Coffee-Table Notes

Gareth Nicholls didn't realise how competitive the world of parenthood could be until he had a child of his own. A year or so on, and taking the reins at various collective activities with assorted parent/baby combos, he has witnessed first hand how easy it is for a keeping up with the Jones' type atmosphere to creep in to everyday affairs. This experience has been something the Glasgow-based theatre director has been able to channel into his forthcoming Tron Theatre production of God of Carnage, French writer Yasmina Reza's excoriatingly funny play about how two sets of parents deal with an altercation between their children at the local park. While Nicholls himself hasn't had recourse to indulge in some of the extreme behaviour the four characters in Reza's play embark on, he nevertheless recognises how civilised discourse's descent into brattish antagonism relates to a much bigger malaise. “It's a play that's really about asking how communities

If ever there was an artist you'd least expect to burst into a massed chorus of sha-la-las, it’s Alasdair Roberts. Here, after all, is a singer, song-writer and musician steeped in a Scottish folk tradition forged by his Callendar roots even as he found a kindred spirit in Will Oldham's similarly doleful backwoods laments. Under the name of Appendix Out, Roberts played the indie circuit with an ever changing line-up, and proved himself way ahead of the curve in terms of the embrace of traditional music which has since permeated more mainstream culture. As the eight albums and other sundry releases under his own name have proved, however, Roberts is no tweed-sporting faux-folk flunky. Rather, his explorations and reconstructions of the arcane have sounded thrillingly contemporary, even as they looked to a more spectral past. Roberts' Oldham-produced 2005 No Earthly Man album may have been a collection of ancient murder ballads, but at times it seemed to channel the Velvet

Dundee Rep Four stars A woman dressed in black plays the flute as she walks mournfully onto a dust covered stage flanked by rows of ash cans. At its centre, a man is elevated up from a life-size hole in the ground and rises from the grave he arguably made for himself. This isn't the most obvious opening for Arthur Miller's Pulitzer Prize winning 1949 treatise on how money can literally suck the life out of those barely scraping by. Rather than merely replicate the play's inherent naturalism, Joe Douglas' production rummages deep within the psyche of the play's tormented protagonist Willy Loman to revitalises its tragedy in an even more devastating fashion. When not in a scene, the nine-strong cast pick out low-end notes on one of two pianos that sit either side of the stage. In the play's key flashback scenes, dialogue is spoken into microphones as if echoes from the ghosts of a past that haunts Willy, as his successful brother Ben and the woman in the ho

Stills Gallery, Edinburgh until April 9 th Four stars Gazing across the two walls that house more than five hundred photographs by Glasgow photographer Alan Dimmick is akin to skimming through a personal scrap book of a city's entire culture. Witnessed first hand, Dimmick's lens moved through its underground that defined it as its habitués went on to change that city's landscape forever. As Dimmick's archive moves through four decades of gatherings and gigs, art openings happenings and hang-outs, his studiedly black and white images capture a world off-guard and in motion, as his subjects pose for all they're worth, recognising the ridiculousness of the situation as they go. Presented in defiantly slap-dash-but-not-really non-chronological order, here are several generations coming together to party, play, protest and perform both offstage and on as they make spectacles of themselves en route to making a scene. The images come in all shapes and sizes, and ar

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Playing war in the school playground is one thing in Owen Sheers' play, first produced in 2015 and now on a UK tour of duty in John Retallack and George Mann's revival of their Bristol Old Vic production. Being on the front-line of Afghanistan is quite another for the teenage boys who people become men too soon, especially with everything that comes after. This is clear from the opening monologue spoken by Arthur, a lanky Bristol adolescent who, as played by Dan Krikler, becomes a dynamic narrator of his own destiny as well as his best mates. Standing tall while he regales the audience with the sort of free-wheeling verse born of the club culture he and his pals Taff and Hads let off steam in, he is surrounded by both them and the mother, wife and girlfriend they variously left behind. The shapes they throw in unison are a well choreographed routine, but when they speak, we see what they have lost as well. On one level this is

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Wednesday February 22 nd The atmosphere is already doing a fairly good impression of a 1980s gay super-club before Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe enter the stage for the Edinburgh leg of Pet Shop Boys' stadium sized Super tour on the back of last year's day-glo inclined album of the same name. The CC Blooms friendly techno is playing and projections are throwing Mod-u-like shapes onto what looks like a pair of upended and oversize circular Formica tables that sit either side of theatre designer Es Devlin's space age stage design. When Tennant and Lowe are seen, it is strapped to the other side of the tables as they're wheeled around in a big reveal that makes for the grandest of entrances. A suited and be-shaded Tennant appears to be crowned with metallic garlands that give him the impression of a science-fiction Caesar, while Lowe's entire head is encased in what looks like a small alien planet. The effect is imperious, abstract and

In the jungle, the mighty jungle, something is stirring. Or at least it is in the world of Usurper, the Edinburgh-based duo of Malcy Duff and Ali Robertson, whose sonic missives over the last decade have become increasingly-expansive exercises in performance that go beyond notions of sound art. Through a series of sketches, routines and goof-offs, all punctuated by noises off made by a bucket-load of acquired junk, Usurper's modus operandi falls somewhere between Samuel Beckett, The Goons and Tex Avery by way of John Hurt's experimental sound designer in Jerzy Skolimowski's neglected 1978 film, The Shout. Following a busy year of monthly CDr releases on their own Giant Tank label, Usurper's cup runneth over, even more on this forty-five minute cassette released on the Sheffield-based Singing Knives label. A sequel of sorts to their 2012 Cdr, The Big Four , which referenced assorted quartets of personality traits, thrash metal bands and coincidence, this follow-up p