Coffee-Table Notes

City Art Centre, Edinburgh until March 6th 3 stars There’s something slightly claustrophobic seeing Ian Hamilton Finlay’s work indoors. As anyone who’s basked in the glories of the radical polymath’s Little Sparta garden in Lanarkshire will be aware, Hamilton Finlay was so at one with nature that a civic gallery space doesn’t seem right somehow. This first floor exhibition sets a small selection of works alongside complimentary material by fellow travelers Paolozzi, George Wylie, Nathan Coley and Kenny Hunter, with two recently acquired sculptures as its apparent centerpiece. An entire wall is devoted to Martyn Greenhalgh’s moodily serene photographs of Little Sparta itself. As if confirming a life-long quest for somewhere purer, sailing boats are to the fore among Hamilton Finlay’s classicist allusions. Of the newly acquired works, ‘Two Temples: To Apollo His Music-His Missiles-His Music’ consists of two biscuit-tin size slate drums. The title piece is carved with the same wording as

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars There’s a revelatory moment in the third part of Conor Lovett’s astonishingly sustained solo rendering of Samuel Beckett’s trilogy of novels that get to the very core of identity, mortality and existence. It comes when Lovett, locked in the rolling interior monologue of The Unnamable and standing in some neo-realist angled doorway, turns to look at his own shadow towering above him. As the two figures seem to stare each other out, it’s as if there’s a monkey on the real man’s back that’s bigger, all-seeing and intangible as it guards the gateway to the abyss. Such an image is the perfect metaphysical illustration to a show that begins with the sound of a wordless aria by Gorecki, and ends in empty, blacked-out silence. Lovett steps out of the audience and into a large spotlight for Molloy, the most conventionally realised of the three works in Judy Hegarty Lovett’s demandingly austere production for Dublin’s Gare St Lazare Players. What emerges over

The first time you chance upon a Conquering Animal Sound live affair, you might well be forgiven for tip-toeing back outside again. As the Edinburgh sired duo’s just released debut album, ‘Kammerspiel’ should indicate at its Edinburgh launch, the CAS sound is a willfully private affair involving Anneke Kampman’s uniquely hushed vocals looped into some ethereal multi-tracked chorale and tickled into melodious shape by Jamie Scott’s array of toy instruments, cheap keyboards and understated electronics. Together, they wash over each other with a warm, small-time sensuality designed for those wordless moments you can’t help but snuggle into, but which threaten to fall apart any second Taking their name from the glories of 1980s Jamaican Dub sound system Conquering Lion Sound, the more inclusive CAS have come a long way since being thrown together on a university popular music course and forced to play a version of Stevie Wonder’s 1973 pop-funk smash, ‘Superstition.’ Their sound, however, i

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 2 stars History records the last few years of twentieth century Britain as a flag-waving riot of unabashed optimism, where Brit-pop, boy-bands and girl power gate-crashed the party side by side and good times trickled down the class scale like never before. If the nineties were just the sixties turned upside down, things aren’t quite so clear cut in the Sheffield terrace where Simon Crowther’s play for the newly regrouped Raindog theatre company is set. This is where Craig Porter’s Jed has fled from 1996 Paisley for a new life away from the mates he grew up with, and where he can acquire himself an Amazonian girlfriend, a new set of bad habits and an aspirational vocabulary to see him through. But the appearance of his best pal Skarloey the night before his sister’s wedding quickly followed by sidekick Chubby and his new girl’s best friend Zoe throws everything out of whack, as a stream of revelations threaten to change things forever. While Crowther seems to be a

Freya Mavor is finding it hard to fit in interviews this week. The seventeen-year old is into extreme essay writing for her final year dissertation on organ donation which forms part of her studies in religious and moral philosophy at an Edinburgh independent school. As if her studies weren’t making life hectic enough, Mavor is dashing between Edinburgh, London and Bristol to promote the new series of Skins, the in-your-face yoof TV drama she’s just joined as part of the third generation of young upstarts who muscle into series five of the programme, the first episode of which airs on E4 next week. In the programme, Mavor plays Mini McGuinness, whose willowy blonde good looks may have all the boys swooning over her, but whose queen bee demeanor masks a more vulnerable side. For someone who’s never acted professionally before, Mavor’s screen debut is pretty striking. “I was very apprehensive about what it was going to be like”, Mavor says of filming on location in Bristol.

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars The power of any Arthur Miller play comes, not from the surface machismo that drives them, but from the human frailty that lies behind it. So it is with his masterly study of the ultimate blue collar betrayal through the actions of Brooklyn longshoreman Eddie Carbone, whose inarticulate affections for his teenage niece Catherine bring about his demise. There are few directors more sensitive to Miller’s world than John Dove, who over the last seven years has been working his way through the writer’s canon on the Lyceum stage with a striking sense of low-key ritual that goes way beyond any natural actor’s tendency for bombast. The tone is set from the off here with Liam Brennan’s Alfieri, the street-smart lawyer and narrator of the piece who provides the play’s moral centre while at the same time keeping a cool distance from the action. The key to the play is the line, “You can get back quicker a million dollars you stole than a word you gave away,

When John Cooper Clarke declaimed an epigrammatic “Why struggle?” at the opening of his final late-night 2010 Edinburgh Festival Fringe show in his trademark deadpan northern twang, the statement was a typically double-edged mix of the philosophical and the practical. While the be-suited and be-shaded bard of Salford’s proclamation smacked of existential enquiry, in actual fact the motor-mouthed stick-insect was merely moving a table closer to the microphone in order to rest his bag full of verses on top and within reach. What follows is a rapid-fire barrage of rhyming vignettes that map out life’s everyday absurdities with a decidedly surrealist vision. Hire cars, not so wedded bliss with a bug-eyed extra-terrestrial and a verbal picture postcard on the salubrious delights of Greater Manchester’s satellite suburbs are all in the mix, each one punctuated with the driest of one-liners that rounds Cooper Clarke’s act up into the deadliest of routines. All this and slumland grimoir ‘Beasl