Coffee-Table Notes

Edinburgh Printmakers until September 3rd 3 stars Drip, drip, drip go the variations on a theme that forms the quartet of works culled from Ian Davenport's 'Etched Puddle' series, in which assorted rainbow-arrayed, candy-striped, multi-coloured streams trickle down into a similarly hued liquid carpet at the bottom of each frame. Seen together, they appear playfully and trippily retro, recalling the opening credits of groovy 1970s teatime alternative to 'Blue Peter', 'Magpie'. In the next room, something similar occurs in one of Julian Opie's four 'Japanese Landscapes', a series of three-dimensional reflective treats akin to old-time breakfast cereal free gifts. This is print-making, Jim, but not as we know it, and it's perhaps telling that both Davenport and Opie are former students of Michael Craig-Martin, whose other, so-much-to-answer-for Goldsmiths alumni include the YBA generation of self-styled art stars. Davenport's

Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh until October 2nd 4 stars Inverleith House has long carved a niche for itself as a champion of late twentieth century American icons, and for the gallery's British Art Show contribution has gathered up a grab-bag of thirty-seven works made between 1982 and 1998 by Abstract Expressionism's original skip-diving grease monkey. This late-period collection is a fast-moving mixture of shine-buffed collages and rust-laden sculptural detritus, as if junkyard and garage had been stripped bare after some Ballardian multiple pile-up on the freeway, then the component parts put back together again on some customised Frankenstein's dragstrip as ornamental signposts forever in motion. Twisted road-signs are heaped together, connecting up neighbourhoods and no-go areas that one would only normally be just passing through. A giant pig is draped in neck-ties. A windmill made of metal strips dominates one room as if oil was

Queens Gallery, Edinburgh until January 15th 2012 3 stars There's something of an inky-fingered Durer overload in the 'burgh just now. Following on from Durer's Fame over at the National Galleries, this sixteenth century compendium of more than a hiundred works uses his output as a springboard for the burgeoning of religious reform and free artistic expression across the continent tellingly illustrated on the 1500 map at the top of the stairs with the British Isles dominating. Not that there's anything from dear old blighty in evidence across the three sections of the show, which begins with Durer, moves on to peers such as Lucas Cranach and co, finishing with portraiture by Holbein that could be storyboarding 'The Tudors.' Durer's output remains the most compelling work on show, from his religious iconography that is the equivalent of pop star pin-ups, with Saints Jerome, Anthony and Eustace a kind of ecclesiastical Take That, to his pen-and

1 When a seventy year old Hamish Henderson sang Freedom Come All Ye at the end of an event billed as something called Self-Determination and Power that took place at the Pearce Institute in Govan, Glasgow in January 1990, it was the ultimate folk-song cabaret. Here, after all, was the man whose co-founding of the School of Scottish Studies in 1951 had kick-started the Scottish folk revival, and here he was singing the song he'd penned that many believe to be Scotland's real national anthem (with a small n, for Henderson was nothing if not internationalist in outlook). Henderson sang it in his own slightly cracked tones not as part of some officially sanctioned flagship event for Glasgow's status as European City of Culture that year, but for a low-level grassroots initiative that brought together art and activism in an event that would prove to be of huge trickle-down significance. The Self-Determination and Power event was organised by a loose alliance of the Free Univ

What would you do if you met Hitler as a toddler, forewarned Dr Who-like of the mass genocide the future Nazi leader would inflict on the twentieth century? Would you do the world a favour and kill him quickly and without fuss? Or would you embrace the seemingly innocent mite to one's bosom, vowing to protect him from whichever ills would otherwise corrupt his infant sensibilities with such disastrous consequences? Such a dilemma is the hypothetical sort of stuff usually played out by liberal intellectuals on The Moral Maze. It's also the starting point for The Wheel, a major new play by Zinnie Harris for the National Theatre of Scotland, which plays as part of the Traverse Theatre's Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme in a production by NTS artistic director Vicky Featherstone. As with many things about the play, though, looks can be deceptive. The play may open in a nineteenth century Spanish village on the eve of both a wedding and a war, and initially c

When the Made In Scotland showcase was founded three years ago to support home-grown theatre and dance companies who wished to perform on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe before a host of international promoters, no-one really knew what to expect. Since then, not only has the strike rate been high in terms of work picked up, but it is work which only a few years ago for it to be produced within a Scottish context would have been nigh-on unthinkable. Shows like Cora Bissett's site-specific sex-trafficking drama, Roadkill, and David Leddy's labyrinthine back-stage tour, Sub-Rosa, speak volumes about how much theatre-making in Scotland has raised the level of its game in terms of scope and imagination. Funded by the Scottish Government's Expo fund, Made in Scotland has developed it's remit this year as well to include a new Scottish Performing Arts Symposium and Promoter Plus, a means of pairing international promoters with at the very least a guaranteed five

Theatre Royal, Glasgow 4 stars Art, life and revolution, as anyone who heard Sex Pistols cover artist Jamie Reid speak in the National Galleries of Scotland last Thursday night will understand, categorically aren't the preserve of a bourgeois establishment who buy such notions into submission. Lee Hall recognises this too in his loving impressionistic portrait of The Ashington Group, the alliance of Tyneside miners who came together in 1934 at a Workers Educational Association art appreciation night-class under future head of Edinburgh College of Art Robert Lyon, only to end up an artistic cause celebre in their own right. First seen at Live Theatre Newcastle in 2007 before transferring to London and Broadway, Max Roberts' co-production with the National Theatre is a gloriously feel-good take on social history, which nevertheless talks about aspiration and the transformative power of art in an intelligently expansive manner. With the men's work projected on