Coffee-Table Notes

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Three stars This week's announcement by T in the Park that as of next year it will shift sites from Balado to Strathallan Castle may embed Scotland's liveliest music festival even firmer on Perthshire soil, but it is far from the first temporary tented village to plant roots there. This is made vividly clear in Anne Downie's dramatisation of Betsy Whyte's 1979 autobiography, which has barely been seen on Scotland's stages since it was first produced by the appropriately nomadic Winged Horse company in 1989. On the one hand, Downie has penned a richly evocative first-person rites of passage of Whyte's alter-ego, Bessie, the tobacco-guzzling brightest spark of the Townsley clan, a family of Travellers winding their way through 1930s rural Scotland. As Betsy, her father Sandy and her mother Maggie are forced to move from place to place, however, they run a gauntlet of class-room snobbery and institutionalised prejudice that looks frighte...

Intro – Snapshots – Deaf School 1 In 1980, the same year as the Manchester band, Magazine, released a 7 inch single called A Song From Under The Floorboards – a three verse and chorus distillation of Dostoyevsky's novel, Notes From Underground – an art school scandal occurred. This scandal took place in Liverpool, and was based around a project called the Furbelows, although it became better known in the Liverpool Echo and other organs that reported it as the Woolly Nudes. The Furbelows, or Woolly Nudes, were a group of artists who had come out of Liverpool College of Art, who, dressed in grotesque woolly costumes which featured knitted approximations of male and female genitalia, made assorted public interventions around the city centre as kind of living sculptures acting out assorted narratives. The Furbelows project had been funded by what was then Merseyside Arts Association, and, after the participants were arrested and taken to court on obscenity charges ...

1 Good afternoon, and welcome to UPLAND, a unique site-specific group exhibition presented by staff and students from Edinburgh College of Art's Intermedia course here at Camp 21, the former Prisoner of War camp, Cultybraggan. My name is Neil Cooper, and I’m a writer and critic about theatre, music and art for various publications. Before I introduce the panel, I just want to go through the procedures of the afternoon and introduce a few ideas and connections about it that have been thrown up in my mind since I came on board. Once I’ve introduced the panel, each of them will talk for a few minutes, introducing their ideas about things relating to Upland, which may open things up for discussion later. I’ll then ask each of the panel some questions before we open things out to the floor. After that, who knows, but we’ll be aiming to finish  at about 5 O clock, but before we do I’ll ask each of the panel to try and sum up, and if anyone wants to we can continue the discuss...

In the 1920's at a Surrealist rally Dadaist  poet Tristan Tzara created a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. There was a riot, and the theatre was wrecked. Andre Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut ups on the Freudian couch. I originally thought Tzara did this in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire nightclub in Zurich, but I was wrong. In 1959, painter and writer Brion Gysin cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random. Gysin introduced the cut-up technique to William Burroughs. Burroughs published The Naked Lunch the same year. The Naked Lunch revolutionised literature and made Bill famous. That was Bill you heard just now. Bill once said that “Language is a virus from outer space.” He may have been right. Cut-ups were later used by the band Cabaret Voltaire. That's them you can hear just now. Musically speaking, cut-ups soon became known as samples. Sampling changed dance music forever. Just ask Grand...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars 'No Pseudo Indy Debate' bore the legend scrawled onto a small blackboard slammed on the upstairs bar of Glasgow's best-connected West End hostelry as a pair of punters bordered on the verge of a square go last night. While such an accessory may prove essential for all pub landlords between now and September, the blackboard was actually displaying one of a series of punchlines that made up writer Kevin P Gilday's contribution to the National Theatre of Scotland's marathon twenty-four hour online extravaganza of bite-size works inspired by the forthcoming referendum on Scottish independence. Downstairs, some twelve other playlets were performed live to camera and broadcast globally as part of a programme of more than 180 works selected by playwright David Greig and theatrical maestro David MacLennan, who sadly passed away last week. Oran Mor's selection opened with Victoria Bianchi's touching letter to her unborn ch...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When the increasingly senile old man at the heart of Justin Young's moving, Toronto-set new play declares to his estranged son in Gaelic that “We will go fishing,” the initial reaction is one of incomprehension. By the end of Philip Howard's elegiac production for Dundee Rep, however, Don has built a bridge, not just with his classics lecturer son, Louis, who he hasn't seen for fifteen years, but with Flora, the Gaelic-speaking carer Don hires so he can get on with his self-absorbed and  long overdue translation of Homer. Inspired by an Iain Crichton Smith's poem and set in a pre-laptop, pre-Google early 1990s, what at first looks like a quiet play about fathers, sons, and everyday dysfunction opens itself out to grander themes of odyssey, exile and the gulf that can open up among families when separated by war. Such  classical allusions never lose sight of the basic human cost of this absence. With Lewis Howden's Louis the epitome o...

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, June 14-October 19 It was a chance meeting with an Edinburgh councillor on Leith Walk that   eventually led to Sitting Ducks, painter and playwright John Byrne's   show of rarely seen work that opens at the Scottish National Portrait   Gallery this month before touring to Inverness. Having suggested to   Byrne that it was about time he had a major show in the capital, the   councillor wrote to the National Galleries of Scotland, who agreed, and   the wheels were duly set in motion for the exhibition of some fifty-odd   works drawn mainly from private collections dating as far back as the   1960s, many of which have never been seen publicly before. “It was just stuff I remembered that people had bought,” Byrne muses,   “so I made a list. A lot of it is stuff I've not seen since I did it,   drawings of my children, things like that.” There are self-portraits too, including one from the early 1...