Coffee-Table Notes

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars “But we can’t live as if we believed in nothing anymore!” John Michie’s world-weary academic, Rennie, implores, well into his cups in the second act of Peter Arnott’s new play. “We have to live at least as if we believed in something.”   Arnott’s self-styled attempt at Scottish Chekhov sees him gather his clans in a Perthshire country house on the eve of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. And my, how civilised the world looks compared to the extremes thrown up in the decade since.   The occasion is Rennie’s retirement do, and he has a very special announcement for the focus group of Scotland’s liberal media and academic establishment in waiting who make up the guest list. These include his wife Edie, his London based art curator daughter Emma, Benny Young’s exiled actor Moon and Rennie’s former students Frank and Charlie, who have turned out very differently indeed.     Charlie is a TV populist, while Frank’s partner Kath...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   Swatting flies probably wasn’t on John Cale’s agenda prior to his Edinburgh International Festival appearance, but such an irritating insect circles Cale over several songs in. The elder statesman of avant pop classicism finally appears to repel the assault from behind his keyboard, necessitating a roadie to come on and reposition his microphone.   This gives an extra edge to an already mighty Guts, from 1975 album Slow Dazzle, one of several sojourns through Cale’s 1970s post Velvet Underground purple patch. This sees Cale’s superb three-piece band led by long term guitarist Dustin Boyer breathe fresh life into the title tracks of Cale’s Paris 1919 and Helen of Troy albums, from 1973 and 1975 respectively, as well as Barracuda, from 1974’s Fear record.     Fleshed out by understated electronic textures that go beyond rock and roll to something more progressively propulsive, there is even a magnificently demonic take on 1980 s...

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...