Coffee-Table Notes

I only ever met Robbie Coltrane once. That was in 2005, when I interviewed him for the Herald newspaper a week or so before he opened in Peter McDougall’s short play, The Brother’s Suit. We met in the top floor games room of the now long closed BBC Club, a stone’s throw from BBC Scotland’s then HQ on Queen Margaret Drive in Glasgow. Oran Mor, the former church turned pub on the corner of Byres Road and Great Western Road, was also close. The production of The Brother’s Suit would form part of David MacLennan’s trailblazing lunchtime theatre initiative, A Play, A Pie and A Pint, which made the venue a new home for West End bohemian types.   At one time, it seemed like the by now globally recognised regular of what was then four Harry Potter films, and a James Bond villain twice over in GoldenEye (1995) and The World is Not Enough (1999) might have been a regular on that sort of scene. As it turned out, this was Coltrane’s first visit to the BBC Club since he took over from Richard S...

Behind the Games Room door there is laughter. Then, from within the faded, cluttered grandeur of the top floor of Glasgow's BBC Club, Robbie Coltrane's dry but fruity transatlantic Scots twang can be easily discerned.   It is the end of the day for rehearsals of The Brother's Suit, Peter McDougall's new work for A Play, A Pie And A Pint, the ambitious series of lunchtime drama at Oran Mor, Glasgow, that has reinvigorated Scotland's theatrical old guard. The play will mark Coltrane's first appearance on a stage in this country for 15 years.  The BBC Club, meanwhile, hasn't seen Coltrane grace its doors for even longer.    "I haven't been in here since we did A Kick Up The Eighties, " Coltrane muses as he tucks himself into the corner of the room like a naughty, if somewhat oversize, schoolboy. The "alternative" sketch show is just a memory now, though the club was "a good place for meeting people. Not that it's changed much, ...

Downtown   The Marvelous Mrs Maisel is Amy Sherman-Palladino’s hit TV drama about a 1950s New York housewife who becomes a stand-up comedian.  Much of the show’s early action is set in Greenwich Village, where Rachel Brosnahan’s eponymous Miriam ‘Midge’ Maisel cuts her performing teeth at The Gaslight Café.    The Gaslight was a real life basement club, which, as well as comedy, in the 1960s played host to early performances by Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Tom Paxton, and many more riding high on the era’s folk revival. Jazz bassist Charles Mingus played the Gaslight, as did civil rights legend Odetta, blues singers Son House, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and many more.   Exteriors for Mrs Maisel’s depiction of The Gaslight were filmed, not where the real Gaslight was, over on MacDougal Street, but on St Mark’s Place, in the doorway of a tenement building previously photographed for the cover of Led Zeppelin’s 1975 album, Physical Graffiti. A few years later...

When Ian MacInnes was headmaster of Stromness Academy on Orkney, he introduced a Friday activities afternoon, whereby students would knock off their studies early in order to explore less academic pursuits such as sailing, introducing an element of play to start the weekend.   This was a typical act of everyday rebellion by MacInnes, whose work is currently on show on home turf at Pier Arts Centre to commemorate the centenary of the Orkney born artist’s birth. The exhibition spans MacInnes’ life’s work, from formal portraits of friends and contemporaries such as writer George Mackay Brown, to more politically driven impressionistic images of life on his doorstep, with striking studies of the ever changing local landscapes in Stromness, the West Shore and Rackwick Valley inbetween.   Also on show are some of MacInnes’ early satirical caricatures of local dignitaries that appeared in the Orkney Herald when he was still a teenager, as well as his illustrations for books by Mackay...

Iza Tarasewicz never danced the Mazurka while growing up on her family farm in the rural Polish village of Kaplany. Only a decade ago did she discover the prevalence of the sixteenth century folk dance that brought farm worker serfs together in a way that has influenced similar expressions of choreographed community across the world.   Tarasewicz has applied the spirit of the Mazurka to her first solo UK exhibition at Tramway in Glasgow, where the circular rhythms of the dance become a life force to her large-scale sculptural constructions crafted from agricultural machinery rendered redundant by industrialisation. Following research based on the decline in farm labour, agricultural problems and controls on produce distribution in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Tarasewicz gives what she calls ‘traumatised objects’ a new lease of life that mirrors a real life need for community in a turbulent world.   " The whole world is in a crazy state just now,” says Tarasewic...

Alan Wilkins – Playwright, teacher   Born July 6, 1969; died September 7, 2022     Alan Wilkins, who has died aged fifty-two, was a playwright and teacher, whose boundless curiosity fed into several acclaimed works. He also led countless drama workshops in schools and prisons, where his natural sense of empathy saw him enable those from less privileged backgrounds to thrive creatively.   Much of Wilkins’ writing explored facets of his own world. This was probably most apparent in The Nest (2004), which looked at the hillwalking community gathered in a Highland bothy. He later fed his experiences working as a barman in a Wester Ross hotel into Offshore (2008), produced by the Birds of Paradise company. He wrote Can We Live With You (2008), produced by Lung Ha Theatre Company in Edinburgh, the same year.   While these possessed a warmth and a self-deprecating wit that marked Wilkins’ own personality, it was the play he wrote inbetween, Carthage Must Be Destroyed (...

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...