Coffee-Table Notes

Summerhall, Edinburgh, January 25 th -March 10th If Robert Burns was an early sighting of a working class auto-didact, it befits a multi-media arts festival to reimagine Burns’ questing poetic spirit for the twenty-first century. This is the aim of the Summerhall-hosted Burns Unbroke festival, which over its six-week duration will feature an array of music, performance and visual art inspired by the bard. The visual art strand includes work by more than thirty artists spread out over eleven gallery spaces. This includes pieces by Graham Fagen, Bridget Collins, Douglas Gordon and the Chapman Brothers, as well as former Frankie Goes to Hollywood vocalist, Holly Johnson. Four new commissions will also feature; a mural by Ciara Veronica Dunne, a film-based installation by Ross Fleming, a mixed media piece by Derrick Guild, and a map by Robert Powell that pinpoints all the places in Edinburgh relevant to Burns. Presented in a collaboration between Summerhall and the Artruist or...

The Playhouse, Edinburgh  Three stars Anyone wishing to see the connections between classical ballet and shaking your stuff in late-night dives as salvation from the 1980s recession could do worse than check out this touring revival of the musical stage version of Adrian Lyne’s 1983 film. Back then, in a post Fame, pre Billy Elliot world, Tom Hedley’s original story concerning Pittsburgh teenager Alex was as blue-collar aspirational as it got. Alex does dayshifts as a welder at the local steelworks before thrusting her way through a late-night floor-show at the local club, all the time harbouring dreams of joining the tutu-clad elite at the Shipley Dance Academy.  Enter boss’s son Nick, who attempts to buy his way into Alex’s affections while being forced to lay off shop-floor staff. With the club Alex dances in similarly exposed to hard times, this ushers in a sub-plot concerning even more hardcore small-town sexploitation, until Alex and everyone else come good, with...

Hannah Tointon was warned off watching Alfred Hitchcock’s big-screen version of Strangers on A Train when she was cast in the new production of Craig Warner’s stage adaptation of the story which arrives in Glasgow next week. Director Anthony Banks told his cast of TV friendly faces that Warner’s script, originally seen a different production on the West End in 2013, had gone back to Patricia Highsmith’s original novel, published in 1950, a year before the film was released with a screenplay co-written by Raymond Chandler. “Anthony told us to steer clear of the film,” says the thirty-year-old actress, probably best known for her small-screen stints in The Inbetweeners, Hollyoaks and, depending on your age, children’s shows Kerching! in the early noughties, and Switch a decade later. “I’ve read the book, which is about these two people, who when they meet talk about how they both have someone they’d like to get out of the way. One of them treats it as a joke, but the other is quite ...

CCA, Glasgow Four stars The low whoosh of rolling thunder that slices through the air at the start of Hanna Tuulikki’s reimagining of her dramatic song cycle originally seen on Skye in 2015 is given extra low-flying heft by the gargantuan figure creating it. Towering some twenty-odd feet in height, with the train of her pure white dress billowing beneath and sporting a plant-based head-dress created by artist Caroline Dear, the instrument she spins above her head is as deadly as the wordless chorale that emanates from her mouth. As embodied by Tuulikki herself with monumental grace, this is Cailleach, the ancient goddess of winter, and she’s spoiling for a fight. She gets one too when Lucy Duncombe enters as her opposite number, Bride, attempting to hold on to all that blossoms in the face of the coming freeze, but dwarfed somewhat by the opposing elements. As the pair spar in and out of harmony, their to-and-fro exchanges morph into a primal form of flyting. A third voice, f...

By the time you read this, a team from the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh will already be in Mumbai, the city formerly known as Bombay, which, as the capital of the state of Maharashtra, forms one of the most densely populated cities of India. It is not only the wealthiest part of the country, but is the birthplace of Bollywood, India's fantastical form of musical cinema. Whether any of this has any bearing on the Traverse's work with young people in the city remains to be seen. Either way, the initiation of Class Act Mumbai, which is the reason for the two-week long visit, promises to be as lively as similar set-ups have been in Scotland for the last quarter of a century.  For those who may not be aware of Class Act, the now annual event began in 1991 as what was then styled as a theatre in education initiative, in which professional playwrights and theatre directors worked with secondary school pupils from various Edinburgh schools to help them develop their own short pla...

It was seven years ago that Fleur Darkin and Jemima Levick first talked about putting Marguerite Duras' novel, The Lover, onstage. They had both become captivated by the French novelist's semi-autobiographical best-seller set in 1920s French Indochina, and concerning an affair between a fifteen year old French girl and a wealthy Chinese man fifteen years her senior. With Darkin now artist director of Scottish Dance Theatre and Levick in charge of the Stellar Quines theatre company, when the pair's unique adaptation opens at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh next week, this unique collaboration between the three companies will highlight their own labour of love. “We've been living with it intently for the last three months,” says Darkin of a book written by Duras when she was 70, and narrated by an older woman looking back at her younger self. “Adapting the book has been quite a dance. We've kind of honed it down to the bare bones of the story, which feels ...

Lust and the Apple, Temple, near Gorebridge until February 15 th Four stars Bruce McLean may have been absent from the opening of this group show named after one of his wry film works, but his playful spirit permeated throughout Lust and the Apple's former school-house. Outside, the soundtrack to two of McLean's three films on show could be heard, bleeding through the walls like an end of term disco. En route, you needed to navigate Tentilla, a drive-way construction and one of a menagerie of imagined creatures by Abi Lewis. Also on show are an array of heads on sticks in the garden called Critters, a pair of mop-headed dogs on wheels and a snake-lined altar. Beaming down from the outside wall is THIS COLOUR IN THE PLACE OF ANOTHER, the first of a proposed series of four neon pieces by David Bellingham. Indoors, another text-based work, THINGS ARE NOT LIKE OTHER THINGS THEY JUST ARE OTHER THINGS (BLACKBOARD) is an equally gnomic lesson. In the bath-room, Natalie Doyle...