Coffee-Table Notes

A wealth of radical mavericks spans the centuries in this year’s Adelaide Festival opera programme. On the one hand, Igor Stravinsky’s The Nightingale is reinvigorated in a new production by Canadian auteur Robert Lepage. On the other, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera is brought to vigorous new life by former Adelaide Festival director Barrie Kosky.   Just as Stravinsky, Weill and Brecht broke moulds and pushed boundaries in their respective eras, Lepage and Kosky have produced a succession of major works that have applied their own respective contemporary visions onto productions drawn from the classical canon.   Lepage’s take on The Nightingale – first presented by Stravinsky in 1913 -  is an international co-production between his own Ex Machina company with Opéra national de Lyon, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Canadian Opera Company and Dutch National Opera. In tune with this internationalist approach, Lepage is working with  Argentine...

As the longest running and most pre-eminent survey of contemporary Australian art, the Adelaide Biennial has always attempted to showcase the most interesting work of a particular moment, with a themed approach giving the event a loose-knit narrative that goes beyond individual artists. By naming this eighteenth edition of the Biennial as Inner Sanctum, curator JoséDa Silva is suggesting a meditation of sorts on where we are now.  “ Inner Sanctum came from a simple proposition of wanting to think about what the human condition might be like in 2023 and 2024,’ Da Silva says. “How might we think about the human condition after having lived through three or four years of COVID and all of the experiences of lockdown, and how that might have affected the way we think about our lives, our homes, and our communities.   “It became clear to me very early in the thinking about this show, that there was a way of grouping certain ideas and certain artists together in distinct ways, a...

Laurie Anderson has always sounded like the future. Ever since she scored a global hit in 1981 with ‘O Superman’, the New York based artist has been at the cutting edge of melding her music, words and performances with the latest technology.    It should come as no surprise, then, that Anderson has embraced Artificial Intelligence in I’ll Be Your Mirror, her hi-tech exhibition that arrives in Adelaide after premiering in Stockholm in 2023. While Anderson won’t be present physically during the exhibition’s run, as she has in previous Adelaide appearances, AI Laurie Anderson very much will. This comes by way of machinery that has absorbed everything the real Anderson has ever said to create a writing machine made from her specific way with words and how she delivers them. Activated by viewers feeding in short phrases, new works are created in Anderson’s voice and style.    As the Velvet Underground referencing title of the exhibition suggests, I’ll Be Your Mirror does ...

Four stars          Jamie Collinson’s study of those forced out of the bands they sometimes founded makes for a refreshingly insightful, entertaining and at times poignant read. Boldly subtitled An Alternative History Of Popular Music, Collinson’s book mixes research, interviews, personal interludes, and a series of wonderful footnotes that join the dots between more than thirty subjects. At one point he writes a gonzo style first person short story charting Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten’s final days before and after being sacked by Neil Young.     Ousted Beatles drummer Pete Best, doomed Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones and dumped-on Velvet Underground auteur John Cale are all in the mix, as are ‘All the Musicians Kicked Out of Fleetwood Mac’ but Collinson focuses on what are perhaps lesser-known stories that are by turns tragic, absurd, and occasionally redemptive.   While the book moves beyond boys with guitars and bad habits by ...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Five stars Home and garden are sanctuary and safe house for the four women of certain ages who line up in Caryl Churchill’s quietly devastating play. As it digs deep into what lies beneath the small talk and shared experiences of friends on a sunny afternoon, a series of everyday revelations give way to something more globally seismic. It begins with Blythe Duff’s Mrs Jarrett stumbling on Lena, Vi and Sally catching some rays as they indulge in chit chat, gossip and tittle tattle as any group of long standing friends and neighbours might do. As everyday mundanities hint at more complex lives, each scene is punctuated with a monologue that reveal worlds of personal and global devastation. Churchill’s play may date from 2016, but Joanna Bowman’s post Covid pandemic revival now looks in part a prophecy of things to come. Ushered in by sound designer Susan Bear’s foreboding drones, Anne Kidd as Lena, Joanna Tope as Sally, Irene Macdougall as Vi and Duff as cuckoo in t...

Richard Walker’s early schooldays have clearly left their mark in this small but expansive exhibition of paintings by the Cumbernauld born artist. This is most evident in the two black and white photographs of the now demolished modernist new town primary school Walker attended, and which are placed like bookends at the top of the show’s large scale title piece that hangs across the entirety of the living room size gallery’s main wall.   In one image, three children play beside a totemic concrete water tower. In the other, a deserted school refectory awaits the bell to fill it with rowdy life as light pours through its voguish spaceship styled windows.  Each of these small pictures is framed in an oval shaped cut out that resembles something that might sit on an elderly relative’s mantelpiece. Inbetween, at the painting’s centre, another egg shaped image suggests something darker beyond its frame.Beneath it, an array of tentacles and roots jostle for space in what may or may n...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   They don’t make summers like they used to in David Greig’s new play, which plops its title characters in the Fife caravan park where they holidayed as teenagers. Amy is on the run from a volatile home life that sees her channelling all her lost dreams of becoming a rock singer into serial adultery. Emma is a lawyer in retreat, with notions of writing a novel. Not one where anything happens, mind. Just a story where people feel. A bit like Two Sisters, in fact.   As Amy and Emma take a cheap holiday to explore their own misery in designer Lisbeth Burian’s rusting hulk of a caravan, this prodigals’ return sees the siblings attempt to recapture how it feels to be sixteen again beyond their black and white grown up lives. When a blast from the past shows up in the shape of maintenance man and DJ Lance, the desire to unleash the terminal adolescent within causes both women to behave as if at some kind of end of term school disco sno...