Coffee-Table Notes

Slamannan Community Centre, Falkirk Three stars To suggest that novelist Alan Bissett's latest piece of stand-up theatre is close to home is something of an understatement. What the F**kirk? was written as part of Falkirk Story, an artistic initiative developed by Falkirk Community Trust as a result of the town winning a Creative Place Award. This has also enabled the publication of Alight Here, an anthology of Falkirk writers edited by Bissett. All of which finds him taking a week-long tour of the area's outlying community centres with a cheeky piece of oral history driven by a polemical intent. Ushered in by live guitar loops played by Adam Stafford, who soundtracks throughout, Bissett's chatty, speak-easy demeanour takes us through his love/hate relationship with the town of his birth along with a potted history of some of its key moments . As well as the Battle of Falkirk that inspired Braveheart, more recent inventions include the world's first Irn Bru fact...

The Secret Courtyard, Edinburgh When Ultras vocalist and former Over The Wall lynchpin Gav Prentice says of the massive drum kit sat between him and his fellow band member that it is there not for them to play, but to provoke the audience into some interactive horseplay that “breaks the fourth wall, as we say in the trade,” he inadvertently sums up the spirit of Hidden Door's nine day DIY festival of music, theatre, art and film, which ended this weekend. The drums actually belonged to Stealing Sheep, Friday's headlining band of regular live music night night Limbo housed offsite in the Bongo Club. Stealing Sheep's female trio were equally conceptual, and not just for their audacious mix of martial mediaeval chorales and electro pop, but for the way their assorted colour-coded leads and cables matched their rainbow-hued hosiery. It was within the sprawl of Hidden Door's main multi-space venue in the former City of Edinburgh Council building that's just b...

Waking up on Friday May 8 was strange experience for Jemima Levick and the cast of her production of Great Expectations, which opens this week at Dundee Rep. It was the morning after the General Election, and slowly but surely it began to sink in that, while Scotland had voted for an almost Tory free zone, England had given what seemed to many to be one of the cruellest Westminster governments in modern times an increased majority that ended the need for any kind of coalition to prop up their austerity-driven powerbase. “It was the weirdest day,” says Levick. “and suddenly it felt like there were these two very different places that existed, and that seemed to reflect what Jo Clifford's version of the play is about, and what Charles Dickens' novel is about.” Great Expectations charts the travails of Pip, an orphan who, after encountering an escaped convict at his dead parents graveside, embarks on an adventure of poverty, riches and thwarted love involving an array of col...

When Edinburgh's electronic dance pioneers FiniTribe returned to active duty in 2014 with a set of remixes of their 1980s Acid anthem, De Testimony, it marked the low-key resurgence of one of the most eclectic operations to ever emerge from a club culture that saw them emerge from Edinburgh's post-punk scene in 1984 to release material through Wax Trax, One Little Indian and FFFR, subverting nursery rhyme Old MacDonald to wind up the ubiquitous hamburger joint en route. Since their 1998 album, the more downbeat Sleazy Listening, former member Philip Pinsky has become a successful composer for theatre, with the current line up of fellow originals Davie Miller and John Vick now formally known as FiniTribe with A Finiflex Production in a nod to their old studio base. Since returning, the new incarnation of FiniTribe have played with fellow clubland auteurs 808 State, and are slowly but surely becoming key players in an underground scene personified both by Glasgow's Poe...

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Douglas Maxwell’s scurrilous West Coast of Scotland version of Argentinian writer Roberto Cossa’s piece of comic outrage, La Nona, could have been tailor-made for popular fun palaces like the King’s. There’s something about the 1970s setting, the Glam Rock pre-show music and the even louder wallpaper of designer Colin Richmond’s garish living room set in Graham McLaren’s National Theatre of Scotland production that reeks of an unreconstructed music hall turn writ large, loud and at times very dirty indeed. Yet there’s revolutionary intent too in this tale of a small town chip shop owning family caught in the midst of the pre Thatcher recession and up against a shiny new burger bar as the Queen’s 1977 Silver Jubilee looks set to tame the masses. Jonathan Watson’s patriarch Cammy even riffs on an imaginary conversation with HRH in-between defending his couch potato would-be genius brother Charlie to his soon to be emancipated wife Marie. Daughter Maris...

When Nicola McCartney was first approached by Garry Robson to write a play about Jane Avril for the Birds of Paradise theatre company, the disability-based theatre company which he is co-artistic director of, on one level McCartney seemed like the obvious choice. “He wanted someone who had written about women and trauma,” says McCartney, “and I've done a lot about both.” Yet the Belfast born writer of plays such as Heritage and Lifeboat hadn't penned a full length work for a decade after she stopped writing several years following a breakdown. McCartney had felt she had nothing left to say, and moved into full-time foster parenting before gradually moving back into theatre by way of dramaturgy and teaching playwriting at the University of Edinburgh. Now she was being offered the chance to dramatise the life of a nineteenth century artist who was principal dancer at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, where she allegedly invented the high-kick for the Can Can. Feted by the great a...

The Secret Courtyard, Edinburgh Four stars What a shame that City of Edinburgh Council is in such a mess that they're flogging off their assets to property developers who then turn them into luxury flats, hotels and restaurants with little or no cultural provision. That's what's about to happen to the Market Street Vaults, the site for last year's Hidden Door, a nine day pop-up festival of music, theatre, visual art and film brought to life by the festival's creative director David Martin and his team of volunteers. That's what looks set to happen too to this year's Hidden Door venue, set in the former King Stables Road headquarters of the City's Departments of Lighting and Cleansing, which Martin and co have transformed into a multiple space endeavour dubbed The Secret Courtyard. With art of one form or another occupying every crumbling nook and cranny either side of the courtyard itself, the result is the sort of hippified autonomous zone and ...