Coffee-Table Notes

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars It is more than 30 years since Willy Russell's Thatcher-era two-hander of working-class aspiration first appeared. But with higher education once again becoming the preserve of a privileged elite, there's a contemporary poignancy to what is essentially a platonic rom-com.   Tamara Harvey's touring production, co-produced by the Menier Chocolate Factory and Theatre Royal Bath, nails its Scouse colours to the mast from the off by using orchestral instrumental versions of Beatles songs as pre-show music. When pop got ideas above its station in this way and went classical, the legion of mop-topped autodidacts that came out of the closet were clearly kin of Russell's Rita. Claire Sweeney is almost too perfectly cast as the gobby hairdresser who breezes into the book-lined study of clapped-out Open University lecturer Frank, played with warm-hearted diffidence by Matthew Kelly. As they move through a succession of 1980s cosy cardies, there...

Gerard Murphy is looking back. As the Irish actor returns to the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow for the first time in fourteen years to appear in Samuel Beckett's solo play, Krapp's Last Tape, it's an all too appropriate thing to be doing. Krapp, after all focuses on an old man rewinding his past via reels of tapes on which he's charted his hopes, ambitions and subsequent disappointments ever since he was a young man. Not that Murphy had much in the way of failure during his time at the Citz, which began an intense three years in 1974, and continued intermittently until 1998, towards the end of what is now regarded as the theatre's golden era under the three-way artistic directorship of Giles Havergal, Robert David MacDonald and Philip Prowse. With Krapp forming part of a double bill with another Beckett miniature, Footfalls, Murphy returns to the Citz at the end of incoming director Dominic Hill's first season, which has tempted other prodigals su...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 4stars Love, death and everything inbetween fire this inspired double bill by director Ramin Gray's invigorated ATC company, who tour Sarah Kane's free-associative meditation on the painful highs and lows of an obsessive and possibly self-destructive amour to the theatre it was first seen in 1998. That was in a production by future National Theatre of Scotland director Vicky Featherstone. Played fourteen years on in tandem with Cazimir Liske's translation of Russian writer Ivan Viripaev's equally serious dissection of how romance can be the greatest of deceivers, the plays are fascinatingly revealed as mutual flipsides of the same coin. The same four actors line up side by side in each to lay bare things that are more often left unsaid. In Crave, they stand on a platform in pyjamas and nighties, as if what comes out of their mouths over the next forty minutes is some kind of bedtime nightmare. In Illusions, they sit on chair...

Pilrig St Paul's Church, Edinburgh Saturday May 19 th 2012 Anyone au fait with Sacred Music, BBC 4's two-series trawl through the history of choral worship, from plainchant to polyphony and beyond, will be as versed in the integral relationship between music and church architecture as they are with presenter Simon Russell-Beale's penchant for gazing earnestly into the middle distance while sporting regulation arts mandarin baggy black suits or else peering longingly at Harry Christophers' media-friendly choir, The Sixteen, perform especially for him. Leith Walk on an all-Edinburgh Scottish Cup Final Day a couple of hours after Hibs are unceremoniously gubbed by Hearts might seem a somewhat apposite locale for such ruminations to be put into spectacular practice. As a curtain-raiser to what is Quebecois electronicist Tim Hecker's second ever Scots date, however, witnessing such radically different brethrens gathered on either side of the street looks ...

Dundee Contemporary Arts April 7th-June 10th 2012 4 stars It makes sense that the site of DCA used to be Scott Myles’ playground. Back then he was a skater-boy and it was a bricks-and-mortar garage reimagined as the sort of makeshift skate-park for local heroes and future high-flyers which under the Scottish Government’s recently imposed changes to public entertainment licensing laws would today be illegal. For his first major UK solo show, the Dundee born and trained artist has reclaimed the building’s interior with an even more playful flourish in DCA’s latest world-turned-upside-down subversions of everyday work, rest and play. Mass production consumables are reinvented for some half-remembered dreamscape as retro Habitat reproductions are painted black and stuck to the first gallery wall, while a swivel-seat skeleton on a chat show platform has a giant prism where its seat should be. ‘ STABILA (Black and Blue)' is a series of twenty-four screen-printed im...

The Modern Institute, April 20th-June 2nd 2012 3 stars ‘I will now call to mind our past foulness and the carnal corruptions of my soul’ goes one missive culled from the now opened pages of almost a hundred notebooks left behind by the Brooklyn-born painter and sculptor, which came to light following his death in 1988. Given the sculptures and installations that formed the body of much of his work from the 1960s Technological Reliquaries series onwards, where one might expect blueprints for the environments shown at this year’s Thek retrospective at the Whitney in New York, one is hit instead with something infinitely more personal. Such a panoply of ripped-up autobiographical scraps and pencilled-in dreamscapes lays bare a candid close-up into one man's self-reflexive, self-absorbed but self-aware quest towards a higher state of being. Thek's ruminations on art, sex and spirituality are Me-Generation pre-cursors to a similarly confessional Zine and blog cultur...

When legendary Radio 1 DJ John Peel died suddenly in 2004, it left a musical and cultural void that has never quite been filled. As several generations of indie-kids weaned on groundbreaking obscurities ranging from DIY post-punk to dub reggae, techno and experimental noise went into, mourning, it became increasingly apparent just how much Peel changed the landscape of popular culture forever. One of those who knew this already was writer and some-time performance poet John Osborne, whose very personal one man homage, John Peel's Shed, was one of the most heartfelt mini hits of last year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Inspired in part by Osborne's book, Radio Head: Up and Down the Dial of British Radio, which charted his experience listening to a different radio station every day, John Peel's Shed was an appropriately lo-fi geek's-eye view of a record-buying subculture which has since gone viral. It's only fitting, then, that Osborne's current ...