Coffee-Table Notes

Queen’s Hall Four stars   “I feel emotional,” says Natasha Khan after reading If You Be the Universe, a poem dedicated to her daughter, towards the end of her Edinburgh International Festival show in her terminally spectral guise as Bat for Lashes. Khan may resemble a Victorian sprite in her ornate white dress, but it is motherhood that fired The Dream of Delphi, the first Bat for Lashes album since 2019, just as it becomes the primal drive behind much of Khan’s performance.    Flanked by Laura Groves on keyboards and Charlotte Hatherley on guitar, Khan opens with an elaborate mime during the instrumental introduction to At Your Feet. The title track from the new album sees all three women offer up some kind of choreographed offering to some sacred deity on high.   Khan rewinds to 2019’s vampire girl gang opus, Lost Girls, for the nocturnal wanderings of The Hunger, perching on the edge of the stage for the big time sensuality of the piano led Mountains. She wields what appears to be s

Edinburgh International Book Festival   Four stars   Sinners of one form or another may be partying hard all over Edinburgh just now, but it is the more diabolically inclined breed hiding in plain sight down back alleys and other dark places you have to watch. So it goes in this very twenty-first century take on James Hogg’s 1824 gothic yarn, Confessions of a Justified Sinner.    Put together for Edinburgh International Book Festival by Grid Iron Theatre Company director Ben Harrison and novelist Louise Welsh, the result is part walking tour, part podcast, as those taking part tune in to a download on their smartphone. Through headphones, our guide, aka The Editor, leads us over an hour or so from kirk to kirk and down Old Town closes. Horrible histories of local landmarks are interspersed with filmed scenes that condense Hogg’s tale into YouTube friendly bite size chunks.    This set up stays true to Hogg’s original, with Welsh herself relishing every word as the Editor. Harrison’s fi

The Studio Five stars   The first thing the three Afro-Brazilian women and a man who sit at tables in front of a triptych of screens do is applaud the demise of Brazil’s Bolsonaro regime and the country’s return to democracy. As opening statements go in writer/director Christiane Jatahy’s multi-faceted dissection of the long-term fallout of slavery, racism and blatant power grabs in Brazil, it speaks volumes. As the women recount first-hand litanies of land grabs, assassination and abuse of Brazil’s indigenous black culture, it is as if we are witnesses at some truth and reconciliation hearing.   What follows in Jatahy’s dizzying construction is a remarkable mash up of historical fiction, archive film footage and community ritual that mixes live performance with onscreen re-enactments and surround sound music in an aesthetic fusion that brings its points home with devastating power.   Jatahy’s production draws from contemporary Brazilian writer Itamar Vieira Junior’s best-selling novel

Royal Lyceum Theatre Four stars   David Ireland’s new play for the National Theatre of Scotland takes its name from Alcoholics Anonymous’s twelve step programme to recovery. The fifth step, in which addicts open up and admit their wrongs to themselves and those around them, is regarded by some as the hardest of all. Ireland takes this notion into assorted rooms with a couple of emotionally stunted men and lets them run with it.    Luka is an alcoholic mess, a damaged and strung out young man just starting out on the AA programme. James is his sponsor, older and presumably wiser, but with a lot of baggage of his own. Whatever resembles small talk between these two unreconstructed men soon turns into freeform riffs on sex, sexuality and meeting Hollywood celebrities with ‘the hands of an aristocratic lady or a sad child,’ and who may or may not be Jesus. As Luka and James spar over six short scenes, the power dynamic shifts as loyalties are breached and taboos broken, so an already fract

Assembly  George Square Studio One   4 stars   A little knowledge goes a long way in Cathrine Frost’s solo meditation on birth, life and near death in an ebullient account of her real life experience of pregnancy. While actress turned nurse Frost understands the science with first hand intimacy in a way that ancient Greek philosophers never mentioned, she also opens up with some half naked karate moves, while a volunteer Socrates gets what he’s deserved for centuries. This makes for a highly charged and hugely entertaining emotional outpouring that falls somewhere between performance lecture and stand up confessional.    Directed by Mats  Eldøen for Norway’s Det Andre Teatret, and with a script by Frost,  Eldøen and Marie Ulsberg, Frost’s show and tell sees her recount an experience life changing enough to put her back on the stage. As she casts audience members as various parts of her anatomy, it suddenly dawns on you that many in the room – men, basically - will never have to face th

Pleasance Courtyard Four stars When Britt met Otto, it was love at first laugh. Both clowns doing shows in Adelaide in 2019, the pairembarked on a delirious long distance romance that looks set to end in an on stage wedding to which we’re all invited. As it’s a clown’s wedding, plastic bananas are handed out at the door instead of confetti, and you might even end up a bridesmaid.    While we’re waiting for Otto, Britt has a tale to tell, not just of long distance love, but of  lockdown, citizenship visas and festival shows without her. Britt Plummer does this with little more than a couple of coffee cups, a mop and a jacket to tell her true life story in Jess Clough-MacRae’s production for Plummer’s suitably named Frank. Theatre.    Returning to Edinburgh following a run in 2023, it’s a glorious double bluff of a show  with bags of attitude, as Plummer utilises the DIY puppetry at play to make for an exuberantly executed hour that is  funny, fragile, and, for Plummer, quite possibly pu

Pleasance Courtyard Bunker One Three stars Jessica Regan is unpacking her props box at the opening of her solo memoir of a life in London flats. This is what Regan has effectively been doing for the last twenty years. Moving from Cork to Acton as a hungry young drama student expecting the streets to be swinging, to her soon to be ex abode in Walthamstow, these are the bookends of a life in boxes and the accumulated baggage along the way.     The names of all sixteen of Regan’s former neighbourhoods are pinned up behind her as if waiting for the highest bid as she invites the audience to select one. What follows depending on which district is picked is a selection of yarns that jump across time as well as place to make up a patchwork of temporary addresses, broken relationships and empty rooms.    Regan invites us in to her world with an easy charm as she’s fixing things up. There are a few gaps that need filled in to give things context, but Regan is totally open about how she got here