Coffee-Table Notes

For more than thirty years now, Johny Brown's Band of Holy Joy have been the conscience of a divided nation. Hailing from North Shields in Tyneside but having formed his original troupe of street-punk vaudevillians in New Cross in London, Brown's heart-on-sleeve social-realist vignettes have been infrequent dispatches from the frontline of broken Britain. Combined with his more hauntologically inclined sonic experiments on online art radio station Resonance FM, Brown's ongoing canon is a righteous address from the margins. With the most recent Band of Holy Joy album, The Land of Holy Joy , released in 2015 on the Edinburgh-based Stereogram label, this self-released two-CDr set is the third of four aural scrapbooks published in a limited edition of just seventy, and, following on from the previous two, An Atlas of Spatial Perceptions and Custom and Crime in Savage Society , is probably already pretty hard to come by. A fourth collection, Fruits and Flowers for Particula...

For twenty-odd years (some of them very odd) Benedict R Wallers, aka The Rebel, has been reeling out a deadpan and wilfully singular take on spindly DIY adult nursery rhymes for terminal nihilists. As if to illustrate, this twenty-one track cassette of 4-track recordings begins with a sneeze and a spoken word rendition of the second verse of Prince's Sign O The Times, With roots in Edinburgh avant-provocateurs The Male Nurse before honing his stetson-headed schtick fronting the Country Teasers, Wallers' output as The Rebel has been prodigious, and this third part of his Poems With Water trilogy released on the Austin, Texas-based Monofonus Press label allows full vent to his polymathic tendencies. If reading Prince lyrics is a good way to start, the rest of Can I Pass? - the track it forms part of - is as straightforward as it gets over the next hour. The brief reading from Flann O'Brien's experimental novel, At Swim Two Birds , in Pegasus , is a telling pointer t...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars “The best we can expect from life now is avoiding the worst,” says Hilary's man-hungry best friend Frances over a bottle of wine early on in April De Angelis' bittersweet evocation of mid-life crises among women who came of age in the 1970s. Then, Hilary and Frances took advantage of the freedoms afforded by a new wave of feminist thinking, went on day trips to Greenham Common and weren't afraid to become independent women on their own terms. In 2009, when the play is set, Hilary is about to turn fifty, her marriage to Mark is cosy to the point of dull and her about to be sixteen year old daughter Tilly is stropping her way through life in postage stamp size skirts and has taken to letting her monosyllabic boyfriend Josh sleep over. Cora Bissett's revival of De Angelis' West End hit relocates the action to Kelvinside, and has designer Jean Chan pile the stage sky high with domestic detritus that looks like an expl...

When Simon Callow played Mozart in the National Theatre's original 1979 production of Peter Shaffer's play, Amadeus, part of his preparation for the role was to make it look as if he knew what he was doing. As an actor dedicated to his craft, such intensive research wasn't unusual for Callow. Amadeus, however, introduced a new challenge for him. “I had to go to great lengths to impersonate a man playing the piano,” says the actor and writer still most familiar to many from his appearance in Richard Curtis' film, Four Weddings and a Funeral. “I thought it was important to try and get the movement right when I sat at the piano. Paul Scofield, who was playing Salieri, had no interest in any of that, but I really sweated over it.” Thirty-seven years on, Callow appears onstage tonight alongside music of a very different kind as part of the Aberdeen-based Sound festival of new music. He will be the sole actor in De Tribun (The Tribune or the Mother of all Speeches), a p...

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh October 222nd 2016-February 19 th 2017 Karla Black and Kishio Suga may be generations as well as oceans apart, but the worlds within worlds they occupy even as they unfurl their creations around them seems to come from very similar places. Both Glasgow-based Black and the Japanese veteran of the Mono-ha or School of Things movement that grew up in that country between 1969 and 1972 create sculptures that fuse natural and industrial materials to create interventions of pure form. In Suga's case, this is best exemplified in Interconnected Space, a piece originally made in the 1970s in which a large boulder sits at the centre of a room supported by four ropes hung from the top of each wall. Black's preoccupations comes in the marshmallow fluffiness of pastel-tinted cotton wool carpets that fill entire rooms with a whiteness prettily stained with pale slivers of paint. While Suga's works are reconstructions of piece...

Dundee Rep Three stars It's a black and white world for Gerry, the football daft fifteen year old who forms the heart of Lee Mattinson's play, adapted from Jonathan Tulloch's novel and filmed as Purely Belter sixteen years ago. Gerry came into that world kicking and screaming, and he's been kicking and screaming ever since. This is the case whether it's in reaction to the brutality he's grown up with while holed up in a Gateshead housing estate with his mum Dee and sister Claire, or whether it's for Newcastle United, the team that has become the saviour of Gerry and his pal Sewell. If only they could experience the communal thrill of a game first hand, their lives would be complete. This is how the pair end up embarking on a fundraising spree that includes breaking and entering their head teacher's house and 'twocking' – stealing - anything they can lay their hands on in order to be able to afford a pair of season tickets. Things don...

Things changed when April De Angelis turned fifty. Here she was, an independent woman and successful playwright who had grown up with feminism, and who had a teenage daughter who took such hard won advantages for granted in a world where feminism itself had become a dirty word. What had happened, De Angelis wondered, both to her and the world she lived in. The result of such a mid-life meltdown was Jumpy, a play about the stresses and strains of a fifty-something woman who had grown up protesting against nuclear weapons at Greenham Common, but whose teenage daughter couldn't care less about such things. First world problems such things may be, but Jumpy became a West End hit, and five years on is revived in a new production which opens this week at at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. “It came out of experience,” De Angelis says of the play. “I'd turned fifty, and my daughter had turned sixteen the same year, and that made me think about a lot of things, particularl...