moving compendium of selected high and low lights from Scotland’s last 1200 years.   Like Horri...

An internationally renowned Scottish writer who bequeathed his library to the French town where he lived for more than forty years on the proviso that his former home be retained as ‘a place of inspiration, a place of life and thought’ has had his wishes overturned by the local municipality. Glasgow born poet and academic Kenneth White, who died in 2023 aged 87, also donated EURO100,000 (£86,277.81) to the  council to enable his wishes to create a Kenneth White Residence for Artists and Writers.    The Trébeurden Council in the Côtes-d'Armor department of Brittany in north western France now has plans to sell the house along with the vast collection of books it currently contains. At a meeting in January this year, Trébeurden’s mayor Bénédicte Boiron declared that “The most likely future of the house will be a sale…. A complete inventory will be carried out. Books can't stay in the house.”   This has prompted outrage amongst the international...

Òran Mór , Glasgow  Four stars    Poor Joy. Despite her name, she just can’t see the funny side of life. As a terminally single librarian, her world isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs anyway, especially not in the Emilys section, where Ms’s Bronte and Dickinson provide some kind of comfort. This would be one more thing to blame the parents for if they were around. As Joy makes clear when she goes on a date with a wannabe comedian who tests out his new material on her, however, she just doesn’t get the joke. Or any joke, for that matter. This prompts Joy’s date to suggest she desperately seek help, medical or otherwise, in order to try and find her sense of humour.    We know all this because Joy tells all in a glorious monologue by Morna Young that sees Naomi Stirrat embody our heroine in all her specky, tweedy, geeky glory. Presented as a stand-up show, Alex Fthenakis’ production charts Joy’s progress across a series of routines in a comic memoir that uses e...

The Studio, Edinburgh Four stars    Liam Hurley and Jo Mango’s musical meditation on the pains of confinement first appeared in 2024. Its presentation by some of Scotland’s leading songwriters of work created with those in the prison system about to be released showcased a poignant fusion of storytelling and folk infused chamber pop. Two years on, and Hurley and Mango’s production remains a moving and powerful construction that brings dignity and nuance to a difficult subject.    What is effectively a song cycle born out of a series of workshops with prisoners sets up a series of criss-crossing narratives knitted either side of a fairytale about a giant without a heart. This see Louis Abbot of Admiral Fallow play a workshop leader not unlike himself going into prisons, while Mango plays a mediator who writes letters for prisoners inbetween dealing with her own stresses. Kim Grant, aka Raveloe, tells the giant’s tale with an engaging performative largesse. At the show...

Edinburgh International Festival has a long history of championing the work of persecuted and oppressed nations. Major theatre, music and dance from the former Eastern bloc, the African diaspora and the First Nations of Australia and Canada rarely seen beyond their own borders have all been given a platform in Edinburgh for all the world to see.    A sense of international inclusion has always transcended those borders for EIF, ever since the first festival in 1947 was conceived to heal the wounds of war. While this is still the case, it is telling that the focus of EIF’s 2026 programme is on America. In honour of the 250 th anniversary of American independence, what is left of the home of the brave and land of the free is represented throughout a programme even more tellingly named All Rise. This is named after the opening concert by jazz musician and composer Wynton Marsalis, who will perform it with the New York based Lincoln Center Orchestra, led by Marsalis since 1991....

