Coffee-Table Notes

Zinnie Harris may have three plays on at this year's Edinburgh International Festival, but as she wishes to make clear from the off, it's not a retrospective. The fact that one of them is a speedy revival of a work originally presented as a trilogy, one a new adaptation of a twentieth century classic, and one a brand new work, seems to validate the increasingly prolific Edinburgh based writer and director's claim. The three productions also see Harris and EIF teaming up with three of Scotland's major producing houses as well as enabling an international collaboration with a company from Turkey. First out the traps for the Harris season, if we can call it that, is Rhinoceros, a new version of the 1959 play by Romanian absurdist and contemporary of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, in which the population of a small French town turn into rhinoceroses. Often read as a warning about the rise of Nazi-ism before World War Two, director Murat Daltaban's co-production betw...

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow Four stars “When the mind is free,” says the terrified old lady at the centre of Jennifer Dick's female reworking of Shakespeare's mightiest tragedy, “the body is delicate.” With Janette Foggo's matriarchal Lear having alienated her entire brood both from herself and each other, there's a double edged sword to such a proclamation, that is a cry for help as much as attention. In Dick's Bard in the Botanics production, however, Lear sees as much or as little as she wants to. There are hints that the ageing Queen is losing her senses from the off, as she attempts emotional blackmail on her three kids, only to set off the ultimate family feud. It is telling too that, while her two daughters Regan and Goneril are at each other's throats, Lear dotes on her youngest, who here has been transformed from Cordelia into a geeky boy called Cornelius. He would rather play the fool than be molly-coddled, and when he disguises himself in clown ...

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow Four stars Temptation is everywhere in Gordon Barr's stripped down adaptation of Shakespeare's negotiation of power and justice, which for his Bard in the Botanics production becomes a simmering treatise on male privilege. Here, Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna, is a Mad Men style boss who goes on sabbatical so he can keep an eye on the little guys beneath him. In true locker room fashion, he hands the keys to high office over to pious young pup Angelo, whose uptight manner can't resist falling into bad habits. This comes in the shape of trainee nun Isabella, who, in a bid to save her wild child sister Claudia from execution, is prepared to give away every virtue she has. With only four actors to play with, and with Claudia a female composite of Shakespeare's male original, Barr's production cuts to the play's patriarchal heart. As church and state conspire to save their male skins, Vincentio's Machiavellian tendencies look al...

Adam McNamara really enjoyed watching TV cop shows when he was growing up in Dundee. When he signed up to become one of the boys in blue, however, any resemblance to much of the on-screen action was incidental. A decade since he left the force to train as an actor, and with stints onstage in Black Watch and more recently on the West End in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child under his belt, McNamara has attempted to set the record straight. This comes in the form of Stand By, an intense and claustrophobic new work, which attempts to show the tedium and frustration of a thin blue line on the verge of action, but forced to hang fire until the moment is right. Rather than give vent to the on-stage equivalent of car chases and gun-toting stand-offs, McNamara's play aims to get behind the police's public image. “It's not a cop drama,” he says on a break from the first read-through of the play earlier this week. “It's about the humans behind the uniform. Having been a co...

Music and art are hardly strange bed-fellows, and indeed the liaison has been an ever-fertile breeding ground for cross-artform collaborations. As releasing records has become a more bespoke affair, editionising what’s effectively several works of art in one has made for creations of rare beauty. So it goes with the Glasgow/Berlin-based Infinite Greyscale label. This new release ticks all the above boxes as part of their exquisitely realised 10” singles club, which has previously hosted work by German electronic duo Mouse on Mars and composer Holly Herndon. This latest opus from Glasgow's Sound of Yell compounds and emboldens the label's aesthetic at every level. Released in a numbered edition of 300 on single sided aqua-blue vinyl with a screen-printed B-side visualised by Ulrich Schmidt-Novak, and with handmade artwork by label bosses/ curators Paul McDevitt and Cornelius Quabeck. Sound of Yell is the chameleon-like project of Stevie Jones, whose peripatetic musical ad...

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh until October 22 nd Giving up smoking can do weird things to people. Just ask Jac Leirner, the Brazilian artist whose work was first seen at the Fruitmarket in the 2015 group show, Possibilities of the Object: Experiments in Modern and Contemporary Art. Cigarette butts, aeroplane ash-trays and rolling papers are some of the materials used in Leirner's first solo show in Scotland, each lined up and transformed into obsessively regimented arrangements that come on like Joseph Beuys with OCD. The most striking thing to hit you first, however, is Blue Phase (1991), in which 50,000 obsolete Brazilian bank-notes are laid out on the floor in two rows that snake across each other, graded in a way that focuses on colour rather than monetary worth. Elsewhere, materials from hardware shops are lined up side by side in order of size and colour. Where, on their own, the spirit levels of Levelled Spirit (2017) the cords of 120 Cords (2014) and the rulers of M...

Jaimini Jethwa was one year old when she and her parents were forced to leave Uganda and move to Dundee. That was in August 1972, when Uganda's larger than life president Idi Amin had ordered the expulsion of all 80,000 Asian Ugandans from the country within a ninety-day period or else face the consequences. Before they left, Jethwa's father had his own business, but Amin took that and everything else he had. When Jethwa's family arrived in Dundee, her father had £7 in his pocket, and they were housed on a council estate in Fintry. With little memory of the country where she was born, Jethwa and her family were the only family of colour on the estate. Any discussion within the family of who they were and how they ended up there was taboo. Jethwa became a film-maker, has worked on short films for the BBC, and developed specialist skills working with vulnerable young people and adults. Even though she was now based at Abertay University, she still had questions she wante...