Coffee-Table Notes

Edinburgh College of Art August 1st-September 1 st If ever there was a match made in northern English heaven, it's this one between Liverpool-born polymath Paul Rooney and arts collective Leeds United. While Rooney has plundered pop culture to create a series of fantastical parallel universes featuring the likes of open-top bus tours, 1960s counter-cultural icon Jeff Nuttall, and a sprite trapped in a 12” vinyl record called Lucy Over Lancashire, the pseudonymously inclined Leeds United appropriate other artists work for their own ends. As Rooney returns to his alma mater mob-handed, he and Leeds United sniff each other out in a series of mutual homages, mythologies and make-believe histories that break cover with a project begun in 2011 that blurs the boundaries of who exactly did what. Such death-of-the-author tactics include a new video and text-based works, including a video that attempts to claim the Loch Ness monster for the Museum of Modern Art and a bleak little f...

Summerhall, August 2nd-31 st Michael Nyman is best known for his work as a contemporary composer who has soundtracked a myriad of films, including several directed by the painterly Peter Greenaway, as well as scoring mainstream success for his work on Jane Campion's The Piano. Such visual motifs date right back to Nyman's work on early Greenaway oddities such as A Walk Through H. All this is compounded in the series of ten remakes of Ivan Vertov's pioneering 1929 film, Man With A Movie Camera, to make up the installation that forms Nyman's first ever exhibition in Scotland. Nyman's original score for Vertov's experimental exploration of cinematic techniques by way of studies of Soviet urban life was first performed by his band in 2002, with a BFI DVD of the film also featuring Nyman's soundtrack, released shortly after. Vertov's original film will be shown alongside Nyman's remakes in such a way that will allow viewers to walk through the gal...

The Wooster Group have always been interested in exploring the ghost in the machine. Ever since the New York-based avant-garde pioneers came stepping out of a 1960s counter-cultural underground high on cut-ups and multi-media, they have consistently redefined what theatre can be in the post-modern age. The Wooster Group's theatre us a theatre of research, in which documentation and research are vital tools, especially if tackling a 'classic' play. More than a quarter of a century on from their first Edinburgh International appearance, The Wooster Group are prrsenting a production of Shakespeare's Hamlet which was first done in New York in 2007. As you might expect from the company, LeCompte's take on the play is different from any reverent, heritage industry approach to the bard which UK theatre-makers might doff their caps to. “I hadn't thought to do the play,” LeCompte says, “but Scott Shepherd, who plays Hamlet, had been doing the play as a one-man...

Two men seek closure in a late night Belfast bar in Quietly, Owen McCafferty's new play presented by Dublin's Abbey Theatre in Jimmy Fay's firecracker of a production. Robert the Polish bar-man is watching the Poland/Northern Ireland match when Jimmy arrives, full of pent-up rage and gallows humour. When Ian arrives, things threaten to explode into violence, but quickly subside as the pair attempt to purge themselves of what happened almost forty years earlier, when sectarian violence in Belfast was at its bloody height. What follows is, as Jimmy observes, a more intimate and less formal take on a truth and reconciliation committee, as the pair unravel the history that binds them. It's a devastating little power play that sums up a battle-scarred nation's collective psyche in miniature, with the football game on television pointing to pointing up the lingering tribalism even more. Fay's production, played out in a working bar-room, is blessed by ...

It's Tuesday night in an uncharacteristically muggy Edinburgh, and in a city centre basement bar sweat-box, a band is about to play their first – and possibly final – gig. The musical set-up is tried and tested; an all-male indie-schmindie four piece consisting of vocals, guitar, bass and drums. There's a chemistry between the quartet as they go through the paces of their brief, four-song set, even as they sound rough round the edges and at times appear to be tugging in different directions. That's nothing new in a pub venue of this size, and in the end it doesn't matter, as the two refreshed east European traveller girls who get their picture taken on the lip of the tiny stage the band are playing on testify to. Despite the fact that they've never played together before outside of a rehearsal room, the band can bluff it enough to make the audience believe everything they're hearing. This is the case even if they're not in on the joke that this b...

Money talks. Or at least that's the case judging by the foyer-full of French economists packed into a small studio theatre ticked off a bustling shopping street in Bordeaux city centre. The economists are coming to the end of a week-long conference at the nearby university, and clearly have plenty to say about it all. In what looks suspiciously like an end of term treat, they're gathered to watch a performance of Adam Smith, Le Grand Tour, a new play written and performed by Vanessa Oltra with fellow actor Frederic Kneip. The production, by Compagnie Les Labyrinthes, which arrives at the French Institute this week for an Edinburgh Festival Fringe run, charts the journey of Mary and Fred Smith, who travel to Edinburgh in search of the real Adam Smith, the Kirkcaldy-born moral philosopher and seminal author of his 1776 tome, An Inquiry into the nature and causes of the Wealth of Nations. More often shortened to the catchier Wealth of Nations, this book is regarded a...

The Events – Traverse Theatre – four stars There's something surprisingly light about The Events, David Greig's new play set in the aftermath of a mass shooting of a community choir by a boy who appears to believe he holds the moral highground to commit such an act. This isn't necessarily a bad thing in a piece which more specifically, the play focuses on Claire the liberal priest and leader of the choir who survives, possibly because she is white. As traumatised as she is by the experience, she remains desperate to understand the rationale behind the Boy's actions. She sees his face in everybody she meets, from her increasingly estranged female lover, to members of the extreme right wing party the Boy was a member of, and, in a final attempt at closure, she visits the Boy in his cell. This is achieved by having Rudi Dharmalingam play all key parts other than Claire, while, as the Boy himself, he relates his story not as some unhinged monster, but with an i...