Coffee-Table Notes

When Raydale Dower visited the old Bon Accord Baths in Aberdeen, the memories came flooding back. Having grown up in nearby Ferryhill, the artist and composer had visited what is now one of the last surviving Art Deco pools in the UK as a child with his mum and grandmother. When he was shown one of the cubicles where people living nearby who didn’t have baths of their own came to wash, he suddenly recalled being there when he was three years old.  “I was standing in this room with a bath and this eight foot high wall, “Dower remembers, “and the person showing me round was laughing, saying how you had to turn the hot water on from outside. I suddenly remembered this whole setup as a young person, wondering why I was having a bath in a public place. Then you've got this backdrop of the noise of a swimming pool, with this cacophony of echo and people running around. It was all really vivid, and I honestly felt like I was in the exact same cubicle.”   Dower has channelled this int...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars   Survival is everything for Ella in German writer Manfred Karge’s play, making a prodigal’s return to Edinburgh with its original English language production’s creators after almost forty years. Don’t mistake this for a sentimental journey, mind, whatever the music in Stephen Unwin’s production might say to the contrary. For Unwin, the play’s late translator Anthony Vivis, designer Bunny Christie and especially its star Tilda Swinton, Man to Man – originally Jacke wie Hose – is an abstract confessional that teeters on the edge of mania. The result is something akin to Samuel Beckett’s tragicomic studies of aloneness brought to life by a shape shifting Mother Courage locked in the solitary confinement of her living room.    Back in 1930s Germany, Ella’s response to the death of her crane driver husband Max is to become him. As grief pushes her to extremes, Ella also needs a living wage to get by. Pulling on Max’s tackety boots a...