Coffee-Table Notes

When research scientist and PhD student Kevin McMahon took part in a TV reality show that gave members of the public a crash course in a field diametrically opposed to their own, he would never have dreamt that it would lead to him, not just switching careers, but to founding what was probably the world's first magic festival. As the fourth Edinburgh International Magic Festival begins this weekend, however, McMahon, now the festival's co-director and a full-time close-up magician himself for the last six years, it's an accidental dream come true. It was when McMahon applied to take part in Faking It that the dream began. The producers whisked him off to America, where he studied magic for two weeks under globally successful double act, Penn and Teller. On his return, he performed to Paul Daniels, who presumed McMahon not to be an old hand at the magic game. McMahon himself was smitten, and has been performing professionally ever since. EIMF was born from an ide...

From the playground to the office block, pecking orders exist in all walks of life. This is made explicitly clear in the revival of Multiplex, Christopher William Hill's play written for the Tron Theatre, Glasgow's Tron Skillshops young people's theatre group that forms part of the theatre's outreach and community initiative, Tron Participation. Hill's play looks at the twilight world of multiplex cinemas where a coterie of ushers jockey for position in the after-dark food chain they occupy. From the Plankton at the bottom of the pack, we move up a peg with the too cool for school Dudes before we meet the Buffs, for whom what goes on up there on the big-screen is a matter of life and death. Whether such a chain of command exists in the assorted groups that make up Tron Skillshops and Tron Participation isn't on record, although it's interesting to note that many of the teenage performers taking part in Multiplex were members of the junior group when...

Summerhall, Edinburgh 4 stars When a large wooden painting of Cab Calloway's face hung from the ceiling of Summerhall's dissection room came crashing down, narrowly missing the star of this unique art and music collaboration, it could have proved disastrous. Nile Rodgers, however, brushed away the incident with the same charm that has seen him through a forty-year musical adventure which began with Chic, and is currently riding high with Get Lucky, the song Rodgers wrote with Daft Punk that is currently the biggest selling record of the summer. An Indigo Night in F is a new suite charting Harlem's rich sonic history that came out of 7x7, Belgian artist Jean Pierre Muller's installation presented at Summerhall in 2012, and which featured work by the likes of Robert Wyatt and Archie Shepp as well as Rodgers. Muller explained all this to a crowd of just 300 from a customised stage area which over the next two hours was gradually decked out with cut-out diorama...

Tramway, Glasgow 4 stars There are those who will swear they were there at all six episodes of the radical site-specific theatricalisation of James Hogg's nineteenth century novel at the fag end of the 1980s. For most of us, however, all we have are the meticulously detailed archive exhibited en route to the auditorium and actor George Anton's lovingly told if possibly unreliable memoir about one Paul Bright. According to Anton and the role-call of theatrical luminaries who appear paying homage on-screen, Bright was a counter-cultural iconoclastic savant, who blazed a brief and chaotic trail from the back rooms of pubs to Mayfest and the Edinburgh International Festival, before crashing and burning in the ultimate act of avant-garde self-destruction. In Stewart Laing's production of Pamela Carter's script for this co-production between Laing's Untitled Projects, the National Theatre of Scotland and Tramway, Anton presents all this found material as a p...

When Bard in the Botanics artistic director programmed The Tempest as his flagship production of his 2012 season of open-air Shakespeare plays, to call his choice unintentionally ironic is something of an understatement. 2012, remember, was the wettest summer for a hundred years, according to the Met Office. Not that Barr or anyone else connected with Bard in the Botanics needed such official confirmation of such a soggy climate. The fact that the company were forced to cancel some fifty per cent of performances because of rain stopping play spoke volumes, even if the temptation to have The Tempest's self-exiled magician Prospero cook up a dramatic storm for real must have been a method-acting friendly temptation for the company's tenth anniversary season. This year, however, Barr and his team return to the fray unbowed with three new productions which are being rehearsed even as Barr keeps an optimistic eye on a weather map. What Barr gas dubbed the Edge of War season sh...

Sandy Nelson never meant to be a comedian, even if he did spend fourteen years on the stand-up circuit. Nelson started out as an actor, working with David MacLennan's politically minded musical theatre troupe, Wildcat. Only when acting work dried up in what he wryly refers to as his “dish-washing years,” did Nelson throw his hat in the comedy ring. Today, however, things have come full circle, and Nelson has finally quit stand-up to embark on a variety of theatre projects that has seen him back working with MacLennan as a regular at Oran Mor's A Play, A Pie and A Pint season of lunchtime plays. Nelson's latest work as both writer and actor is an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, which forms part of this summer's Classic Cuts season of pared down favourites. While Iain Robertson will play Petruchio, Nelson himself will play Baptista in Rosie Kellagher's production of Nelson's second stab at a Classic Cut. “Last year I adapted Pyg...

Primal Scream have just been introduced onstage as the best rock and roll band in the world. When the five-piece led by a check-shirted Bobby Gillespie troop on and launch into a forty-five minute, nine-song set drawn largely from their just released More Light album, any suspicions that they are studio-bound alchemists only are instantly dispelled by one of the most glorious live performances of the year. Under dim red lights, the band open, not with new material, but with the slow-burning noir of Out of the Void from 1997's dark come-down album, Vanishing Point. After that, things crank up for the insistent urgency of More Light's first single, 2013. It may be without the post-punk saxophone of the record, but, in its raw state, with a sax sample low in the mix, it still sounds like a manifesto, a soundtrack to an Occupy riot and a devotional hymn to rock and roll all at the same time. It's back to Vanishing Point for Burning Wheel, before some wag in the crowd...