Coffee-Table Notes

A teenage critic with ambitions for a career in theatre has won this year’s Wee Cherub award for her review of an ambitious sonic artwork at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. 16-year-old Holy Rood High School Olivia Campanile submitted her review of Night Walk for Edinburgh as part of the annual Herald Young Critics scheme, run in partnership between the Herald and EIF. As part of the initiative, high school students are tasked to write reviews of EIF shows they’ve seen after taking part in a workshop led by one of this newspaper’s arts writing team. The best of these were selected for publication, with Campanile judged as outright winner. “I’m really pleased,” said Campanile after being presented with her award yesterday. “I really enjoyed seeing the work. I see a lot of theatre, because I love theatre, but this was quite different to anything I’d seen before, so it’s really nice getting the recognition. Writing it was initially quite hard, but once I managed to get t...

It wasn’t the first time David Hayman had been inside HMP Barlinnie. In truth, the veteran actor and director’s appearance this week in the former home of convicted murderer turned sculptor Jimmy Boyle to give a bravura solo turn in his friend and colleague Rony Bridges play, Six and a Tanner, makes him something of an old lag. In the 1980s when Hayman was at the helm of left-wing theatre company, 7:84, he would frequently host rehearsals of forthcoming works before inmates. Hayman’s associations go back even further, to the days of Barlinnie’s controversial special unit, which enabled Boyle and other offenders the resources to become artists under a progressively enlightened regime. Hayman played Boyle in the 1981 STV drama, A Sense of Freedom, based on Boyle’s autobiography. Hayman also directed Silent Scream, a 1990 feature film starring Ian Glen as Larry Winters, another Special Unit inmate who died of an overdose of barbiturates in the institution. Neither film was made at Barlinn...