Coffee-Table Notes

Liquid Room, Edinburgh 4 stars It’s the drums you notice first with the Go! Team. Not the sound, as their relentless pounding pretty much gets submerged by the glorious sample-heavy hip-hop indie-schmindie din that defines their pick-and-mix post-modern aesthetic. Rather, it’s the star-shaped flashing neon lights that adorn the twin bass drums as if they were bought as a job lot at a Glitter Band fire sale to define the Brighton sextet’s cartoon image. Not that they’ve needed it, ever since Go! Team mastermind Ian Parton was forced to form a band to play Thunder, Lightning, Strike, the Mercury Music Prize nominated debut he cut and pasted on his Mum’s kitchen table. With their just released third album, Rolling Blackouts, adopting a more conventional if just as restless songwriting approach, there’s a mission accomplished feel to the accompanying tour, and Parton has already hinted that this may be the last we see of the Go! Team in their current form. Not that there’s any let-up in en

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars Which came first, chicken or egg? You’d be as well asking this age-old philosophical question of puppeteer Nicole Mossoux and composer Patrick Bonte, who as Compagnie Mossoux-Bonte brought their latest show, Kefar Nahum, to this year’s Manipulate festival of visual theatre last week. Named after the village that existed beside the Sea of Galilee and more commonly known to westerners as Capernaum, Kefar Nahum attempts to get to the biblical essence of creation via a series of fantastical creatures created from assorted detritus and soundtracked by the glitches of Bonte’s live electronic score. It’s a blink and you’ll miss it affair, mind, as evolution moves on before you’re ever allowed to get a handle on what makes its ancestors tick. Even with such quick-fire constructions, however, Mossoux and Bonte manage to serve up an eye-popping array of creatures on the road to extinction. And so to Jerk, French auteur Giselle Vienne’s astonishing staging of A

In August 1977 I bought a seven inch single by a punk band called The Adverts. It was a song called Gary Gilmore’s Eyes, which presented a two and a half minute narrative told in the first person by a man who’d undergone an eye transplant which had seen him fitted with the corneas of Gary Gilmore. In January that year, the real Gary Gilmore was killed by firing squad after insisting that the death sentence he was given following two murders he committed in Utah be fulfilled. Gilmore also requested that his eyes be used for transplant purposes, and within hours of his execution, two people received his corneas. So, here was a record taking a real life incident and turning it into a fiction that fitted perfectly with the self-destructive, nihilistic iconography of punk. There was mild tabloid outrage, although Gary Gilmore’s Eyes made the lower reaches of the UK pop charts, and The Adverts even appeared miming to it on Top of the Pops. It didn’t end there. In 1979, Norman Mailor fictiona

Blythe Duff likes being in control. As indeed does the character played by the veteran Taggart actor in Just Checking, the new one-woman play Duff stars in at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre over the next two weeks. Which is why, despite being about to grace prime time TV screens for yet another stint after twenty years as Detective Sergeant Jackie Reid on the day we speak, Duff has founded her own company to explore other ventures on stage and screen she might not otherwise be cast in. In Just Checking, for instance, Duff plays Izzy Grant, a go-getting career woman on the fast track to success, with a dream job and a dreamy boyfriend, but whose aversion to cats, the number nine and diseases finds her ordered little world gradually falling apart. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder isn’t the obvious subject for a one-woman comedy, but Duff’s collaboration with director Liz Carruthers, writer Karen McLachlan and composer and member of The Blue Nile PJ Moore for Duff’s newly constituted Datum Point Pro

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars It’s a foolhardy theatre company that crams a full-length contemporary epic with a cast of fifteen into the Tron’s Changing House studio space with zero budget and expects not to come a cropper. Yet, by getting creative and employing a refreshingly twenty-first century Poor Theatre aesthetic to Peter Arnott’s 2003 tale of two cities set in nineteenth century Edinburgh, Bill Wright’s boldy named shoestring outfit, Rekindle Theatre, have achieved exactly that. Dividing its time between New Town drawing rooms where cross-class indiscretions are silently indulged, and old town flop-houses where gentlemen go slumming for rough trade, Arnott’s play is a masterly study of upstairs/downstairs hypocrisy. The old-fashioned tripod camera that sits at the centre of a bare stage at its start will eventually expose all of this, belonging as it does to the widowed Cloon, who takes pictures of women at work even as he falls for his servant. His friend Chanterelle, meanwhi

You won’t find many people in Jean-Marc Bustamante’s work. If you can see the wood for the trees in his multi-format array of working materials that form an architectural whole, the impression, as should be seen in much of ‘Dead Calm’, a major solo show which opens at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery this month, is of a solitary onlooker taking documentary snapshots of dirty back roads and deserted Ballardian swimming pools. Early work especially looks culled from extensive visits to assorted building sites, Bustamante’s more recent output seems to have found a play-room to call his own among, or usually within, the debris. All of which sounds at odds with the French artist’s personality as much as form and content rub up against each other in the work. “It’s nice to be in a foreign country,” Bustamante muses down the line from Munich, where he teaches painting. “I’m not the sort of artist who works all day in the studio. I need to go out and see things and exchange ideas, so for me to

There’s something very dark at the heart of this year’s Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival. Now in its fourth year, Puppet Animation Scotland’s week-long showcase of hybrid forms involving puppetry, film and animation intermingling with live performers features eleven different events at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre which mine the more immersive sides of the human psyche. The two most striking wares on offer may take radically different approaches, but the worlds they inhabit nevertheless remain striking enough to both captivate and disturb. At the start of the week, archaically inclined ensemble 1927 return with the long awaited follow-up to their Herald Angel winning Edinburgh Festival Fringe hit, Between The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, which blended animation and silent movie piano with a cut-glass parlour-room presentation of a selection of fantastically gothic short stories. The new piece is the equally extravagantly titled The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, a full-len