Coffee-Table Notes

Tramway, Glasgow Five stars  Something is stirring beneath the cold, dark earth in Vanishing Point’s rollicking graveyard opera, brought to life by director Matthew Lenton in an epic co-production with the Citizens Theatre in association with Dundee Rep. There are bodies asleep in coffins piled on top of each other as Elicia Daly’s narrator wanders into the light, before Biff Smith and his pasty-faced street corner cabaret band strike up the first of a string of chansons that soundtrack a night of the undead. Above them, mourners pay assorted respects to their loved ones. Higher still, drunken angels keep their own council, enjoying the fruits of their out of touch immortality. What emerges out of designer Kenneth MacLeod’s magnificent funereal set is a series of noisy visual tableaux to accompany the live music inbetween rhymed exchanges between the eccentric members of an accidentally thrown together underground community. With the sixteen-strong ensemble swathed in ce...

Nicholas Bone’s son was about eleven when the seeds of an idea for what would become Lost in Music began to take hold. This got the director of Magnetic North theatre company thinking, about what music meant, both to him, and to his son’s generation.   “I was thinking about maybe doing a show for a younger audience,” says Bone. “My son had asked when I was going to do a show that he can come and see, and I started to think about what might interest him. At the same time, I was seeing his engagement with music start to change, where he started to make his own choices about what music he liked. “That took me right back to being eleven, and starting to do exactly that, and realising you could make your own choices and that you didn’t have to like everything, and didn’t have to like what other people liked, but you could start to form your own taste in music. For a lot of people that becomes a really formative thing. “The music you start to listen to at that point and...

Robert Ryman – artist Born May 30, 1930; died February 8, 2019   Robert Ryman, who has died aged 88, never planned to be a painter. As it turned out, he became one of the most distinctive artists of his generation, who offered something quieter and more meditative than the wave of abstract expressionists who preceded him. Where they lashed out with excitable shades of mercurial largesse, Ryman pared things down to a more methodical, pragmatic approach, diligently setting out his store on white or off-white different sized squares. While working with such a wilfully limited palette implied a zen purity that saw Ryman dubbed a minimalist, in truth, the use of white was only there to shed light on other things going on. You just had to look, that was all, and he preferred to be regarded as a realist. Light and space were everything to Ryman’s work, which could be regarded as an extended life-long riff that added textures and phrases to its deliberately recognisable framew...