Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse @ Lyceum Studio Four stars   Paul Ready’s new solo work ends as it begins, as a talking point concerning a matter of life and death. With the audience sat in a circle in the harsh light of the Lyceum rehearsal room, Ready stands at the centre, his unnamed character dressed in a city boy suit that belies his gentle delivery. He could be about to do a TED talk or some ghastly presentation illustrated with slides and whatever the digital equivalent of flip charts might be. As it is, as he paces, he is preparing to give a eulogy to his best friend Richard, who died drowning.    As we are told, Ready’s character and Richard had been inseparable ever since they were kids, and if things had turned out differently, they would have likely seen out their dotage together. Somewhere along the way, however, the world changed, and what for Ready’s character was a life of aspiration and acquisition, for Richard became one of opposition as he tried to save the planet. With moral...

Collective, Edinburgh 4 Stars The 197 reconstructed ancient amulets that make up Katie Paterson’s latest artistic and environmental excavation are laid out on a bespoke round table designed by international architects Zeller & Moye, and made out of sycamore by East Lothian based Silvan Studio. The display may bring to mind the sort of hipster emporium where magic happens after dark as demons are invoked, but each intricately constructed piece that makes up Paterson’s sculptural installation has a story of its own.   Made from materials drawn from landscapes and environments under threat, the five sections - Biosphere; Hydrosphere; Cryosphere; Place & Climate; and Wildfire - cast Paterson as a Scheherazade like figure. As she breathes new life into old forms, it is a reminder of their strength gathered across centuries.    Gathered together as both memorial and homage, as Paterson’s labours bring home the fragile eco system each piece sprung from, as a brand n...

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh Four stars    When Gwen John (1876-1939) wrote how ‘A beautiful life is one led, perhaps, in the shadow, but ordered, regular, harmonious’ it was a self aware summation of her own quiet devotions, both in life and work.    The Edinburgh leg of this major exhibition in partnership with Amgueddfa Cymru - Museum Wales in Cardiff prior to dates at Yale Center for British Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, marks the 150 th anniversary of John’s birth. It brings together more than 200 of her paintings, contextualised here in such a way as to reveal the connections, repetitions and variations pursued by John with an understated but passionate intensity.   This runs throughout her portraits of unsmiling women, her beloved cat, and the nuns she looked to after converting to Catholicism. With each set lined up in groups, one can play a game of spot the difference with the same enigmatic ...

The Studio Four stars   Hollywood might have ended up a very different place if America’s House Un-American Activities Committee hadn’t assured everyone they accused of being communists was blacklisted. One of those questioned by the committee was Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright who had already been in exile since he left Germany in 1933 as the rise of the Nazis left his politically charged work somewhat out of goosestep.    Having only been in America for a year when he appeared before the HUAC in 1947, he left the country the day after and eventually went back to East Germany, where he founded the Berliner Ensemble. As with other great drama created by HUAC hounded artists, such unintended consequences can create great accidental legacies.    Brecht’s exile and his appearance before the committee are the starting point for this intense construction by Lebanese artistic duo Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué. Presented alongside pianist Henrik Kair...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   The world doesn’t end in Oliver Emanuel’s play, but sometimes that’s how it feels. Over its bite-size 70-minute duration, Emanuel’s play is a living monument that preserves the emotional paper trails that chart the magic moments of people’s lives. Originally seen in a studio based version in 2024, the play charts the love affair of two people, played here by Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson, who become arbiters of something eternal that came in the shape of this play.    He is a terminal adolescent who’s just been chucked hard enough to provoke him to spend his nights playing Radiohead at full blast. She is living next door, and puts a postcard through his letterbox to ask him to turn that racket down. When they meet, the rest is history. As we watch them relive their life together, that history is barely contained in a box of old tickets, receipts, a jar of confetti and magical origami creations.    The play was wr...

King’s Theatre, Five stars   America is sick in Tony Kushner’s epic evocation of the rise of AIDS and its political fallout in what eventually becomes a visionary hymn of hope. Thirty-four years since Kushner’s two-part magical realist fantasia first appeared, the world has changed and changed again in radical fashion, with sex in the city a very different proposition these days and big pharma ramping up the prices of life saving medication.    Despite the play’s 1980s setting, Ivo van Hove’s International Theater Amsterdam revival of a production first seen in 2008 nevertheless reads like a tragicomic state of the nation prophecy of today’s increasingly dark times and how we got here. An early riff between one of the play’s key couples lays out the 57 varieties of migrant that make up the American diaspora, with the near five hour performance being played in Dutch adding to the international melting pot.    Shortened from the play’s original seve...

Dovecot Four stars    Jack Ellis was a teenage schoolboy when he first stumbled on the masterpieces of Vincent Van Gogh. This came after he was banished to the library by his art teacher after talking too much in class. This happy accident has stayed with Ellis for life, to the extent that he now lives in Arles, the South of France haven where in 1888 the Dutch master attempted to gather together like minds to form a brotherhood of artists. Only Paul Gauguin, alas, turned up to the party. As these two very different but equally driven artistic personalities spent the next nine weeks making work, this was where the fun began.    Ellis relates his very personal history of Van Gogh and Gauguin’s time in Arles in a script and production concocted with Edinburgh Fringe veteran John Retallack. As the audience lend their ears, Ellis relates the story in a conversational style that sees him slip in and out of character as both artists.    Crucial to the production ...