Coffee-Table Notes

Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh until March 26th 3 stars There’s a sense of magnificent isolation as you go walkabout in New Zealand born Craig Murray-Orr’s first show for a decade, that says much about self-imposed exile in the wilderness. Both Henry David Thoreau’s novel ‘Walden’ and the sprawl of Jack Kerouac’s ‘Big Sur’ spring to mind as you pace around the twenty small landscape paintings that map out some barren topography of the soul, their three-dimensional splodges of purple-grey and orange-green hues lighting up fifty-seven varieties of desolate science-fiction landscape that silently hum with the voices of the ancients. Only the clouds or streams of black shooting through the night sky suggest any kind of movement beyond the raging calm below. Three oversize Victorian rifles carved from rich mahogany guard both floors, their edges smoothed into undulating curves, so even the spaces where the triggers would be become circular voids resembling standing stones in miniature. The larg...

Kings Theatre, Edinburgh  4 stars  Life and art are pretty much inseparable in Terrence McNally’s epic homage to Maria Callas, who, as the grandest of operatic divas, put herself through the emotional wringer enough both onstage and off to become a pop art icon. Using the neat conceit of Callas giving a public masterclass to a trio of students at New York’s great Juilliard School in New York in 1972, McNally allows the real life audience to get up close and personal to a surprisingly playful if past her best and unsentimentally caustic Callas.  In this way, Callas is allowed to indulge in her own personal reveries to lay bare the agonies of what made her such a great artist. Any production of McNally’s play requires a lead actress as formidable as it’s subject to make it live, and Jonathan Church’s puts a larger than life Stephanie Beacham in the frame to give what may well be the performance of her life. As she puts the succession of wannabes through their ...

Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh Tuesday February 9th 4 stars The young lady ID’d on the door says much about the Wire demographic. Especially as she’s escorted by her mum and dad. The original art school punks may be well into their third decade, but their influence on the last couple of generations of Brit-pop artrockers is more obvious than ever. Now reduced to a core trio of donnish guitarist Colin Newman, Glengarry sporting bassist Graham Lewis and whippet-thin drummer Robert Grey following avant-boffin Bruce Gilbert’s departure, and with live sound fleshed out by touring guitarist Matt Simms, Wire’s quintessentially English marriage of plummy opacity and jangular guitars sounds leaner, more urgent, yet somewhat appositely more conventional than ever, even if no-one ever sounded like this before them. Material from the recently released ‘Red Barked Tree’ album fits seamlessly with the band’s back catalogue, with a magnificent ‘Kidney Bingos’ giving way to the swearily caustic ‘Please T...

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but when a playwright, a theatre director and a folk song archivist walk into a bar, funny things can happen. Given that the playwright is the ever prolific and perennially inquisitive David Greig and the director is Wils Wilson, who last worked with Greig on children’s play, Gobbo, you can see how things might end up that way. Throw into the mix lecturer in Scottish Studies Dr Valentina Bold, and the end result is the extravagantly titled concoction, The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, which sees the National Theatre of Scotland go off-site for a lock-in in an assortment of hostelries, hafs and other places you might fall in with a bad crowd. “The over-riding principle of Gobbo was to try and imagine doing a show for children that you could take anywhere,” explains Greig, “where they would feel completely at home in, and where you could transform things into an amazing story full of adventure, and we had a laugh doing that. Then we decided w...

When Stephanie Beacham steps onto the stage of Edinburgh’s King’s Theatre tonight, she will be following in the footsteps of one of the most iconic divas ever. As Maria Callas, Beacham may not sing, nor even get to recreate the celebrated soprano’s famous 1957 turn in Bellini’s La Sonnambula at the King’s, but as the centre of American writer Terence McNally’s play, Master Class, Beacham will get to utter more words than she would in any work by Shakespeare. If you add them all up – and Beacham has - that’s ten thousand, four hundred and eighty-six, to be precise, giving her a truly up close and personal insight into an iconic presence.  “I feel I know her inside and out,” Beacham says of Callas. “There’s something about her artistic passion. Playing the unbearable diva is no problem at all for me, but there is also a soft underbelly underneath. The harder the exterior, the softer the centre, I find. All the women I’ve played have been terrible bitches, but I’ve always...

If you fancy a wet weekend at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, you could do worse than dive into Wet Sounds, a truly immersive experience that involves listening to sound art underwater, where sound travels four and a half times faster than on terra firma. The last time Wet Sounds floated into view was in Leith Baths in Edinburgh, where a none-stop electronic pulse added momentum as well as meditation to the daily work-out. This time out, curator Joel Cahan has enlisted the skills of site-specific specialist Eric La Casa and electro-acoustic composer Adrian Moore to add a different element to Wet Sounds, which this session uses two different sound-systems, one above water, the other below. “The event on Sunday will be quite different to the one on the Saturday,” Cahen points out. “The one on Saturday will be pretty similar to what we did in Edinburgh, but on Sunday with Eric and Adrian we’re going to have the whole place lit up differently, so that becomes part of the experience as w...

One thing the annual New Territories festival has never done is stand still. This year, the longstanding National Review of Live Art may have vanished, but the newly branded This Is Performance Art strand has risen from its ashes with an ambitious programme of performances, workshops, residencies and a Winter School, all designed to break the frame of what constitutes art with a set of ever-changing radical strategies. Central to all this activity is Black Market International, the long-standing troupe of individual artists who combine resources to present a series of durational performances that can last anything between two and ten hours. A lynch-pin of BMI, and indeed New Territories, is Perthshire-born Alastair MacLennan, who for the best part of half a century has pushed both himself and his work to the limits of endurance. This year, the BMI epic will take place at the SWG3 artspace, where anything and nothing may or may not happen. “It has to do with a German word, Begegnung,” M...