Coffee-Table Notes

Tramway, Glasgow until June 30 th 4 stars One only has to look at the names on the spines of the books projected on the two large side-screens that flank a central one in Stephen Sutcliffe's large-scale film installation to get where he's coming from. Philosopher Jacques Derrida, semiotician Roland Barthes, a book of Christopher Logue poems and even a DVD of Shelagh Delaney-scripted, Albert Finney starring 1960s Brit-curio 'Charlie Bubbles' are all in there in a mash-up of post-modern pop cultural ephemera. Drawn from Sutcliffe's personal archive of sound, broadcast and spoken-word recordings dating back to a childhood in which he clearly didn't get out much, Outwork was inspired by sociologist Erving Goffman's book, 'Frame Analysis' and was originally produced for the Margaret Tait Award. Beginning with hummed snatches of 'The Internationale' and ending with the opening guitar riff of 'Gloria', Sutcliffe juxtaposes little ...

Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, until June 23 rd 3 stars X marks the spot in Inverleith House's latest show in which a contemporary artist responds to work in the RBG's Archival holdings of botanical-based art. Arriving just in time for the sun to belatedly shine, and running alongside 'Nature Printed', featuring actual examples from the RBG collection, Canadian-born, Glasgow-based Ciara Phillips beams down a series of groovy-looking screenprints brandishing vivid colour blocks that gets back to nature in homage to publications by eighteenth century nature printer Johannes Kniphof. Amidst the abstractions, there are blurry archive images of hourglasses and lush, lime-coloured landscape splodges amidst the flora and fauna. The show's centrepiece finds the gallery's central column of walls wallpapered with sa blanket of watery, ice-blue and white prints, on top of which is draped a banner-like large-scale print of two yellow pencils...

When a woman called Coralie turned up at Dundee Rep's box office to say that the theatre's next production was about her, the company sat up and took notice. The late Tom McGrath's play, Kora, after all, is set in a Dundee housing estate where a community fight against the local authorities attempts to decamp the residents out of their homes ids led by a powerful matriarchal figure whose home is bursting at the seams with her offspring. Nicholas Bone, director of the Magnetic North company, who are co-producing Kora with the Rep, and actress Emily Winter, who plays the title role in a play first seen at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 1986 before being revived a year later in Dundee, met Coralie. The result was what Bone describes as “a slightly surreal hour, spending time with this woman who Tom met almost thirty years ago, and based this whole play on. It was hearing from her what's true and what's not true in the play, but then you have to put it to one ...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars It looks like the end of the world in Seamus Keenan's blistering new play, which Derry Playhouse brought to the Tron's Mayfesto season last week. Either that or some latter-day social experiment for reality TV or a venue for extreme sports. In fact, the barbed-wire topped cage that confines five men in what looks like a burnt-out scrap-yard is a dead-ringer for Long Kesh in 1974 after the County Down-based prison's IRA prisoners torched it during riots. The five men now appear to occupy some approximation of a Beckettian wasteland, in which they attempt to keep up a notion of army discipline, even as they survive on scraps while sleeping in the most makeshift of shelters. Three of them, Barry, Colin?? and pretty-boy Dutch are volunteers. Dee is notional leader, with Lucas his brutal number two. Beyond the macho banter and dedication to the cause, the claustrophobic living conditions create an uneasy tension that turns to suspicio...

Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh 3 stars A banker from Macduff makes for an unlikely action hero, yet when Roger Hunt got caught up in a terrorist raid on his Mumbai hotel in 2008, that's exactly what he became. Not an action hero in the conventional sense, but, as he endured forty hours alone with only his thoughts and a series of text messages to keep him going, his sense of self-preservation became an inspiration. Writers Euan Martin and Dave Smith and director Ian Grieve have taken Hunt's story of human bravery and turned it into a tense hour-long thriller based on Hunt's book of the same name written with Kenny Kemp. It opens with Roger, as played by James Mackenzie, about to give a presentation on his experiences. Within seconds, however, Roger is back in his hotel room where he takes refuge, texting his wife Irene and assorted lifelines for help while he hides out. Much of the latter is done via John McGeoch's set of fast-track video images projected o...

Two weeks ago, playwright Michael Frayn was given a special Olivier award for a body of dramatic work which over the last forty years has quietly become an essential part of Britain's artistic fabric. This week, a touring production of his 1982 farce par excellence, Noises Off, that originated at the Old Vic, is playing in Aberdeen prior to dates in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Frayn himself has been on the literary festival circuit, giving readings to coincide with the publication of his most recent novel, Skios. All of these events in different ways go some way to illustrating Frayn's relationship with public life, be it at an awards ceremony in a room full of high-class thespians, entertaining literary groupies, or, in Noises Off, lampooning the world he is both part of and outside with an astonishing theatrical skill which has made it one of the most popular plays in the world. Noises Off is set in the the world of low-rent touring theatre in which a badly penned far...

Dundee Rep 3 stars In these hi-tech days of texting, sexting and social media immediacy, it's hard to credit the power of an old-fashioned hand-written love letter and the yearningly painful gaps between each exchange. This probably wasn't what American playwright AR Gurney was thinking when he penned this Pulitzer Prize nominated two-hander about two people who retain an intimacy across half a century of billets-doux, but it does explain its popularity. So, however, does the play's status as a star vehicle, as many of those who packed the theatre to see former Dempsey and Makepeace TV double act and real life husband and wife Michael Brandon and Glynis Barber in action would no doubt bear witness to. Not that there's much action, as the pair sit at separate tables to give voice to the life-long romance between the dependably dull Andrew and the more mercurially self-destructive Melissa. From the moment Andrew accepts an invitation to Melissa's secon...