Coffee-Table Notes

Where did all the working class photographers go? This was a question posed by Johny Pitts when he started thinking about curating the exhibition that became After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024. The answer comes in images by a diverse array of more than twenty-five artists that make up the exhibition. As the show arrives in Edinburgh from the Hayward Gallery as part of a UK tour, it highlights an often-overlooked era in British photography.   “A s a kid I started to see the old world disappear, and this new world ushered in by neo liberal capitalism,’ says Pitts, who draws the title of the exhibition from  American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man . “On the one hand there was the complete destruction of working class community, but then there was this kind of resurrection of it through capitalist consumption. Yet what lingers are the ghosts of a working class culture, and even within th...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars    When Dawn Sievewright stands at the front of an empty stage wielding a guitar at the end of Nicole Taylor’s stage version of her Tom Harper directed hit 2018 film, it doesn’t matter whether she is acting anymore. For the previous two and a half hours Sievewright has owned the Lyceum stage as Rose-Lynn Harlan, the big city girl with a tragic back-story and a dream of becoming a Country music star in Nashville. As she sings a heart rending version of Glasgow (No Place Like Home), the only song especially composed for the film, Sievewright transcends any fictional rendition to become the star Rose-Lynn so aspired to be.   Sievewright provides the heart and soul of John Tiffany’s all singing, all-dancing production, and is one of the many magnificent things about it. From the moment Rose-Lynn prepares to leave prison accompanied by a foot-tapping ensemble rendition of Primal Scream’s Country Girl onwards, Taylor, Tiffany and ...

The Studio, Edinburgh Three stars   Wanna' buy a bridge? Maybe later, but before we begin, a history lesson. Between 1820 and 1837, a Scottish soldier called Gregor MacGregor fairly successfully attempted to get hundreds of believers to invest in a country in Central America he claimed to rule called Poyais. When those who bought into MacGregor’s promised land sailed out to embrace their new homestead, alas, they found only uninhabitable jungle. Or so we’re led to believe.    Such a back story is about as true to life as it gets in Liam Rees’s solo show, in which he explores our willingness to suspend disbelief and put our faith in pretty much anything a smart talking huckster like MacGregor can offload, however non-existent it might be. Rees does this in an affable mix of pop history lecture and shaggy dog stand-up routine, in which he double bluffs the audience with geeky charm, only to bamboozle them with what may or may not be details of his own personal history. He t...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four stars   Down by the docks they’re talking tough in James Graham’s stage adaptation of Alan Bleasdale’s classic twentieth century TV drama. For the unlikely Liverpool lads thrown on the scrap heap in the thick of 1980s Thatcher’s Britain, all that talk won’t pay their rent or feed their kids. As each man moves from dole office to cash in hand desperation to an increasingly volatile home life, the Kafkaesque absurdities of the dole office ‘sniffers’ become the enemy.    Licking their wounds from the disaster of a get rich quick job a year ago, Chrissie, Loggo, Yosser, George, Dixie and Dixie’s son Kevin’s lives collapse like the wall on the dodgy building site that kills old George’s political firebrand son Snowy. Beyond ideology, the survivors are felled by a kind of collective emasculation.   While Graham’s script remains faithful to Bleasdale’s original, Kate Wasserberg’s production steps out of its naturalistic roots with a series of the...

The Pavilion, Glasgow Four stars   American dreams don’t come much more broken in Arthur Miller’s slow burning 1949 tragedy, brought to life here in Andy Arnold’s mighty production, led by a towering performance from David Hayman at its centre.    Hayman is Willy Loman, the veteran salesman as past his sell by date as some of the wares he’s been hawking for more years than he can remember. Where once he was apparently a hot shot, charming the buyers in Boston and beyond, now he can barely earn enough to pay off all the things he and his wife Linda have bought into. This built in obsolescence of a clapped out fridge and other domestic goods becomes a symbol of the ruthless disposability of consumer capitalism. Willy may be over the hill, but next year’s model will be along any second.    Throw in the terminal underachievement of Willy and his wife Linda’s two sons, Happy and Biff, the missed opportunities with his brother Ben, and the guilt of being caught out in...

Perth Theatre Four stars   When D.H. Lawrence wrote his novel The Rainbow in 1915, his tale of three generations of working class lives saw it hauled before the courts on obscenity charges. More than a thousand copies of the book were burnt, rendering it unavailable in the UK for eleven years in an early example of cancel culture.   Given such an extreme response, one can only speculate what cultural gatekeepers might have made of writer Nicola Werenowska and director Jo Newman’s audacious new stage version, which rips into Lawrence’s story to focus on the three women at its heart.   Lydia is the widowed Polish refugee who lands in rural mid nineteenth century Nottinghamshire where she marries Tom, sevral years her junior. Anna, Lydia’s daughter from her first marriage, inherits her mother’s individualism as she embarks on her own domestic battle. By the time Anna’s own daughter Ursula comes of age, the new freedoms she embraces appear to make anything possible. What foll...

David Keenan’s debut novel, This is Memorial Device (2017), erupted into view like a counter cultural dam bursting. The book’s wild depiction of small town Scottish post punk pop life was based around the short lived crash and burn of a group called Memorial Device.   Keenan’s epic immortalisation of the ultimate legends in their own living room seemed to come from the inside, as Keenan conjured up an entire parallel universe. When the stage adaptation of the book was first performed at Edinburgh College of Art’s Wee Red Bar, a poster for a Memorial Device show remains there to this day.   After five more novels in as many years, such devotion to detail can be seen and heard in Volcanic Tongue – A Time-Travelling Evangelist’s Guide to Late 20 th Century Underground Music. Keenan’s bumper-sized compendium of music writing culled from his years as the Wire magazine’s evangelist in chief is accompanied by a compilation album of the same name. This features the sort of no-fi auteu...