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars    Edinburgh has so much to answer for in David Greig’s new stage adaptation of David Nicholls’ novel, just as it has in the book itself, as well as its film and TV adaptations. The city’s influence is there at the start as Emma and Dexter drunkenly fall together on graduation day 1988 in what on Rae Smith’s revolving set looks like a mock-up of the University of Edinburgh’s Teviot House Union long before its recent makeover. It’s there as well in the Rankeillor Street student flatshare on the city’s southside where Emma lives with what turn out to be mates for life. Finally, it’s up there on Arthur’s Seat, where everything sort of begins, and where, twenty years on, and with their lives turned upside down, it will never fully end.   As with its source, Greig’s play charts Emma and Dexter’s parallel lives every St. Swithin’s Day on which they intermittently collide. This comes first as friends, then soulmates, before fate ta...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Five stars    When worlds collide it changes everything for Susan, the woman on the verge of what used to be called a nervous breakdown in Alan Ayckbourn’s mid 1980s play. The bump on the head she wakes up from at the start of the play after she stepped on a rake in an unseen piece of comedy slapstick has clearly been an accident waiting to happen for some time.    Vicar’s wife Susan is trapped in a loveless marriage with Gerald, who is more concerned with trying to write a history of his parish than he is for his wife. Their would-be rebel son Rick has just left a sect in Hemel Hempstead for a brand new wife, and Gerald’s sister Muriel thinks her long dead husband is talking to her.    Delirium sends Susan down one of Dr. Bill’s rabbit holes, where a parallel universe steps out of the bushes in the shape of a fantasy family. All drop dead gorgeous, they idolise Susan, who has reimagined herself as a best selling historical novelist....

Òran Mór , Glasgow Four stars Lydia gets more than she bargained for when she visits the local duck pond. Armed with a bottle of gin, a broken heart and a deep-set death wish, she intends chucking herself in the water and ending it all. A resident Swan has other ideas, however, and determines to show her a good time. Before long this oddest of couples are flying high on a bender in dodgy nightclubs and taking last trains to London, where Lydia wakes at dawn.    Or at least this is the story Lydia tells at closing time in this lounge bar musical fantasia by writer/director Eve Nicol and composer/lyricist Finn Anderson.  Based on a radio play by David Greig,  this latest edition of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s lunchtime theatre initiative is a bittersweet tale of everyday emotional survival.    Julia Murray is in fine voice as broken diva Lydia, with Paul McArthur somehow transforming himself from barfly to Swan with just a change of shirt. This ushers in ...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars   How might a generation of young people judge the failures of their parents to protect the environment? This is the starting point for Dawn King’s play, receiving its Scottish premiere in Joanna Bowman’s production for the Tron. King’s line of inquiry takes us into some dystopian near future, where three adults all deemed culpable in the damage done are judged by a jury of teenagers, with euthanisation the potential end result.   The trio are first world cannon fodder, whose speeches of liberal atonement for taking too many flights, working for dodgy oil companies and probably not putting the right rubbish in the recycling bin probably aren’t going to save them. Certainly not from the twelve angry adolescents tasked here to decide their fate with a mere fifteen minutes to make their mind up.    As the unnamed Defendants, Brian Ferguson, Maryam Hamidi and Pauline Goldsmith speak their monologues from designer Jessica Worrall’s state ...

The Studio, Edinburgh Three stars    What do you do when you’re told you’re not the God you say you are? In Dionysus’ case after being barred from Thebes by king Pentheus and his mother Agave in one of Euripides’ defining works, you take revenge on those that disrespected with your own gang, and hell mewnd the lot ofd them.    This is more or less the driving force for Dionysus in Euripides’ much-reimagined  piece of myth-making involving a cast of, if not thousands, then certainly a few. The last time a new version of the play graced Scottish stages was by way of David Greig’s version in 2007, when Dionysus turned up mob handed in the form of Alan Cumming and a gospel choir in tow.    Arriving in Edinburgh hot on the heels of Bard in the Botanics' production of Euripides' other greatest hit, Medea, Ewan Downie’s new take on The Bacchae for the Company of Wolves company couldn’t be more different. Written by Downie, and performed solo by him over ...

Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock Four stars   Alan Spence’s study of the shifting fortunes of a father and son in working class Glasgow was first produced at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in 1982, arriving on a wave of new Scottish voices creating poetry out of the everyday. Spence became better known as a novelist and poet, while Sailmaker went on to become a fixture and favourite of the school curriculum. It was last seen on a professional stage in 1990.    This long overdue revival by director Liz Carruthers reminds us of what a fine dramatist Spence is. His play is a masterpiece that fuses rites of passage and working class ambition with a portrait of poverty and grief in a rapidly disappearing Glasgow. At times it feels like a piece of European neo realism that in any other country would have long seen it adapted for film. As it is, this tour heroically produced by Ayr’s Gaiety Theatre and Greenock’s Beacon Art Centre can’t even get a gig in the city where it is...