Coffee-Table Notes

The Captain's Rest, Glasgow Tuesday June 7th 2011 Heroism comes in many forms, but Paul Simpson's ongoing awfully big adventure fronting his reconstituted, reconfigured and on this showing on the first date of a short UK tour thoroughly reignited Wild Swans nom de plume is a sublime experience that falls somewhere between a vintage copy of Boy's Own magazine brought to life and an indie supergroup in excelcis. In a set gleaned largely from new album, The Coldest Winter For A Hundred Years, it's a call to arms from the off, with Simpson's lyrics a one-man campaign against the worst excesses of urban regeneration, his beloved Liverpool in particular seen through a mix of rose-tinted yearning for the days that defined him, and an impassioned despair at the 'dark satanic shopping malls' that have wiped out the fields where Simpson used to play. Set to the shimmeringly busy jangle of former Brian Jonestown Massacre guitarist Ricky Mayme - fresh

Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh until July 3rd 2011 4 stars The relationship between the title of the first museum-based show by Leeds-born sculptor Houseago and the work itself may not be immediately apparent. It's taken from 'Transmission', the urgent post-punk anthem released in 1979 by Joy Division, who implored listeners to 'Dance, dance, dance to the radio'. Wander through the sepulchral marble-white hemp, iron and wood structures possessing Inverleith's ground floor, however, and something monumental grabs hold. It's as if the imposing dome at the centre of a room littered with sawn-off remnants of trees or the bulbous giant leg in the next are paying tribute to the aftermath of some Ballardian dystopia, marking time until whatever happens next. The masks, the walk-through wooden gate and the giant fox-head in the basement further suggest a society getting back to basics. Either that or totems of some primitive c

Dundee Contemporary Arts until July 31st 2011 4 stars If the world is a circle without a beginning and nobody knows where it really ends ('laa-la-laaa-la'), as a zenned-out Hal David once wrote to a Burt Bacharach choon for the big-screen Shangri-la of Charles Jarrott's 1973 remake of 'Lost Horizon', then both Nina Rhode and Cara Tolmie's worlds seem to be on a permanent loop in these wonderfully complimentary shows. For Glasgow-based Tolmie, this comes via two films, one an actual loop of a Death Valley landscape viewed from a speeding car, the other a hand-crafted pop-up toy theatre made with a shoebox, some sticky-back plastic and some close-up cut-outs of a similarly mountainous mural and a window that blows hot and cold. Out of this comes a narrative both domestic and epic, set as it is in a room with a very special view. In her first ever UK solo show, Berlin-based Rhode's series of spinning wheels, cut out shapes and endless mirror im

4 stars This latest excursion in Drew Wright's ongoing adventure in ethno-celtic vocal loops marries two extended pieces back to back on a cassette that comes in a plain brown hand-stamped envelope and wrapped in an offcut of tweed. Where 'Whither?' eventuality morphs into snatches of al green's 'Take me To The River,', flipside 'Wither,' a kind of dub version of the former, comes over more biblical in its bullfrog mantra. The length of both tracks allows Wright's extrapolations space enough to breathe in an ideal accompaniment for Sunday afternoon strolls up Arthur's Seat with bigger hills in mind. There's even a plaster in case you trip on the crags. ends

3 stars The latest graduate of Stow College's music industry course's in-house record label is this Edinburgh five-piecce's collection of epic soundtracks to vocalist Sean Watson's heartfelt lyrical concerns. Delivered in an opaque vocal rasp, this is an album chock-full of widescreen ambition that at times resembles the sublime adventures of late-period Talk Talk mashed-up with Sigur Ros, with its grandiose piano, violin and bass trombone arrangements overlaying the urgent melodrama of the guitars. Watson certainly puts himself through the emotional wringer, and sometimes it all gets too much, but at its sweepingly regal best, this is grown-up heartbreak made for fractured times. The List, June 2011 ends

When a young woman has been left with two black eyes you fear the worst. When that young woman just happens to be an actress appearing in a brutal contemporary play in which power games between the sexes are brought to the fore in a disturbing and claustrophobic fashion, you could be forgiven for speculating on how life imitating art might not necessarily always be such a good thing. As it turns out, the injuries sustained by Nicola Daley, who has just finished a run of Dennis Kelly's play, After The End, in a production directed by Amanda Gaughan at the Citizens Theatre's Circle Studio in Glasgow, are nothing to do with anything that happened onstage. Rather, Daley's two shiners were acquired in an offstage stumble that nevertheless lent her performance opposite Jonathan Dunn in Amanda Gaughan's production an accidental whiff of authenticity. Just as the Citz production has been put to bed, however, another take on After The End prepares to open in Dunde

“If you believe a story’s worth telling, you’ll believe in it to the death.” So said Cora Bissett, director of Roadkill, an astonishing look at sex trafficking close to home and winner of the year’s Best production award at yesterday’s Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland. If ever there was a sentiment that summed up the creative whirlwind of just how much theatre in Scotland is punching well above its weight, Bissett captures it perfectly. This is especially the case in the current economic climate, with cuts in arts funding as inevitable this side of the border as they were recently in England. Bissett accidentally captured the gung ho, never say die approach that makes artists create work in the face of adversity, and the CATS awards rightly celebrates this. Apart from anything else, it also shows off the full diverse range of the work made in Scotland that is a world apart from the London awards scene centred mainly around commercial west end shows. As well as Ro