Coffee-Table Notes

Lee Blakeley - Opera and theatre director Born August 16 1971; died August 5 2017 Lee Blakeley, who has died suddenly of a suspected heart attack aged 45, was a fearlessly individual director, who moved between opera and musical theatre in a way that wasn't afraid to be popular, and who, both in his personal and professional life, could find the fun in everything. This was the case whether overseeing a production of Die Fledermaus for Scottish Opera set in the world of Footballers' Wives, or simply indulging in impromptu bouts of ridiculous quick stepping round the studio during breaks in rehearsal with some of his cast. Blakeley's international career saw him work with such luminaries as Gigi star Leslie Caron and Greta Scacchi in a production of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris in a production which introduced Sondheim's work to French audiences for the first time. This set the template for a series of visually st...

Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a busy woman. The thirty-two year old actress who burst onto our TV screens as writer and star of Fleabag, the tragi-comic sort of sit-com about a supposedly independent woman on the verge is currently overseeing Killing Eve, her new TV drama which she's written for BBC America. As an actress, Waller-Bridge is also filming a big screen project which we can't talk about, but which has already been outed as being part of the ongoing Star Wars franchise. These are both pretty good reasons why Waller-Bridge won't be appearing in the brief Edinburgh Festival Fringe revival of the original stage play of Fleabag, when it opens next week at the Underbelly, where it was first unleashed to the world in 2013. In her place, Maddie Rice will take on the role of the potty-mouthed anti-heroine after touring Vickie Jones' production for Waller-Bridge and Jones' DryWrite company in association with Soho Theatre. This doesn't mean Waller-Bridge has turn...

Trinity Apse until August 27 th Four stars Back at the end of July, passers by on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh were confronted with a giant inflatable green dragon and a display of mediaeval pageantry in which a procession of agitators attempted to slay the beast. The dragon was s emblazoned with the words, 'PUBLIC AND PRIVATE OWNERSHIP' on its front, and 'CORPORATE GREED' on its back. Some of those attempting to usurp it were tattooed with the word 'NATIONALISATION.' It looked like a satirical cartoon made flesh and acted out in a display that resembled something between a mummer's play and an episode of Horrible Histories. This was By leaves we live...not by the jingling of our coins , the latest processional intervention by Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich, who have previously made weapons of happiness out of the pink blow-up artillery of Love Cannon (2005), which brightened the skies by firing pink balloons. This new intervention is inspired by an i...

When Cosey Fanni Tutti's autobiography, Art Sex Music, was published earlier this year, it provided a remarkable account of life on the frontline of a very English counter-cultural underground. Over it's 500 pages, Art Sex Music also lays bare a deeply personal account of how a smart and fiercely individual working class teenager from Hull called Christine Newby landed in the thick of an alternative artistic firmament. All of which should make for an electrifying conversation between Tutti and author Ian Rankin as part of a List sponsored Edinburgh International Book Festival event. “I'd been planning to do a book for years,” says Tutti of the motivation behind Art Sex Music. “A lot of my work in music and in exhibitions is very autobiographical anyway, so it made sense to try and get it all down in the one place.” The first part of the book relates how, after falling in with a bad crowd led by future partner in crime Genesis P-Orridge, Newby/Tutti became part of live a...

Most mornings over at the Cameo over the next couple of weeks, prior to the cinema's own programme of screenings, Cameo Live is a new initiative of film-inspired performance-based works from artists you'd be more likely to find on the Forest Fringe. First up was Deborah Pearson, one of the co-founders of that most underground breath of fresh air during festivals season over the last decade. Pearson has a thing about film, having previously created works for the Filmhouse and the now long gone Alphabet video shop in Marchmont. Judging by her latest piece of auto-biographical story-telling, History History History, perhaps it's in the blood. As Pearson sits at her laptop beside the big screen, the credits role on a little known Hungarian film. With a title that translates as The Wonder Striker, it is a Billy Wilder style comedy in a which a pen salesman is mistaken for a real life star footballer in a town where football is everything. The film's premiere was due t...

Gladstone Court until August 27 th Four stars The title of Shannon Te Ao's new twin video installation may resemble that of a Godspeed You! Black Emperor album, but the landscape here is the artist's native Aotearoa New Zealand. The tone is similarly mournful, in a starkly poetic study of what seems to be an eternal estrangement between human-kind and the fractured landscape it barely occupies. The first of the two five minute or so films is a close-up of two Maori women slow-dancing in a field, silently holding on for dear life itself before the inevitable goodbye as the sky above them broods its way from day to night. The second focuses on the landscape itself. Filmed in sumptuous black and white, hills and fields are punctured by pylons as cows graze. Both scenarios are sound-tracked with a slow-burning string-led score, and end with a voice-over of the same elegiac verse. Housed for Edinburgh Art Festival in a former Magdalene Asylum for 'fallen' women, ...

King's Theatre Four stars Everything is black and white in Alan Ayckbourn's new play, a six hour two part epic set in a dystopian future where men and women are segregated from each other following the aftermath of an unspecified plague. Into this landscape, the secret diaries of brother and sister Elihu and Soween are brought to life by Jake Davies and Erin Doherty with a wide-eyed lightness of touch as their hormones get the better of them when they both hit puberty. Annabel Bolton's production for the Old Vic, EIF and Karl Sydow begins with a TED Talk type lecture that reveals the back story to how things turned out this way. It ends with a sentimental love story designed to tug the heart-strings. Inbetween, there is teenage rebellion aplenty against the regime's institutionalised repression. Liberation comes through art and sex, which, in such extreme circumstances become even greater life forces. With both plays told through the siblings' diaries al...