Coffee-Table Notes

By rights, those in charge of Leith Depot should have been in mourning this weekend. As the long-running battle for the heart and soul of Stead’s Place, the two-storey 1920s sandstone block on Leith Walk in Edinburgh threatened with demolition by developers, looks towards some kind of endgame, its last remaining tenants were set to close the doors on one of the city’s finest small music venues for a final time. As it is, the series of gigs that were originally supposed to be a last gasp wake for the bijou upstairs room of what was formerly regarded as Edinburgh’s worst pub before being reinvented as Leith Depot will now have something of a triumphal air. This is down to a last minute decision to extend Leith Depot’s lease for another month.   Up until this week, Stead’s Place owners Drum Property Group appeared determined to stick to an eviction date of October 1 for all sitting tenants. This was despite the fact that City of Edinburgh Council had unanimously rejected Drum...

King’s Theatre Three stars Shelagh Delaney’s precocious taboo-busting soap opera was always more theatrical than Tony Richardson’s kitchen-sink film version gave it credit for after Joan Littlewood’s original production appeared in 1958. So it goes in Bijan Sheibani’s five-year-old National Theatre production, recast for its current tour, and introduced by pianist David O’Brien’s jazz trio doing an impressive turn as the sort of combo permanently in residence at northern English basement dives of the post war era.   They’re the sort of places Jo’s mum Helen knows well. This is clear by the way Jodie Prenger as Helen leans against the piano as if adorning a pulp fiction paperback, a bottle-blonde would-be diva who wields a lipstick-stained cigarette like a weapon that could stab your eyes out. Gemma Dobson’s Josephine may be able to namedrop the classics, but she and Helen spark off each other with the sort of lacerating love/hate exchanges that binds their spiky and self...

A teenage critic with ambitions for a career in theatre has won this year’s Wee Cherub award for her review of an ambitious sonic artwork at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. 16-year-old Holy Rood High School Olivia Campanile submitted her review of Night Walk for Edinburgh as part of the annual Herald Young Critics scheme, run in partnership between the Herald and EIF. As part of the initiative, high school students are tasked to write reviews of EIF shows they’ve seen after taking part in a workshop led by one of this newspaper’s arts writing team. The best of these were selected for publication, with Campanile judged as outright winner. “I’m really pleased,” said Campanile after being presented with her award yesterday. “I really enjoyed seeing the work. I see a lot of theatre, because I love theatre, but this was quite different to anything I’d seen before, so it’s really nice getting the recognition. Writing it was initially quite hard, but once I managed to get t...