Coffee-Table Notes

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh until April 26th Four stars 'Live in Ponte', declaims the mantra on a poster depicting some glossy urban paradise, 'and never go out.'  For the  54-storey circular folly that still towers over Johannesburg's skyline and which was originally built in 1976 to house South Africa's white elite, alas, things didn't quite work out like that. By the time South African photographer Mikhael Subotsky and British artist Patrick Waterhouse came calling, the concrete monstrosity was largely occupied by black residents who moved in following the collapse of apartheid, although many had subsequently been evicted by predatory property developers. The result of Subotsky and Waterhouse's five year study in this international collaboration between the SNPG, Le Bal, Paris and FoMu Antwerp is an expansive piece of impressionistic photo-journalism that combines archive and found material alongside fresh images and texts documentin...

When Harper Lee's novel To Kill A Mockingbird was reported to have been banned from GCSE reading lists in England and Wales last year alongside other works by American writers at the behest of UK Education Secretary Michael Gove, there was an understandable outcry. Here, after all, was an iconic and much-loved Pulitzer Prize winner which, since its publication in 1960, has become a modern classic. As Regent's Park Theatre set off on a tour of Timothy Sheader's hit west end staging of the novel which takes in three Scottish cities, what the incident highlighted was just how much of a bond readers who grew up with To Kill A Mockingbird maintain with it throughout their adult life. “I watched what Michael Gove was saying,” says Sheader, “and he said that he wanted more of Charles Dickens, who I think is wonderful and writes great universal stories and creates wonderful characters, but they're not really about life in the same way ...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars In a windowless high-rise built where the Sun no longer shines, the entire world seems to be closing in on Jane and Mac, the listless couple at the centre of this short opera penned by real life partners, playwright Zinnie Harris and composer John Harris. The concrete landscape they've created for Jane and Mac is grey and empty, their lives barren of feeling as each struggles with their own private ennui. When a small weed appears beneath the lino, having seemingly grown up through breeze-block like some Ballardian bean-stalk, it's flash of green suggests a life beyond the four walls for them both. When what turns out to be an apple tree keeps growing back, refusing to be pruned, its persistence awakens in Jane and Mac a desire which transcends beyond the numbness, even as they self-medicate their way to oblivion, Commissioned and presented by the Aberdeen-based Sound festival of new music and adapted from Zinnie Harris' short play, this...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Three stars When what looks like a bunch of black and grey clad technicians huddle around a bank of home-made electronic instruments at the centre of an otherwise bare stage to make assorted retro-futurist beeps and bloops worthy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the penny drops that sound and fury will most likely be at the heart of the Filter company's seventy-five minute truncation of Shakespeare's Scottish play. As it is, this follow-up to the company's take on the far frothier Twelfth Night, which toured to the Citizens last year, is an oddly restrained affair, in which any eerieness in the collectively created co-production with Bristol's Tobacco Factory comes from Tom Haines' soundtrack. Here an ever rolling set of witches culled from the cast of seven become the show's house band, ghosts in the machine both driving and manipulating the action as they tune in on it like some diabolical branch of the Stasi or GCHQ. Poppy Miller...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars “Spend your life in show-business and you become a philosopher,” says Teddy, the spiv-like manager and touring partner of The Fantastic Francis Hardy in the third of four monologues that make up Brian Friel's haunting dramatic meditation on the the unreliable powers of an inconsistent muse, and how those powers can trap their carrier in their own self-destructive mythology. Before Teddy met Frank, his world was occupied by bagpipe-playing whippets and other end-of-the-pier acts. Once their paths crossed, it was an endless itinerary of one-night stands in isolated towns and villages in Scotland and Wales where miracles sometimes happened. Like an ageing rock band, Frank, Teddy and Frank's wife Grace embark on a never-ending tour of backwoods venues struggling to recapture the alchemical spark that once made Frank great in-between burying himself in booze and antagonising strangers and intimates. It is Frank who frames ...

In the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, a huddle of four young women sit in closed ranks formation in the new writing venue's busy lunchtime bar. At the centre of the gathering, whoo include Traverse associate director Emma Callander and former Perth Theatre head now in charge of Sherman Cymru in Cardiff, Rachel O'Riordan, is Susannah Armitage. The subject of discussion is the ever-expanding enterprise that is A Play, A Pie and A Pint, the lunchtime theatre set up a decade ago at Oran Mor in the west end of Glasgow by former head of Wildcat Stage Productions and co-founder of 7:84 Scotland, David MacLennan. The premise of the operation was simple. Put short new plays on at lunchtime for a week on a minimal budget, throw a glass of what you fancy and a pie of your choice in with the ticket price, and see what happens. Up until then, there was little history of lunchtime theatre in Scotland, but A Play, A Pie and A Pint's quick turnover of work quickly became a m...

When The Sexual Objects release their second album, Marshmallow, this week, this long-awaited follow-up to their 2010 debut, Cucumber, will be a singular experience bar none. Ever the conceptualists, the Edinburgh sired quintet led by Davy Henderson, a key figure in the Sound of Young Scotland ever since his first band, Fire Engines, announced themselves to the world in 1980 with the breathless fury of alt. muzak mini-album, Lubricate Your Living Room, will put out their new opus in a uniquely bespoke fashion. While an accompanying set of instrumentals magnificently christened Cream Split Up and currently garnering airplay care of Marc Riley on BBC 6Music will be heard on 10'' vinyl, Marshmallow will be let loose into the world in an edition of, well, you choose. Because, while the album is technically self-released on the SOBs own Eyelids in the Rain micro-label in conjunction with the Creeping Bent Organisation, as was their 2013 digital only single, Feels With Me, Henderson ...