Coffee-Table Notes

Summerhall Four stars    OCD is the great misunderstood illness, with sufferers misdiagnosed and treated as a joke by many who should no better. Charlotte Anne-Tilley’s new play goes some way to redress the balance by way of Lucy and Claire, two women generations apart, but who go through very similar things.    Lucy is in the last stages of labour, with the prospect of looking after another human blighted by the fact that she’s falling apart. Twenty-five years on, Claire is about to drop out of art school after being unable to cope with panic attacks.    Anne-Tilley’s set up dovetails between Lucy and Claire’s parallel lives with a fluidity that sees Anne-Tilley as Claire and fellow performer Maddy Banks as Lucy double up in Ed White’s production as assorted mothers, grandmothers and lecturers. On one level these are peripheral characters, but in Lucy and Claire’s minds they become obstacles to living free of anxiety.    What follows is...

C alto Four stars   Growing up in Belfast during the 1970s, when the Troubles were at their height, was a traumatic time for Ruairi Conaghan.  Especially when his uncle, a judge, was assassinated on his doorstep by gunmen. By the time of the 1984 Brighton bombing, when a device exploded in the hotel then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was staying in during the Conservative Party conference; Conaghan was set on escaping for an actor’s life in London.   When he is asked to play the man responsible for the bombing in a brand new play that, unlike the victims of violence, might have another life, the experience of meeting him opens up a long buried wound for Conaghan. What follows in Patrick O’Kane’s production is part memoir, part exorcism, as Conaghan squares up to his own past and a brush with near death in a fearless performance that doesn’t flinch from the damage done. As Conaghan comes to terms with old ghosts, his powerful and deeply personal purging reveals a m...

Summerhall Four stars   Bert and Nasi have something to tell us, and they want to make it as clear and simple as possible. This is why this increasingly manic double act take a moment at the start of their new show to explain to the audience exactly what they’re about to do. Which is essentially an extended restaurant routine between a waiter and a customer, with the waiter keeping on pouring into the customer’s wine glass even though it is overflowing. As they do so, alas, the duo manages to tie themselves in semantic knots before they proceed.    Once they get started, they do exactly what they promised with umpteen variations on a theme. Under the directorial guidance of Forced Entertainment’s Tim Etchells, Bert and Nasi become a fantastical living cartoon, taking the everyday absurdities of human behaviour to the limit.    The whirlwind of repetitive action is a hypnotic glimpse into Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas’ Sisyphean Groundhog Day style construction...

Summerhall 4 stars   There’s a riot going on from the start in Apphia Campbell’s dynamic dissection of parallel times, from the 1960s and 1970s civil rights movement to the dawn of Black Lives Matter. These are seen through the eyes of Black Panther on the run Assata Shakur, on the one hand, and a female student, Ambrosia, who is starting college forty years later.    Both women find themselves caught in the state sanctioned crossfire of civil unrest. With Assata on the frontline from the start, Ambrosia’s rude awakening comes by way of the same forces that closed ranks following the fatal shooting of black teenager Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.   Assata and Ambrosia are brought to life with a sense of righteous anger in Caitlin Skinner’s production, with Campbell herself as Assata and Tinashe Warikandwa as Ambrosia. The play’s dramatic fusion of words, music and recorded voices shows how history can repeat itself while laying down ...

Edinburgh Playhouse Five stars   When Martyn Bennett started performing his radical fusion of Scottish traditional music and contemporary beats and samples around underground Edinburgh clubs in the mid 1990s, little did he know where it would end up. Almost two decades since Bennett’s untimely passing, and just shy of ten years since Greg Lawson pulled together an orchestral rendition of Bennett’s final album, GRIT, and the more than eighty strong Lawson led orchestra is still going strong as Bennett’s legacy burls on.    This makes for an epic way to end the 2024 Edinburgh International Festival in a set that builds on Bennett’s already expansive originals to become a musical expression of a global village.   Vocal lead comes from Fiona Hunter and Karen Matheson, with Hunter setting a rousing tone on the opening take on Ewan MacColl’s ‘Move’. This continues with the theatrical fun of ‘Aye?’, jazz saxophone on ‘Wedding’/’Swallowtail’, and a choir and strings as big a...

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 wie...

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...