Coffee-Table Notes

Hammersmith Apollo, London Five stars   A flash of white lights up the blue, and Kate Bush leads her five backing vocalists, who include her sixteen year old son, Bertie, onstage in a jaunty conga as her seven-piece band kick into Lily, from Bush's 1993 The Red Shoes album. Twelve nights into her twenty-two night marathon, it's a playful opening to Bush's first live shows for thirty-five years, which have rightly generated screeds of praise for their inherent theatricality. Over the course of three acts, a delighted Bush get back to her pub-band roots in the first six numbers of sophisticated funk and a couple of hits punctuated by showbizzy “I really hope you enjoy this,” type cooings. This is followed by two suites, The Hounds of Love's The Ninth Wave, and, following an interval, Aerial's A Sky of Honey, performed in their entirety. With dialogue by novelist David Mitchell and co-direction by former RSC boss Adrian Noble,  these are revealed as a...

King's Theatre, Edinburgh When Tom Waits hung his nightclub barfly shtick out to dry in favour of something more primal with his 1983 Swordfishtrombones album, as Tristram Bath made clear in a thirtieth anniversary study of the album in The Quietus in September 2013, it was composer Harry Partch who in part liberated Waits' muse. Partch, who died in 1974, built his own instruments with extravagantly other-worldly sounding names such as the Chromelodeon and the Quadrangularis Reversum. He also worked with micro-tonal scales that ditched western systems for more exotic-sounding sonic provocations gleaned from Africa and Japan. Partch's interest in the East may have been voguishly in keeping with the trappings of post World War Two modernist esoterica, but his interests in ancient Greek drama and Japanese Noh theatre lent his increasingly ambitious fusions of sound, song and spectacle a classical formality that gave what was effectively the original junkyard orchestra a gravit...

Telfer Gallery, Glasgow September 13th-28th The missile testing range on South Uist built by the RAF in 1957 may have been privatised in 2001, but the fascination of what is regarded as the largest air and sea range in the UK goes on. Nick Thomas' filmic portrait of Uist that makes up his show at the Telfer looks at the impact of the range on those who live, work and have grown up in its shadow that dominates a landscape where the ancient and modern rub up against each other. “There's also a consideration of the Catholic iconography of the area and its historical role,” the Glasgow-based artist explains, “as public art, in the initial ideological conflict around the site.” Thomas' fascination with the site has seen him make other Uist-based work since graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 2012, though this is the most substantial piece to date, with much of its research techniques learnt while Thomas worked on the moving image archive of pioneering Sauchiehall Street art...

Playfair Library, Edinburgh Five stars It's the eyes that get you first when you step into South African artist Brett Bailey's searing damnation of historical and modern-day racism. Set up as a series of tableaux vivants in the most quietly ornate of human zoos, the audience are invited to peer at living representations of black people down the centuries in this presentation by Bailey's Third World Bunfight company for Edinburgh International Festival. Flanked by the white marble busts of  the victors of the official history books, we pay witness to those abused and treated as a novelty or freak-show by their white masters. Captions use the triumphant colonialist clichés of the 'Civilising The Native' variety, only for the small print to spell out what really happened. Most damning of all are the three so-called Found Objects, in which real life immigrants from Jamaica, Ghana and Nigeria portray, not figures from  history, but themselves, with the details of whe...

Talbot Rice Gallery until October 18th Three stars Waiting plays a big part in the Talbot Rice's compendium of eight relatively off-piste artists for their EAF show. Nowhere is this more evident than in Ellie Harrison's 'After The Revolution, Who Will clean Up The Mess?' an installation of four confetti cannons which may or may not be detonated on September 18th this year at a post-referendum party ONLY if there is a Yes vote.  This is something Ross Birrell's uncertainty-based works also point too in their pointers to Heisenberg and Mallarme's poem, A Dice Throw. If Harrison's specially commissioned piece in search of an audience for a once in a lifetime event isn't enough motivation for the accompanying all-night party to go with a bang, one might turn to Michelle Hannah's ongoing fantasy-wish-fulfilment fascination with retro-futuristic electronic torch ballads and the vogue for ice-cool dystopian iconography that defined the accompanying rise of ...

Summerhall, Edinburgh Four stars From COUM Transmissions to Throbbing Gristle and beyond, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge  was the ultimate self-created deity. So when he and partner Lady Jaye embarked on their Pandrogyny project in a bid to look identical to each other, it was the ultimate love story. This first UK show since 2003, the same year the pair celebrated Valentine's Day by having identical breast implants, is part document of the ongoing series of body modifications the pair underwent, part homage to Lady Jaye, whose 'body dropped' in 2007. The scars are there still in this in-the-raw assortment of imagery that charts their quest for two to become one, both in large-scale light-box images that provides an entry into their special world, and in elaborately framed photographs of them post-op. Elsewhere, coyote-head installations, religious iconography and royal family subverting collages expose lives in permanent opposition. After such extreme measures, however, it'...

August 1st-31st. Performances Thursday to Saturday at 7pm. Three stars The vast top-floor warehouse space of Ocean Terminal's Logan's Run style shopping mall is a gloriously incongruous venue for the Hamburg/London-based Villa Design Group to house its epic reimagining of Gogol's play, The Gamblers. While the array of clean-lined screens and curious cabinets flanking the large stage that simulates Yves Saint Laurent's faux Russian dacha remain in situ throughout the day, this third part of Than Hussein Clark, James Connick and William Joys' Gogol-inspired dissection of architecture and morality blossoms into full dramatic life for a two-hour performance of the play in the evening. Here Laura Schuller's Adelaida holds court to a crooked conference of interior designers brought together to discuss the building of a new library to house Gogol's archive. As she bursts through a wooden construction that is part state-of-art coffin, part dressing-up box, her conn...