Coffee-Table Notes

As you read this, Scottish theatre company Stellar Quines is in the midst of premiering Ana, a new bi-lingual play by Scots writer Clare Duffy and Quebecoius playwright Pierre-Yves Lemieux. Co-produced with French-Canadian company, Imago, Ana opened last Tuesday night at Theatre Epace Go in Montreal prior to a Scottish tour in Spring 2012. On the face of it there is nothing unusual about any of this. Scotland's theatre scene has had a long and fecund relationship with Quebecois theatre, largely through the work of Michel Tremblay. Eight of his emotionally-charged poetic parables have been translated into Scots-accented English by Martin Bowman and, up until his death, Bill Findlay. The Guid Sisters in particular fired the imaginations of audiences in both countries via an acclaimed 1992 production by outgoing Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Michael Boyd when he was in charge of Glasgow’s Tron Theatre. Almost twenty years later, The Guid Sisters is set to...

Playwright, screen-writer, author Born November 25th 1939; died November 20th 2011. When Shelagh Delaney, who has died of cancer aged seventy-two, saw Terence Rattigan's play, Variations On A Theme, she was appalled, both by its writing and by what she saw as an insensitive treatment of homosexuality. The response of this precocious Salford-born teenager was to pen A Taste of Honey, a play about a girl her own age who becomes pregnant to a black sailor on a one-night stand, then moves in to bring up the child with what would now be regarded as her gay best friend. When the play was produced in 1958 by Joan Littlewood's ground-breaking Theatre Workshop company in London's east end, its taboo-breaking in terms of its depiction of race, class and a sexuality that had only just been decriminalised in England became a hit. Delaney was just eighteen. The play transferred to the West End, then Broadway. In 1961, Tony Richardson's film of the play that cast Rita...

When Dominic Hill took up his post as artistic director of the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow following his departure from Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre, big things were expected from one of Scotland's few directors who is capable of working on a truly epic scale. The announcement today of his first full season of work as exclusively revealed by The Herald confirms both the sense of expectation Hill's appointment shook up, and the scale of his own ambitions for the Citz. Even by themselves, the presence of a play by Pinter, a Beckett double bill and a Shakespeare are enough cause for celebration. The fact that, not just King Lear, but both Pinter's mid-period ménage a trois, Betrayal, and Beckett's solo miniatures, Krapp's Last Tape and the rarely performed Footfalls, will be directed by Hill on the theatre's main stage rather than its two studio spaces, says much about Hill's thinking. Betrayal, Krapp's Last Tape and Footfalls may have sma...

Liquid Room, Edinburgh 4 stars “Can you ever really escape your past?” Wire's glengarry-sporting bassist Graham Lewis asks as the band return for their first encore of a louder, punkier and less polite set than when they visited Edinburgh in February. The answer to such a philosophical enquiry is probably no, even if vocalist and guitarist Colin Newman has spent much of the set peering over professorial specs reading lyrics from a twenty-first century ipad which he later morphs into a keyboard. Material from this year's Red Barked Tree album and some older fare is played at a volume coruscating enough to compensate for the band's no-nonsense lack of chat. Given their art school roots, it's surprising how uncompromisingly basic a set-up Wire keep. Where their peers might theatricalise or recreate an album's studio embellishments with orchestral add-ons or such like, Wire strip everything back. There is nothing onstage that isn't black and white ot...

Tramway, Glasgow 4 stars The knives are out at the start of David Shrigley, David Fennessy and Magnetic North director Nicholas Bone's 'sort of opera'. This shouldn't, however, signal any alarm bells in terms of what follows. Because, for all the out and out ridiculousness of Pass The Spoon, Shrigley's TV cooking show-based yarn is an irresistibly irreverent riot of surreally grotesque humour and avant-garde music that waves a refreshing two fingers at serious theatrical conventions even as it takes them to the max. Our hosts for the evening are June Spoon and Phillip Fork, a fawningly supercilious Bleakly and Chiles of the Ready, Steady, Cook set. With rictus grins fixed on an invisible autocue, Pauline Knowles' June and Stewart Cairns' Phil introduce us to a world where smiley-faced puppet vegetables are auditioned to dive into the soup, Gavin Mitchell's alcoholic Mr Egg is on the verge of cracking up, Martin McCormick's pompous banana attempt...

In Scottish Opera's top floor rehearsal room, all talk is of appendages. The phallic attachment in question is for Mr Granules, a grotesque dinner guest in  Pass The Spoon , visual artist David Shrigley and composer David Fennessy's 'sort of opera' for director Nicholas Bone's Magnetic North company. Based around an absurd idea of a daytime TV cookery show,  Pass The Spoon  features characters that include a life-size banana and an alcoholic, manic depressive, mood-swinging giant egg. Actor Gavin Mitchell has already donned a foam-based egg costume for his turn as Mr Egg. This provoked much debate about whether or not the foam should have holes for arms. With Mitchell's hands flapping about in a ridiculously limited circumference to express Mr Egg's full emotional range, Humpty Dumpty he most certainly isn't. If the egg does have arms, Shrigley points out, then every movement will pull its flexible but none too t...

October 28 2011-January 8 2012 4 stars Onscreen in black and white, a man is attempting to stand a log upright of its own volition. Time and again the man methodically lifts the log off the ground, moving it from horizontal to vertical before it topples as though felled with some invisible axe. For a second it looks like it’s there, only for it to go down with a silent thump. It’s a Sisyphean task, and, as the film’s jump-cuts suggest, one that took an age. Then, finally, in what’s become an unpredictably prolonged performance, the log is up there, standing tall, proud and monumental. So what does the guy do but only go and knock it over some more. ‘Movie’ goes some way to explaining the high-tension methodology of the late Bill Bollinger, the aeronautical engineer turned 1960s New York contemporary of Bruce Nauman, Robert Ryman, Eva Hesse and co. Unlike them, Bollinger died in obscurity in 1988, aged not yet fifty. This lovingly sourced retrospective, instigated by the...