Coffee-Table Notes

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars   “You are us,” says the Inquisitor of Peter Arnott’s play to his silent Prisoner at one point. This is a telling moment in this unspecified war of attrition that reveals the similarities as much as the differences between those in one conflict or another. Whether political, religious or generational, as the Inquisitor expounds on morality, ethics and all the contradictions at play that give us the excuse to square any circle we like in the name of whatever cause is going, for a veteran like him, this time it seems, it’s also personal.    Tom McGovern’s Inquisitor is every inch the establishment mandarin in Liz Carruthers’ suitably elliptical production, the final lunchtime offering from A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s spring and summer season. Sat in the old school splendour of designer Heather Grace Currie’s set, McGovern waxes forth from his desk while his Prisoner, initially bound, but always captive, acts as a human sounding board, never givin...

As the Creeping Bent Organisation winds down operations after thirty years on the frontline of art/pop interface, it is only fitting that one of its swan song releases gets back to its roots. As one of the label’s mainstays from the start, The Secret Goldfish do this on their fourth opus through a collection of cover versions guest-starring a posse of fellow travellers. As a work in progress on the go since 1996, the result is a delirious pop mash-up of influence and homage that joins several generations of assorted rock family tree type dots while still sounding every inch The Secret Goldfish.   Much of this is down to vocalist Katy Lironi, who takes songs by Vic Godard, ex Orange Juice guitarist James Kirk and Fire Engine turned Sexual Object Davy Henderson and makes them her own. There is something Proustian too hearing Lironi sing the Shop Assistants’ mournful Somewhere in China, Godard’s Stop That Girl and Henderson’s Nectarine No 9 era 22 Blue with a cast list that includes G...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   Teenage dreams have rarely sounded sweeter than in Sam Hardie’s loving revival of Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s original piece of rock and roll revivalism. Jacobs and Casey’s quifftastic confection may have been sweetened for Randal Kleiser’s smash hit movie that saw John Travolta and Olivia Newton John keep both the punk and disco hordes at bay from the number 1 pop chart slot in the summer of ‘78, but happy days are here again in a show that takes its moves more from the original stage show.    As good girl Sandy spars with tough guy Danny after a holiday romance that sees them join forces with their respective gangs once school starts. What follows sees them make a song and dance of an everyday tale of first love, peer group pressure, youth cult tribes, the growing pains of friendship and learning to be who you want to be that points to teen drama past, present and future. The mass earworm familiarity of Jacobs and...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars    A storm is brewing over Mull in Amy Conway’s new comedy thriller that forms the latest offering from A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s current season of lunchtime theatre. Agnes and her American TV actor husband James have arrived late at the old house where they are having a belated honeymoon. Greeted unexpectedly by housekeeper Mrs Carlin, Agnes and James are also seeking to escape other domestic pressures. Once things start going bump in the night, however, old ghosts making their presence felt sees things spiral into a nightmare. Only when Agnes confronts a few demons does the storm calm.    Shades of Inside Number 9’s meticulously observed pastiches of hammy horror pulp fiction TV tropes abound in Katie Slater’s production of Conway’s script. This is the case from the creepy portrait of the former lady of the house Constance Laird resembling real life characters, to Manasa Tagica’s Jack appearing to believe he is in a reality show. ...

As the necessary historicisation of Scotland’s pre digital but all too recent artistic past runs on apace, it is vital that collections are put on show to remind year zero types that the world didn’t begin with NFTs and AI, but with hard graft and artistic vision.     So it goes with Story, which fills Edinburgh Printmakers’ downstairs gallery with what is effectively a greatest hits selection that joins the dots between Edinburgh Printmakers’ assorted homes since it was founded in 1967 in Victoria Street as The Printmakers’ Workshop. Seen together, the forty works on show also become something of a rough guide to the high rollers of contemporary Scottish art since then.   Drawn from Edinburgh Printmakers’ permanent collection, the exhibition begins with the muscularity of work by John Bellany, Jock McFadyen, Ken Currie and Peter Howson, as well as pieces from Sam Ainsley and Carol Rhodes. This moves onwards to several generations of art stars, with contributions from the...

Saturday lunchtime in Dundee’s City Square, and the Gods walk amongst us. The red carpet is out on the steps of the Caird Hall leading inside to the Marryat Hall, and the Square is alive with noise. As Dundee Community Youth Orchestra rehearse a horn-led number that sounds like an off-cut from the soundtrack to cult 1970s film The Wicker Man, a stall run by KennardPhillipps, the artist duo of Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps, is being set up for people to screen-print their own t-shirts.    Another stall invites passers by to toss celestial looking laurels on to hooks to win a mystery teapot. A group of students are dressed in homemade outfits that look like a miniature Stonehenge. Co-curator of the day’s events Laura McSorley walks across the Square wielding what appears to be a gold  lamé  bullhorn.   At the far end of the Square, the drums and chants of pro and counter refugee based demos may not be part of the official spectacle at the Caird Hall end, bu...

Palestine Museum Scotland is hard to miss in its new home in the heart of Edinburgh’s commercial gallery district. The two artworks that fill the Museum’s windows looking out on to Dundas Street are a striking introduction to this holistic initiative set up by Palestinian American Faisal Saleh as the first such venture in Europe.   Inside, the gallery floor is dominated by a map of Palestine in 1948 that features the names of 500 villages destroyed by Israel that year during the Nakba, in which more than 800,000 Palestinians were driven from their homeland. These names have been reinstated into the landscape by historian Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, who, aged ten, was himself forced from his home during the Nakba to seek refuge elsewhere.   The map is flanked on one side by a painting by veteran Palestinian artist, Samia Halaby, which shows idyllic looking fields spread out across the canvas. “It’s a typical Palestinian landscape before it was cut up,” Saleh explains. “It’s the sort ...