Coffee-Table Notes

The spirit of Kurt Schwitters looms large over MERZ, the exhibition and artists’ residency space housed in a former lemonade factory and surrounding outhouses in the village of Sanquhar, Dumfries and Galloway. Founded by Dave Rushton in 2009, MERZ takes Schwitters’ collagist approach drawn from his cutting up the German word, ‘Kommerz’ (commerce) to create something new.   The notions of ‘Reconstruction and Fabrication’ that are at the heart of MERZ are best exemplified by Schwitters’ Merzbau (Merzhouse), whereby several rooms of his family home were transformed utilising assorted detritus. Schwitters went on to create similar constructions in Lysaker, near Oslo, then in Cumbria, where he was exiled after fleeing Nazi Germany prior to his death in 1948.   Rushton learnt about Schwitters’ story while visiting Cumbria, and has applied his inspiration’s aesthetic to his own MERZ through an ongoing series of residencies that culminate in exhibitions by resident artists in the gall...

Edinburgh International Festival The Lyceum Four stars Life is one big soap opera for Julia Hales in her autobiographical show-and-tell, which finally arrives in Edinburgh after the COVID pandemic prevented it from visiting, not once, but twice. Even now it has arrived, the drama keeps on coming, as Clare Watson’s production for Australia’s Black Swan State Theatre Company had to be rejigged due to five of the seven-strong cast being struck down by the virus, necessitating their appearance on film rather than in person.   This doesn’t stop the irrepressible Hales, who weaves her personal story of life with Down syndrome alongside her life long obsession with Home and Away, the sunkissed Australian soap still going strong after thirty-four years. Hales does this with considerable charm, as she invites us all to share in her story in designer Tyler Hill’s mock-up of the diner in Summer Bay, Home and Away’s fictional town where anything can and usually does happen. She even creates he...

Edinburgh International Festival Church Hill Theatre Four stars Death becomes Sergio Blanco, the Franco-Uruguayan playwright who puts himself as the main character of his forensic and surprisingly fun dissection of the desire to shuffle of this mortal coil on one’s own terms. The audience aren’t greeted with anything remotely funereal, but with the cast wielding electric guitars and regaling them with an indie rock song while lined up on stools like some weekend bar band. Behind them are projections of newspaper style death notices that double up as company biographies.   This makes for a lively curtain raiser to Blanco’s latest piece of what he calls auto-fiction, a kind of fantasy autobiography in which he gives full vent to his assorted obsessions. In this case his opus moves between London and Geneva, as Sergio Blanco the character explores assisted suicide and necrophilia, winding up in the room where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein - another life and death yarn - before takin...

The landscape has changed since John Maher first took his photographic studies of abandoned and derelict houses on the islands of Lewis and Harris that make up his exhibition, Nobody’s Home. Almost a decade on from its first showing in 2013 at An Lanntair, on Lewis, in tandem with work by fellow photographer Ian Paterson, the current selection of twenty-eight images by Maher at Dunoon Burgh Hall is a glimpse of a world that has largely been demolished.   “ It's probably two or three years since I last went back to revisit some of the houses,” says Maher, “but there's a point where that decay gets to a stage where it doesn't become photographically interesting to me. For instance, there's one that’s got a yellow Rayburn stove as the focal point of the picture, but the last time I went there, the ceiling had collapsed, and the floor had gone through. If it had been in that state when I originally looked in, I probably wouldn't have bothered taking a picture.   “There ...

Three stars   Be careful who you flirt with over a business lunch, or you might end up in the same heap of trouble as Daphne, the sexually adventurous heroine of Rafaella Marcus’ play, which starts off like a thoroughly modern piece of dating game froth, but ends up taking a far darker turn into the forest. Out of this comes a heady dissection of power, manipulation and psychological abuse within the emotional maze that Daphne finds herself trapped inside.   At first glance, Marcus’ play is as first world zeitgeisty as it gets, and may yet make a glossy prime time mainstream thriller. Given that it is also a loose knit twenty-first century reimagining of the story in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, in which the god Apollo pursues the nymph Daphne until she turns into a laurel tree, the bar is raised considerably in terms of dramatic chops.   Jessica Lazar’s production - a collaboration between Atticist, Ellie Keel Productions, and MAST Mayflower Studios in association with 45North ...

Four stars   A bowerbird, as Luke Rollason never quite gets round to telling us in his latest madcap potpourri of mime and existential angst, is from a fruit eating species of feathered friends renowned for their unique courtship behaviour. As the Wikipedia oracle does tell us, this ritual sees the male bowerbird build a structure and decorate it with sticks and brightly coloured objects in an attempt to attract a mate.   Welcoming his audience with a lampshade on his head while dressed akin to a Hare Krisnna jogger, whatever the significance of the show’s title, by the end of it Rollason has lots of mates. Utilising a ton of domestic detritus and kitchen drawer clutter, a singing sofa and coathanger shoulders for reals, Rollason’s set up resembles a friendlier take on Gethin Price’s self-destructive routine in the cabaret club segment of Trevor Griffiths’ play, Comedians.   This is punctuated by a pseudo lecture on comedy by Rollason cos-playing his physical slapstick fo...

Edinburgh International Festival Theatre Festival Theatre Five stars   What goes on behind closed doors between friends is nobody’s business but theirs in Ivo van Hove’s epic staging of Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel. This sense of insularity permeates van Hove’s production, initially coming from the way the four college buddies at the core of Yanagihara’s story hang out and party hard while the world goes on outside.   What begins looking like a more regular rites of passage as Jude, Willem, JB and Malcolm become successful in their fields takes a lurch even more inwards, with lawyer Jude becoming the centre of the action as his story unfolds. Over the next four hours, van Hove and co lay bare a relentless litany of sexual abuse that provokes a lifetime of self-loathing and self-harm, as Jude becomes the doomed heart of the relationship between the quartet.   Performed in Dutch with English supertitles, Koen Tachelet’s adaptation brings home the brutality of Jude’s self-h...