Coffee-Table Notes

As Momus, Nick Currie has charted a singular path over the last quarter of a century as a writer and performer of literate pop songs of the occasionally pervy kind. Naming himself after the Greek of mockery, Currie looked to Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg for inspiration before exploring a range of stylers, modes and influences as her travelled between London, Paris, New York, Berlin, Tokyo and, more recently, Osaka. Currie's musical adventures began in 1981 in Edinburgh as vocalist with The Happy Family, who he formed with former members of Josef K. The Happy Family released an EP, Puritans, and an album, The Man On Your Street, on 4AD records, both in 1982. The debut Momus album, Circus Maximus, was released on El records in 1986, before Currie moved to Creation, releasing a stream of albums that began with The Poison Boyfriend, continuing with Tender Pervert, Don't Stop The Night, Monsters of Love and the Gainsbourg dedicated Hippopotomus. With the rise ...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars Harold Pinter’s 1978 study of an affair among London literary types and its aftermath is both his most grown-up work and his most self-indulgent. Dominic Hill’s production – his first as artistic director of the Citz – catches both facets, albeit without ever making you feel much in the way of empathy with the publisher, the agent, the wife or the lovers onstage. But then, as things painfully unwind across a decade that begins two years after the end of Jerry’s long-term amour with his best friend Robert’s wife Emma, and closes with Jerry’s first clumsy drunken pass, it’s hardly Hill’s fault. On one level, as Cal MacAninch’s Robert, Neve McIntosh’s Emma and Hywel Simons’ Jerry navigate their way through the sort of awkward silences and knowing banter that only former intimates can stumble into, any trademark earnestness is ironed out by a recognition of the self-absorbed ridiculousness of it all. Yet there are moments when the delivery ...

As the power of celebrity dictates, when a beautiful A-list actor is courted by once-great writers, there's usually only one thing on both their minds. In the case of The Man Who Lived Twice, Garry Robson's new play for the disabled and non-disabled performer based Birds of Paradise company, it's a bit more complicated than that. As it imagines a real-life meeting between the young John Gielgud and the reclusive Edward Sheldon, Robson's play raises questions about the fleeting allure, not just of fame, but of the famous, as well as notions of sexuality and physical beauty. Two days after Christmas 1936 when the meeting took place, twenty-eight year-old Gielgud was the toast of Broadway following his debut playing the title role in a smash-hit production of Hamlet, playing opposite Lillian Gish's Ophelia. Gielgud was also a closet homosexual at a time when such behaviour was not only taboo, but illegal. Sheldon, meanwhile, who had scored hits with work...

At the end of Tony Roper's first week working in Bowhill Colliery, the Fife mine a few miles from his Cardonald home, the wet behind the ears teenager was taken by surprise. Roper may have been working beside women, but they weren't shy about hauling the youngster away from his workplace, ripping off all of his clothes and smearing him from head to toe with copious amounts of axle-grease. “They got me everywhere,” says Roper, who as an actor is associated by most people as Rab C Nesbitt's sidekick Jamesie Cotter, “and I mean everywhere.” It was a rites of passage he never forgot, and while the incident didn't trickle down into his post World War Two Glasgow wash-house-set play, The Steamie, the larger than life influence of the women he depicted is alive and kicking throughout. “All the women in The Steamie are amalgamations of women I knew growing up,” Roper says on the eve of directing a twenty-fifth anniversary tour of a play that has become a contemporary classic, a...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars Six scarlet-clad women line up in coffin-size boxes like life-size historical dolls being flogged off at some old-time sideshow. As a shabby ringmaster parades them before the audience, he opens the door on a complex, criss-crossing trawl through epochal moments of times past, as umpteen versions of the same woman split in two at moments of crisis. The result, in this unique Scots/Quebecois collaboration between the Edinburgh-based Stellar Quines company and Montreal's Imago Theatre, is a fascinatingly beguiling magical-realist epic that stretches an extended umbilical cord through history. Joan of Arc, Medea, St Therese, the French revolution, Charles Darwin, Jack the Ripper and Sigmund Freud are all in Clare Duffy and Pierre Yves Lemieux's bi-lingual script, mixed and matched into life in Serge Denoncourt's audacious and vivacious production. Matters of life, death, art, science and religion are similarly entwined in a whi...

Writer, Musician, Promoter Born - July 2nd 1960; Died – February 15th 2012 Without Fritz Van Helsing, who has died aged fifty-one following a prolonged battle with hepatitis C, Edinburgh's nascent 1977 punk scene would have been a very different place. Whether as the precocious brains behind the Wrong Image fanzine, scribbling out early paeans to Edinburgh's first wave of punk and post-punk acts of his generation such as Scars and TV 21 – both recently reformed to reclaim the spoils that should've been theirs – or else playing mine host at various incarnations of his all too appropriately named Full Moon Club, Van Helsing was at the heart of a boisterous scene that remained truly underground in the best sense of the word. As some of the posts make clear on the Scraps, rags, factions, splinters and glitz Facebook page, set up to document the crucial years between 1977 to 1982, when a fast-changing Edinburgh music scene seemed to promise the world, Van Helsing was at the epi...

Dundee Contemporary Arts Until March 25th 2012 4 stars Jane and Louise Wilson are no strangers to going behind closed doors. In ‘Face Scripting – What Did the Building See?’, a major new film installation that forms the centrepiece of this body of surveillance-related work, they cast themselves as undercover operatives moving behind enemy lines. As a monitor plays out a forensically assembled CCTV narrative showing the mundane comings and goings leading up to the murder in a Dubai hotel room of Hamas agent Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, the Wilsons own surreptitious after-hours footage pans through the same hotel corridors. Aided by an impressionistic voiceover, a true-life detective story is lent a poetic weight heightened by the sixteen large-scale mug-shots of the disguised sisters that form ‘false positives and false negatives’. The seven large-scale photographic prints that make up ‘Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum)’, bear similar witness, this time of deserted interiors within the 30km exc...