Coffee-Table Notes

If Subway Sect hadn’t supported The Clash at Edinburgh Playhouse on May 7th 1977, it’s unlikely Postcard Records, Fast Product and Fire Engines would have happened. Thirty-one years on, Vic Godard’s latest Subway Sect is sharing a bill with Henderson’s new incarnation as The Sexual Objects. For Douglas McIntyre, boss of the Fast/Postcard styled Creeping Bent label and in the thick of the original Sound of Young Scotland since year zero, these two dates (Glasgow also features The Leopards, whose guitarist Mick Slaven recently guested with ex Josef K front-man Paul Haig) are a match made in rock n’ roll heaven. “To me,” says McIntyre, “Vic Godard is undoubtedly the best writer to come out of the whole post-punk movement. I remember the words on the back cover of the single ‘Ambition’ blowing my mind. It was full of literary references, and you knew there was something mysterious going on. Then later, seeing Fire Engines play two fifteen minute sets, it was incredible. These people had

Alex Lowde is having a ball. As he peers dreamily into the scaled down black and white model for his set design of Dundee Rep's forthcoming production of Anna Karenina, you can see entire worlds come to life in his eyes. Moving around pieces of tiny furniture inside the model's square box interior, it's as if Lowde has become a character in some child-like epic centred around some fantasy-fuelled princelings who conjure up some kind of magic from their toy theatre as they sit around the fireside. As it is, the bright meeting room at the top of the Rep building may spoil the ambience somewhat, but Tolstoy's own epic yarn as translated by Jo Clifford is probably enough to be getting on with anyway, both in full size and in the miniature replica that sits before us. “It's vast,” Lowde murmurs just out of a costume fitting with the cast and director Jemima Levick, with whom he is collaborating for a sixth time at Dundee following work on Equus, The Elep

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars Growing up in Ireland during the Troubles can't have been easy. Not for nine year old Nuala, scared of no-one as she is. Nor for her teenage big brother Oran who she worships, especially after seeing him in the school nativity play, when she builds him up into some kind of ecclesiastical superhero. And at least in 1979 they have The Undertones, Stiff Little Fingers and Thin Lizzy for comfort. But when Oran's lifeless body is carried from the sea one day without any chance of resurrection, the very sight of him lights the touch paper on a series of emotional shocks that will eventually go off in Nuala's face, changing her life in a way that's still with her ten years after. Tara McKevitt's little fire-cracker of a play is yet another piece in the Tron's Mayfesto season that taps into the all too human collateral damage that any conflict brings in its wake. Performed spunkily by Emma O'Grady in Caroline Lynch'

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars There's a devastating stillness to David Greig's big, audacious sequel to Shakespeare's Macbeth, restaged here in Roxana Silbert's original 2010 Royal Shakespeare Company production care of the National Theatre of Scotland. As English general Siward squares up to Scotland and all its funny ways as defined by the polar opposites of puppet boy king Malcolm and defiant surviving queen of the old order, Gruach, it's as if the entire country is stuck in some long-term limbo, waiting for something to happen. This has nothing to do with nationalism, mind, lest anyone mistake the play's appearance as some fortuitous bi-product of the Holyrood election result. Rather, by using such a back-drop of imagined history, Greig has unleashed a slow-burning and profound meditation on life in a land occupied and overseen by some misguided but well-armed peace-keeping force that can only end in a stubbornly personal war of at

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars Family fall-outs are one of several threads running throughout The Tron's Mayfesto season this year. Following on from the explosion of sisterly feelings in David Ireland's Everything Between Us, David Harrower's new play, performed by real life brother and sister Lewis and Kathryn Howden, is on the surface at least a far more gentler affair. Athol is a suburban man who long since fled his Edinburgh birthplace for the Renfrewshire town he could only call home after the 2007 Glasgow airport would-be bombers were discovered living there. His sister Morna cleans posh peoples houses back in auld Reekie, though the mercurial streak that sent her on her own wayward path remains intact. When Morna's son Joshua lands on Athol's doorstep after a fourteen-year silence between the siblings, an everyday tale of painful estrangement gradually unravels. Told in a series of interlocking monologues, Harrower's story is on one le

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars When a demented young woman is dragged kicking and screaming into a back room of Northern Ireland's Stormont parliament on the first day of a post-Troubles truth and reconciliation committee, old wounds, it seems, appear harder to heal than ever. Especially as Teeni has just punched the black South African chairwoman in the face while simultaneously hurling racial abuse. But Teeni and Sandra, the committee member who's taken charge of her, are sisters, and eleven years after a drink-sodden Teeni disappeared after pulling a knife on Sandra's new born baby, they've a lot of catching up to do. What unravels in David Ireland's blistering seventy-minute two-hander for the Belfast-based Tinderbox company is an unflinching bundle of rage that lays bare the deep-set emotional scars that are the collective aftermath of any conflict. Where Teeni is ablaze with too much energy and anger, with no outlet save to lash out at those w

Tramway, Glasgow, until December 7th 2008 4 stars Who says the world isn’t flat? Not, one suspects, any of the six artists playing with personas, pseudo-science, imagined histories and parallel universes in a show that creates a set of brand new myths made in their own (self) image. The first thing you see is a series of billboard-size hoardings featuring a publicity still of 1990s Glasgow band A.C. Acoustics. In real life noted for a low-key and lo-fi presence on Glasgow’s indie scene, the monumental scale of Michael Fullarton’s posters suggests all-consuming world-domination on a monumental scale. Two smaller paintings tucked to the side accentuate the effect. Peter Friedl’s ‘Liberty City’ loops the sort of blurred verite sensationalism seen on late-night true crime reality TV shows. As rioters kick a cop senseless, you’re willing whoever’s filming to intervene. The realisation that it’s a reconstruction of actual riots don’t make you feel any less uneasy. Beside it, Gabriella Va