Coffee-Table Notes

King’s Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars “Life,” says iconic film-maker Jack Cardiff in Terry Johnson’s play, “is temporary. Film is forever.” So it is in this loving reimagining of the final days of the cinematographer behind The African Queen, The Red Shoes and a lot more besides. Johnson puts Cardiff in the garage of his Buckinghamshire home, a space lined with portraits of the actresses he lit with such translucent wonder alongside some of the equipment he used to make it happen. Now in the throes of Alzheimer’s, Jack’s son Mason has surrounded his father with totems of his adventures in the screen trade to help nudge out his memoirs. Also on board is his young carer Lucy, while he can’t help but mistake his wife Nicola for Katharine Hepburn. Out of this comes a gentle elegy for an artist who spent most of his life in make-believe worlds, and who here goes beyond the seeming befuddlement of age to take a peek into a rich imaginative life that keeps him holding on. We don’t j...

John Giorno, poet, artist Born December 4, 1936; died October 11, 2019 John Giorno, who has died of a heart attack aged 82, was a poetic iconoclast, whose belief in taking words off the page and bringing them to life on record and in the live arena helped kick-start what we now know as spoken-word performance, a genre rooted in the beat scene, moving through rock and roll, rap and live art. Through the promotion of peers that included Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs by way of his Giorno Poetry Systems organisation, then through his much imitated Dial-A-Poem service, Giorno took poetry to younger audiences more attuned to pop music and pop art, both more accessible and less rarefied forms than what was considered to be high culture. Taking counter-cultural literature into a similar mass media landscape in this way influenced subsequent generations of musicians and writers. The likes of Tom Waits and Laurie Anderson appeared alongside post-punk auteurs including David...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Five stars Truth is everything in Brian Friel’s mighty play, which dissects the emotional debris left behind by Francis Healey, a self-destructive faith healer who’s lost his mojo, but is so addicted to life on the road he doesn’t know how to give it up. The various truths are laid bare in a quartet of interlinked monologues, with litanies by Frank’s wife Grace and manager Teddy book-ended by two from Frank. From a deserted village hall staple of Frank’s never-ending tour comes a series of show-boating confessionals, showbiz anecdotes and unreliable memoirs that map out the rise and fall of a life in personal and artistic decline. As Frank incants the names of the small-town circuit like a prayer, the magic he’s attempting to conjure up seems forever out of reach. But when it happens, however rarely, it is truly a thing of wonder. Elizabeth Newman’s broodingly intense production sets out its store on Amanda Stoodley’s set, which, lit by Jeanine...