Coffee-Table Notes

Citrus Club, Edinburgh, Friday February 3rd 2012 2 stars When eighties tribute band support act Party Fears Three dedicate their bombastically unsubtle cover of David Bowie's Ashes To Ashes to Steve Strange, who appeared in the song's video as part of the Bowie-influenced New Romantic scene of flamboyantly apparelled clothes horses and dressing-up box dandies, it was almost an accidental epitaph for what followed. Because when the somewhat fragile-looking original Blitz-kid and face of New Romo supergroup Visage finally takes the stage with a perma-smiling bottle-blonde co-vocalist beside him for his first ever Scottish show, he nearly comes a cropper after a dodgy microphone serves him the double indignity of cutting out on the opening number before giving him an electric shock as he tries to fix it. Mind you, starting off what back in the actual 1980s was called a club PA – a somewhat lonely looking artist running through a couple of hits to a backing track pl...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars A week before Valentine’s, and anyone who’s lost faith in the power of everlasting true love should be sent on a blind date to playwright Abi Morgan’s new play. A collaboration with director/choreographers Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett’s Frantic Assembly company, as it charts four decades of marriage between Maggie and Billy via two sets of actors, it cuts through the hearts and flowers to get to the real-politik of a relationship that is a mirror for some, an education for others. Mid-life crises, affairs and seven-year itches are all intact. Morgan’s ongoing fascination with the ageing process follows both her recent National Theatre of Scotland play, 27, and her script about another Maggie for the film, The Iron Lady. Yet in Frantic Assembly’s head, hands and feet, the company’s trademark physical tics elevate her words to somewhere else again. As back-dropped here by Merle Hensel’s stately design, Ian William Galloway and Adam Y...

When Shabina Aslam took up her post as artistic director of Ankur  Productions last summer, she knew she had a tough act to follow. Under  her predecessor, Lalitha Rajan, who founded the company in 2004 to  present work by and for black and ethnic minority groups, Ankur had  co-produced Roadkill, the Cora Bissett directed site-specific work  about sex-trafficking that became one of the highest profile shows of  recent years. Rather than attempt to rehash the idea, Aslam's debut  production, Mwana, by first-time playwright Tawona Sithole, aims to  fuse poetry and drama in a tale of the conflicting loyalties of a young  Zimbabwean boy living and studying in Glasgow. The play's form is a  world Aslam knows well. “In most black and other ethnic minority communities, the first form of expression is always oral, through spoken word and poetry,” she says. “So often when I've worked elsewhere trying to find a black playwright h...

Age becomes Sian Phillips. The Welsh-born actress who began her career  playing Masha in Three Sisters, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Shaw's Saint  Joan is about to arrive in Glasgow at the end of a long tour with  high-octane physical theatre company Frantic Assembly. The company will  be presenting Lovesong, a play by writer of Margaret Thatcher biopic  The Iron Lady and Steve McQueen's sex-addiction flick, Shame, Abi  Morgan. In Lovesong, Phillips plays a woman working her way through her  entire forty years of marriage, 'from love's first fever to it's  plague', as Dylan Thomas wrote. More noted for her classical roles, two years ago Phillips finally got to play Juliet in Tom Morris' radical take on Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers tragedy. She's also recently shared a stage with singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright after appearing on his 2007 album, Release The Stars. Sian Phillips is seventy-eight years old. Sat in her car outsid...

In a dimly-lit wood-lined bar-restaurant, Burns Night is in full swing. Haggis and whisky are on the menu, there's Irn Bru behind the bar, and the kilt-clad staff more than look the part. In a book-lined corner of the room lined with tat-shop Saltire bunting and a lion rampant, a band are playing My Love Is Like A Red Red Rose, while on the tables Oor Wullie grins cheekily on little tartan flags. Watching over all this on the walls and behind the band is the bard himself, his heroic head-and-shoulders visage captured in an image made iconic by Alexander Nasmyth's 1787 portrait, and made immortal on shortbread tins and poetry compendiums for ever after. At first glance, such a gathering looks and sounds like a million and one similar events taking place on January 25 th . Look closer, however, and you notice that Nasmyth's image of Burns has been altered in such a way that he now seems to be sporting a Nordic-patterned wooly jumper, while a volcano appears to be eruptin...

Cameo Cinema, Edinburgh Thursday January 12th 2012 3 stars The man with the flowing white hair walks towards a small table and chair to one side of the Cameo's big screen. Sporting a long black winter coat and carrying a glass of red wine, the man looks as if he's stepped in from another, altogether darker age of shadows and light. Especially when juxtaposed against the shiny silver Macbook perched on the table which he sits himself down before. Such a clash of time-zones may be accidental, but it's the perfect introduction to former Siouxsie and the Banshees bass player Steven Severin's contemporary live score for Vampyr, Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1932 study in parasitic possession, in which young fogey Allan Grey blank-walks his way into saving the lives of a pair of once-bitten sisters. Because Severin's use of brooding synth shards that ooze in and out provides a delicious counterpoint to Dreyer's consciously over-egged visual signifiers, w...

Stills Gallery, Edinburgh January 23rd-March 18th 2012 4 stars Now capitalism is a sinking ship with assorted captains scrambling for the lifeboats, Allan Sekula's ongoing photographic exploration of globalisation in motion is the perfect metaphor for a world all at sea. This most recent series by the Pennsylvania-born documentarist forms the second part of Stills' Social Documents programme, trailing Glasgow and Edinburgh screenings of his new film, 'The Forgotten Space', en route. The large-scale colour images here chart the voyage of the Global Mariner, a cargo vessel carrying, not imported produce from exotic lands to be marked up in price, but a touring exhibition outlining the shipping industry's crucial role in exploitation of labour. The activists manning the vessel are captured by Sekula with a casual dignity in snapshot-like fashion against the vivid seascape behind, with workers caught unposed and in motion. Throughout the gallery are a ...