Coffee-Table Notes

If Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government and its heirs had had their way, there would be no such thing as society, community, and quite possibly the two pieces of theatre that are this year's winners of The Arches Platform 18 award for new directors and theatre makers. As it is, both Gary Gardiner's tellingly named Thatcher's Children and Kieran Hurley's response to the Criminal Justice Bill, which effectively criminalised rave culture, BEATS, combine historical significance and a renewed political pertinence for a younger generation who've discovered protest for themselves with renewed activist vigour. While Gardiner's piece sets up a mock Houses of Parliament in which a series of authoritarian speakers explore the legacy of Thatcher's ideas, Hurley puts a live DJ onstage to explore one of the most absurd laws in history, which made gatherings of people listening to music with repetitive beats effectively illegal. “I wanted to make...

Kinning Park Complex/CCA, Glasgow 4 stars Theatrics were to the fore on the third and final day of the inaugural Counterflows festival, which proved to be an intense and largely song-based affair featuring an array of left-field divas and show-people. With Sunday afternoon’s events at Kinning Park’s artist-led space curated by the small but perfectly-formed Tracer Trails organisation, none were showier than Iain Campbell F W, whose live art display involving assorted amplifiers, recording devices, record players and laptop footage of himself seemed to question the nature of performance itself. Following Saturday’s trio set, veteran Swedish drummer Sven-Ake Johansson’s solo routine began with him utilising two copies of the Yellow Pages to skitter out a series of clip-clopping percussive patterns which occasionally broke into a gallop. While the extended rolls on a snare drum that followed were just as much fun, once Johansson picked up the brushes to vamp it up on “three love songs”...

When the wave of protests that resulted in the Arab Spring swept through Middle Eastern countries throughout the early part of 2011, the mass unrest saw oppresive governments in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen overthrown. While the unrest continues elsewhere, the new possibilities such actions have opened up have been seized on by young people throughout the Arab world. Some of this ongoing creative energy is captured in the One Day in Spring season, a series of new plays by young Arab writers seen over a six week period as part of Oran Mor's A Play, A Pie and A Pint season of lunchtime theatre. As curated by playwright David Greig and partnered by the National Theatre of Scotland in association with the Tron Theatre's Mayfesto season, One Day in Spring highlights a set of vital voices caught in the crossfire of a brand new landscape, as Greig explains. “For about ten years I've been going back and forth between here and the Middle East working with young pl...

David Hayman was sitting in a pub the other week, watching the Celtic versus Rangers match with his sons and some pals. After Rangers went one nil up, there was a shout from the back of the room. 'Haw, Lear,' came the voice. 'Whit ye gonnae do about that?' Quick as a flash, Hayman replied, 'I'll have them all beheaded on Monday', and the entire room erupted into applause. “That's Glasgow for you,” smiles the Glasgow-born actor and director who some might know best from his twelve year tenure as Detective Mike Walker in Lynda La Plante's cops and robbers TV show, Trial and Retribution. Sitting in the foyer of the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow on a soup and sandwich break from rehearsing the title role in Dominic Hill's new production of King Lear, it's clear from the black wooly hat and check shirt combo that Hayman has come home to roost. It was in this building, after all, where Hayman became the enfant terrible of a remarkable ...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars The four walls of the cosy country kitchen which houses Tim Price's elegaic little play is a deceptively domestic setting for a piece in which worlds are ever so quietly rocked following the car crash death of a teenager. As Gordon, April and their son Sid recount their versions of the story via a series of devastatingly simple criss-crossing monologues while they go about their daily chores, the raging calm that slowly unravels reveals a sense of barely contained frustration beneath the surface. April gets by with her concerts in the city, Gordon through a solitary trawl through bars and B & Bs in search of solace. Yet it's Sid, who survived the crash, who provides the social glue between them lest they “stop pretending to be happy” as he puts it at one point. Set in “a village with attitude” that looks an awful lot like Ludlow, the Shropshire town where the play's producers Pentabus reside, For Once is a sad, funny an...

When Tim Price went to Ludlow in Shropshire, the Cardiff playwright looked at what was going on beyond the surface of a town he describes as “the gastronomic centre of England.” What he found during three weeks of development as part of a group of writers seconded by the Ludlow-based Pentabus was serious food for thought. Beyond the abattoirs and the Michelin-starred restaurants was a disaffected younger population with little or nothing to call their own. The result of this is For Once, Price's debit full-length stage play following stints on television penning the likes of Secret Diary of A Call Girl after cutting his teeth with DIY guerilla theatre company Dirty Protest back in Cardiff. Following a successful run in 2011, For Once tours to Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre, where its director Orla O'Loughlin is now in charge following her departure from Pentabus. “It's about food and the politics of food,” Price says of For Once. “I did a week-long residenc...

                                      Heroes and Villains      The Fall and Rise of Daniel Johnston and His Apocalyptic Pop Star Life When Daniel Johnston played London’s Institute Of Contemporary Arts a few years back, by all accounts it was painful to watch. In the throes of the illness that arguably fueled his creativity, here was a real life mental break-down in words and music, live on stage. Onlookers reveled in the freak-show. But then, onlookers always have and always will love a freak show, especially one they can sing along to. When Johnston’s artwork appeared in a group show of cartoonists at The Royal Edinburgh Hospital, which provides ‘acute psychiatric and mental health services’, the freak-show, it seemed, had come home to roost. Shaky-handed felt tip splodges had long let loose the visions cluttering up Johnston’s head. Weaned on an overload of trash cul...