Coffee-Table Notes

The last time a new work by Heathcote Williams was performed on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe twenty-odd years ago, his trilogy of ecologically minded epic poems that began with Whale Nation had become some of the hottest property in poetry. Whale Nation, Autogedden and Falling For A Dolphin, alongside another volume, Sacred Elephant, were produced in a series of lavishly illustrated large-format editions, while their subject matter predated a mainstream concern for life on earth that was still regarded as marginal. The books sold in bucket-loads, while the performances by Williams' long-term collaborator Roy Hutchins packed out the Traverse Theatre and the Assembly Rooms. Since then there's been an apparent silence by Williams, whose loathing of the attention fame brings with it had previously caused him to retreat from public view during the 1960s. Then he was a key figure of London's counter-culture, where he mixed with the underground cognoscenti in a pri

Being a mother has helped Diana Quick as an actress, she reckons. As the veteran English rose who rose to prominence playing the aristocratic but troubled Julia Flyte in the 1981 TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited prepares for her solo Edinburgh turn in Adam Brace's monologue, Midnight Your Time, Ms Quick can easily put herself in the shoes of the well-meaning Islingtonite she's playing. In the play, Quick plays a retired lawyer in search of new meaning in her life, be it with the women's peace league, the local neighbours, or, most of all, the life of her daughter, who is on the other side of the world in Palestine, and with whom she has weekly webcam chats. While hardly an ideal means of communication, given the play's circumstances, it's as close, it seems, as they'll ever get. “Lots of women have said to me that that's the story of them and their son or daughter for the last five years,” says Quick of reactions to Midnight Your Time,

When Ralph Bernard met Arthur Scargill, Bernard was in the thick of making a documentary radio on the history of the coal industry called Down To Earth. Scargill was the leader of the Yorkshire Miners, and had yet to become president for life of the National Union of Miners (NUM). That was in the 1970s, when industrial action could hold governments to ransom during a time when Britain's winter of discontent was just around the corner. Five years later, Scargill may have been in charge of the NUM at a national level, but Margaret Thatcher was in Downing Street, and in what effectively became a civil war during the 1984/85 miner's strike, she was as stubborn as her opponent. The collapse of the strike and subsequent closure of pits throughout Britain ended a period of trade union power in Britain which it has never fully recovered from. Yet, while Thatcher has long been swept from office, even if her ideologies still linger, the 73-year old Scargill remains the NUM

Theatrical con-men are everywhere in Edinburgh at this time of year. All it needs is a change of hat, a stick-on moustache and a penchant for talking up attributes you haven't got, and Bob's not so much your uncle as anyone you want him to be. This is a trick Lorne Campbell's Greyscale company explore to the max with their show, Sandy Grierson Will Lecture, Dance and Box. Hang on a minute, though. When Campbell and playwright Selma Dimitrijevic first co-directed a version of the show at Oran Mor last year, wasn't it called David Ireland Will Lecture, Dance and Box? And aren't Grierson and Ireland both noted actors on the Scottish theatre circuit? And what on earth has Swiss-born proto Dadaist prankster Arthur Cravan to do with anything? The answers to all these questions probably won't be found by going to see the work in what sounds like a curious way of doing business. “Arthur Cravan had about a hundred and twenty identities,” Greyscale artisti

At various times over the last three years, in Canada, Australia, America and Ireland, a very special dance has been set in motion. Entire rooms full of revellers have launched into spontaneous displays of the alphabet-shaped choreography that accompanies evergreen 1970s disco smash, Y.M.C.A. This song, made famous by The Village People, a group of young men extravagantly dressed up as various macho archetypes, may be a staple of late-night clubland cheese-fests across the globe anyway, but this is different. The extrovert activity described above exploded out of Dance Marathon, a four-hour participatory endurance test cum endorphin enhancing Dionysian rite cum life-changing piece of social engineering devised by the Toronto and New York-based experiential theatre explorers, bluemouth inc. As Dance Marathon shimmies into Edinburgh for a limited run as part of the Traverse Theatre's programme, the show has has proved so apparently transformative for its audience that

Underbelly@Your Lounge Neil Cooper 3 stars If living rooms could talk, they might well end up looking and sounding a bit like this intimate little display by Australian duo Stuart Bowden and Wil Greenway. Designed to be portable enough to be performed around town in your very own des res, Bowden and Greenway's compendium of darkly comic yarns takes advantage of such up close intimacy with their sofa-bound audience that, even on a Thursday teatime with light pouring through the windows of a Tollcross tenement, there's an infectious charm about what unfolds. It begins with a poem about a rug named Keith, a household item consistently walked over and ignored by all who pass through the household, but whose cosiness cannot be faulted. So by the time the Fabulators themselves arrive in the vintage suits and facial hair of their alter egos Anderson and Finn, we're lulled into a false sense of security about what is about to unfold. With assorted props and toy f

4 stars Smoother than they once were, Edinburgh's premier lo-fi power-popsters nervertheless come on like some unreconstructed missing link between Swell Maps and Pavement, their urgently scuzzed-up melodies bouncing along with an unashamed fondness for squiggly-wiggly guitar lines pumped along by a drummer who thwacks his kit around the room a post-modern Keith Moon who can't find the swimming pool. With such a pot-pourri of conflicting sounds slugging it out over a selection of everyday art-school laments, this gloriously messy melange of oddball nonsense is the aural equivalent of falling down a spiral staircase, grinning as you go. The List, August 2011 ends