Coffee-Table Notes

Four stars   When seventeen-year-old Juliane Koepcke took a flight with her mother from Lima to Pucallpa in Peru, little did she know she would be the sole survivor of the plane crash that followed. Over the next eleven days, Juliane navigated a rainforest where hidden depths hide crocodiles and other creatures, fell 10,000 feet, was almost eaten by maggots, and somehow lived to tell the tale.     This remarkable true story is brought to life by Sophie Kean in a near gymnastic display as Juliane. As the script moves back and forth with Juliane’s reminiscences, Kean’s movements seem to embody her life flashing before her in Emma Howlett’s deftly realised production. Moving from the row of aeroplane seats that make up the bulk of Eleanor Wintour’s ingenious set, Kean utilises paper planes, origami creatures and toyshop miniatures to bring the jungle to life. A glossary of some of the local bestiary is flashed onto a screen behind her, as if accompanying a museum e...

Playhouse Four stars Alison Goldfrapp’s eyes are staring out at the audience in giant size close up beamed from the full length of the stage’s entire back wall. In the flesh, Goldfrapp, keyboardist Evelyn May and drummer Seb Sternberg are battering out Strict Machine, Goldfrapp’s now classic piece of glamtastic electronic squelch as the climax to the disco diva’s Edinburgh International Festival extravaganza.  For the last hour, Goldfrapp has been vamping her way through The Love Invention, her first full-blown solo shebang after decades in partnership with sonic sculptor Will Gregory. Sired during lockdown, The Love Invention saw Goldfrapp co-opt pop mavericks Richard X, James Greenwood, songwriter Hannah Robinson, Norwegian duo Röyksopp and German house double act Claptone for the record’s machine age dancefloor friendly opus. The experience thus far has been a slow burning epic, opening with Hotel 23 and the record’s title track, with Goldfrapp slinking her sparkly way...

Royal Lyceum Theatre Four stars A moment of peace, then pandemonium reigns in this rollicking new look by Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s seventeenth century Spanish classic. Brought to life by England’s internationalist inclined maverick auteurs Cheek by Jowl, here, reality morphs into a spectacular fantasia for its incarcerated hero after being unleashed into the world.   Such is the lot of poor Segismundo, the Polish prince locked up like Rapunzel in a tower since birth lest he turn out to be a wrong ‘un. Once his regal old man Basilio guilt trips himself into cutting his son some slack, an initially befuddled Segismundo launches himself into society like a man who fell to earth running riot as he explores the undiscovered extremities of the big bad world he just landed in. Why? Because he can, and he was always going to turn out that way, anyway. Or was he?     Freedom is a funny thing in Declan Donnellan’s Spanish language production, which puts the lights up on the aud...

Early on in Art is Magic, Jeremy Deller’s bumper compendium of his back catalogue, the 2004 Turner Prize winner talks about how he made the shift ‘from making things to making things happen.’ This line sums up Deller’s whole approach as an artist over the last thirty years, whether persuading the Williams Fairey Brass Band to play house music in Acid Brass (1997), reconstructing The Battle of Orgeave (2001), one of the key moments in the 1984 miners’ strike, or reinventing Stonehenge as a bouncy castle on Glasgow Green (2012).   Other works featured in Art is Magic include So Many Ways to Hurt You (2010) – a film about glam wrestler Adrian Street – and Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 (2019) , which filmed Deller giving a history of rave culture to a classroom of teenagers. Deller’s mix of pop culture, social history and civic spectacle has made for a form of very public art that engages with the world with a playfulness at its heart.   In kee...

“Can you hear me, Deborah?’   Deborah Pearson looks like she’s lip-synching at the start of our conversation about The Talent, the Canadian writer/performer/director’s collaboration with Gemma Paintin and Jim Stenhouse, aka Action Hero, which plays at Summerhall for a week as part of the England based artist focused Horizon Showcase. As is the way of things these days, Pearson and I are attempting to talk over Zoom, the international video communications platform that rose to prominence during the pandemic induced lockdown.   As I shout into the silence, I’m conscious of sounding like Clem Fandango, one of the pompous hipsters directing arch thespian Steven Toast during the old luv’s voiceover gigs in Matt Berry and Arthur Mathews’ TV sit-com, Toast of London. This fits in all too well with The Talent’s focus on a voiceover artist taking direction for a variety of presentations in her recording booth limbo.   “I had this idea of how interesting it would be to see a show w...

Four stars Two newsreaders sit behind a desk while a dramatic theme music plays out. Scripts are wielded like weapons by the man and woman as they prepare to dole out the headlines to anyone still seeking some kind of truth beyond fake news. Initially strait-laced - and straight-faced - in their delivery, the veneer of democracy soon starts to fade, however, as a litany of atrocities takes in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the 1980s Soviet-Afghan conflict, and a whole lot more, as any pretence at an objective worldview is consumed into the chaos the pair collapse into.   The foodstuffs that fill the desk are used as props for little miniature scenarios projected live onto a screen at the side of the stage. While caviar and vodka are passed out like holy sacraments, toy tanks are abandoned on the woman’s hair, while tiny figurines are burnt like tin soldiers.   This is quietly ferocious stuff in Petr   Boháč ’s production for the Czech Republic based Spitfire Company, which ...

  Five  stars Once upon a time, Fred Deakin was a shy kid who started playing records at teenage parties to try and make friends. Within a few years, as a student in Edinburgh, he was running some of the best clubs in town, and had the best posters to boot. And that was before he became a proper pop star as one half of electronic party people Lemon Jelly and a professor in design. Most of this is in Club Life, Deakin’s very personal late night show and tell concerning his life manning the wheels of plastic fronting legendary 1980s and 1990s clubland concepts. These ranged from the nu jazz of Blue to the Easy Listening irony of Going Places by way of heroically named nights such as Thunderball, Devil Mountain, Impotent Fury, and self-styled worst club in the world, Misery. These are all revived by way of assorted potted greatest hits selections, as Deakin takes us on a tour of Edinburgh nightlife from back in the day. Director Sita Pieraccini transforms Deakin’s testimonies int...