Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 5 stars When John Byrne is asked by fellow playwright Chris Hannan about his use of language in his seminal slice of Scots working class tragic-comedy, The Slab Boys, Byrne states how the baroque, pop culture savvy patois that drives the drama came from a hatred of “pedestrian” writing. Byrne singles out mundane lines like ‘What time is it?’ as a particular example of naturalistic banality. Ten minutes later, actresses Charlene Boyd and Julie Duncanson are on the floor acting out a scene from the play between glamourpuss Lucille and tea lady Sadie. In an already hilarious set of exchanges, Duncanson utters the self-same line just dissed by its author, and the packed audience erupts at the gloriously contrary joy of what has just occurred. Subtitled The Traverse, New Writing and How it Changed the World, this first of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Staging The Nation Events gathered together many of the key players who helped sire The Slab Boys and duly u

The room looks like a bombed-out kindergarten, and through an amped-up ipod Joe Jackson is singing something about pretty women out walking with gorillas on his street. The floor is carpeted with piles of upturned books, a paddling pool filled with soil and assorted goblets, buckets and other casual detritus. At the centre of the room inside a circle chalked on the floor is a large banquet table that seems to have been the venue hosting a particularly unruly chimps tea party. The walls are lined with sheets of A4 paper with assorted self-help mantras scrawled on. ‘You cannot change another’, reads one. ‘You can only change yourself. ‘It is good to step into another’s shoes’, declaims another. As the music plays, four people clamber about the room, trying on coats and hats, picking up assorted props, or, in one case, hanging upside down beneath the banquet table. Two of the people, Andy Manley and Ros Sydney, are actors, and such behaviour should probably be expected from such professio

Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh 4 stars On paper the Phantom Band shouldn’t work. The Glasgow sextet’s unholy stew of Green-era REM guitars, Scots folk balladeering, motorik Krautrock rhythm and Appalachian Americana tugs in so many ways – quite often all in the same song - it should all collapse in on itself in disaster. As their debut album Checkmate Savage and 2010’s follow-up The Wants proved, however, it makes for thrilling listening. Live it’s even better, as is the support from Chemikal Underground labelmates FOUND, the Edinburgh trio who, for their third album, Factorycraft, have stripped down, grown some muscles and let rip where loose-fit post Beta Band stylings used to sit. So fiercely focused is their pot-pourri of electronic squiggles and wigged-out references to Vincent Gallo and Johnny Cash, that vocalist Ziggy Campbell not only breaks a string on his own guitar, but also on the borrowed Phantom Band axe that replaces it. Three of the Phantom Band sport woo

Kings Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars ‘Your Country Needs You’ says the empire-building legend on the stage curtain as an accusatory pre-cursor to David Grindley’s mighty and elegiac production of R.C. Sherriff’s World War One play, which, more than eighty years after it first appeared, seems as tragically pertinent as ever. Set in a British officers dug-out on the eve of the March 1918 German offensive, it’s a bleak and twitchy world we’re led into, that resembles an extension of a public school dormitory, with all the same pecking orders intact. Top of the heap is Stanhope, a once heroic figure whose mercurial nature has been tempered by terror, self-loathing and whisky after three years in charge on the frontline. Into this highly-strung emotional morass comes Raleigh, who hero-worshipped Stanhope at school, and now sees war as some kind of Boys Own romance. The shell-shocked reality, however, is starkly different. Jonathan Fenson’s claustrophobic, candle-lit set looks almost sepia tinte

The Queen's Gallery, Edinburgh 3 stars The best Royal portrait ever was a line drawing gracing the cover of post-punk zine City Fun in 1981 to commemorate the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Di. A classic image of the happy couple was waggishly reconfigured so the couldn’t-believe-his-luck fruitcake’s hand was stuffed into his doomed fiance’s blouse, groping away like bilio. While something similarly disrespectful should accompany Wills and Kate’s forthcoming nuptials, there’s none of that in this handsomely displayed archive of the definitive Royal snapper, primarily because Adams ditched his subjects once puberty got the better of them. Leaving aside how Adams would probably end up on the sex register today, we take a sepia-tinted tour through the birth of Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, through to HRH’s own offspring Charles and Anne, and a subsequent slice of the twentieth century establishment en route. Princesses Liz and Mags seem to lose their sparkle as they get older

InSpace, Edinburgh, April 22nd How do you go from being a core member of experimental electronic pioneers Cabaret Voltaire to becoming David Attenburgh and Bill Oddie’s favourite sound recordist, with the odd radio documentary and installation for assorted sonic arts festivals thrown in for good measure? Sheffield-born Touch Records recording artiste Chris Watson doesn’t have an answer for his seemingly wayward career trajectory over the last thirty-odd years, but, on the eve of a trip to Iceland to make a programme for BBC Radio 4 prior to a week-long Edinburgh residency care of Edinburgh International Science Festival in association with left-field music promoters Dialogues, neither does he see much difference between his assorted outlets. “I’m essentially a sound recordist,” Watson enthuses, “and I don’t see any distinction between any of the things I do. Something I might do for TV might end up informing an installation work, but what I get excited by is the release of moving out o

Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh until April 17th 4 stars Two female artists bridge the last two centuries in these contrasting but complimentary shows. Cahun’s all-angles black and white photographs on the top floor of the gallery captures the artist’s striking singularity via a series of portraits that look like an early twentieth century pre-punk template for equally studied images by Patti Smith. Downstairs, meanwhile, ex Life Without Buildings chanteuse Tompkins expands her adventures with text-based pieces by utilising safety pins and other accoutrements into her palette. With her text pieces becoming increasingly minimal on paper at least, the opening of Tompkins’ show saw her perform her opus ‘Hallo Welcome To Keith Street’ in full. Reading from a thick swadge of paper scrappily bound in a folder, Tomkins gave a gleeful rendition of what sounds like a very personal set of free-associations, bippetty-boppitying about in front of the gallery’s lift over the piec