Coffee-Table Notes

Burns&Beyond Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh Four stars   There can’t be many serious contemporary classical composers who end their live shows with a classic pop sing-along anthem, This is exactly what Anna Meredith and band did, however, for their Burns&Beyond festival show of maximalist machine age euphoria delivered with enough Tiggerish ebullience to sound like a Radio 3 rave.   With Meredith currently working on a new album, this one-off show was clearly a treat for both her and tuba player Hanna Mbuya, cellist Maddie Cutter, Sam Wilson on drums and Jack Ross on guitar. Sporting matching jumpsuits that make them look like they’ve stepped out of a 1970s TV ad for minty sweet, Pacers, the quintet launch themselves into an opening rally of the first three tracks of Meredith’s second album, Fibs, released in 2019. Over the next hour, the relentless zing never lets up for a second.   Sawbones is bashed out with Meredith pounding drums like her life depended on it; Inha...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh  Four stars Once upon a time, there were three little girls who never dreamt for a minute they could change the world. By applying their passions to everyday endeavours, however, they end up making a difference, finding their voices en route. So it goes for Alice, Jade and Chloe in Hannah Lavery’s play for young people, in which assorted rites of passage and resistance puts the trio at the centre of grassroots activism.   All lined up against the brightly coloured wonders of designer Amy Jane Cook’s Paolozzi style adventure playground set, the trio take it in turns to tell their stories. As their criss-crossing narratives connect, they find common ground and strength in numbers enough to stand up for themselves and their assorted causes.   For Alice it’s being able to run races as an equal. Jade has to square up to racist bullying in the classroom. And Chloe has a small thing of an environmental crisis to deal with. Together, it seems, they can...

Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh Four stars   ‘Be warned’, goes the disclaimer for one of the Burns&Beyond festival’s flagship shows this year. ‘This will not be your normal Burns Night or gig!’ Callum Easter’s post modern variety show that follows pretty much sums up the ‘Beyond’ bit of the festival name.    With Easter clad in white and carrying what turns out to be a joke book, he sets himself up as mine host and top turn of a night that culminates in a killer set of accordion driven Caledonian blues, electronic No Wave primitivism and off kilter David Lynch themes in waiting. With the action beamed out on a screen behind him, Easter opens with a solo number before his band The Roulettes join him on twin drums to conjure up something resembling Suicide playing a ceilidh.    The haggis is piped in by Fraser Fifield accompanied by a whip wielding Mistress Inka, aka Hettie Noir, vocalist with Edinburgh supergroup, Scorpio Leisure. There are no cheesy showbiz duets ...

Royal Highland Centre, Edinburgh Four stars   The battle looks far from won as audiences enter this epic staging of Shakespeare’s Scottish play. Walking through a battle-scarred landscape of burnt out cars and the debris of war, the sounds of jet planes and helicopters swoop overhead. Set designer Frankie Bradshaw’s evocative installation is quite a curtain raiser for what follows in the more formal interior where the show takes place.   There are the Witches for starters. T he three young women who  greet Ralph Fiennes’ camouflage clad Macbeth as he and Banquo are finishing their tour of duty appear like some New Age ragamuffin girl gang. As they promise Macbeth the world, the die is cast on the catastrophic power grab to come. Played by Lucy Mangan, Danielle Fiamanya and Lola Shalam, it is they who pull the strings here. In many ways in Simon Godwin’s production of Emily Burns’ adaptation, it is their play.   The royal clique the trio manipulate into self destructi...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars Whatever literary purists might say, the poor things, classic fiction has always been up for grabs in terms of reinvention. This is certainly the case with Robert Louis Stevenson’s nineteenth century gothic novella, a short, sharp shocker that over more than a century now has been reimagined in many ways. Gary McNair’s new rendering sees the current master of the solo show shake Stevenson’s yarn to troubling new life in a slow burning monologue that cuts through to the dark heart of the secrets that lurk within us all.   Michael Fentiman’s production begins quietly enough, as Forbes Masson returns to the Lyceum stage for the first time in two decades to offer up a disclaimer that ends up framing the show, much as the sudden snaps of light and shade do between scenes. It is as if a series of Victorian peep show portraits were being immortalised on Max Jones’ picture frame set. Whether for posterity or evidence, Masson’s confessional as Utte...

Oliver Emanuel – Playwright   Born April 4 th 1980; died December 19th 2023      Oliver Emanuel, who has died aged 43, was a playwright whose every work was an adventure. This wasn’t just the way Emanuel sometimes filled his plays with fantastical creatures. It was how he brought his writing to dramatic life, driven by a sense of wonder and compassion. Whether it was writing a play without actors, as with Flight (2017-2020), or penning a piece without words with Dragon (2013-2015), Emanuel relished the challenge of finding new forms in expansive and playful ways.   He did this both on stage and on radio, where his imagination flew, using the medium as a creative tool. This was used to maximum effect in When the Pips Stop (2019), written for the centenary of the BBC. Emanuel took the idea of the state broadcaster going off air in the event of a nuclear attack and ran with it, to the extent of the play not only interrupting The Archers, but not being listed, adver...

Summerhall, Edinburgh Four stars   Cassie Workman comes not to praise Kurt Cobain in her hour-long meditation on the life and premature death of the driving force behind Nirvana who became the doomed messiah of 1990s disaffected youth. Nor does the Australian comedian and writer come to bury her idol, even as he rises up to haunt her again and again.    As she draws her audience in close to confess all about her pilgrimage to the industrial Washington city where Cobain grew up  - or maybe didn’t – Workman digs beyond the acquired mythology that still surrounds Cobain, as well as her own hero worship. For Workman, then, like every other outsider fan who lost their guru and found their own sense of self, this is personal.   As she paces around the small rug that becomes her stage, Workman looks assorted audience members in the eye. Surrounded by them on four sides, she lays bare her epic tale in rhyming couplets. The effect of the eventual catharsis that...