Coffee-Table Notes

Tramway, Glasgow, Saturday October 29; Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow, Sunday October 30. How fragile is Glass? And how shattering? Audiences have had plenty of time of late to ponder the cause and effect of veteran New York composer Philip Glass' considerable body of work. Glass himself appeared with his Ensemble to perform the dizzying soundtracks to Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi trilogy of films as part of Edinburgh International Festival. Hot on its heels came a performance of '1000 Airplanes On The Roof,' the Glass-scored 'science-fiction opera', featuring The Red Note Ensemble playing beneath a Concorde in a hangar at the National Museum of Flight. The latter performance is repeated, sans Concorde, as part of the self-explanatory Minimal festival, which this year celebrates Glass' seventy-fifth birthday with a weekend programme split between Glasgow Royal Concert Hall and Tramway. As well as '1000 Airplanes On The Roof,' avant-chamber gr

4 stars Now a real-life silver Foxx, the pushing-sixty electro-pop/clash pioneer and former vocalist with Ultravox before Midge Ure made them rubbish might just have found his time. Even if, it must be said, this retro-future compendium of detached, dystopian analogue-synth ditties enabled with collaborator Benge was originally released in March this year. While the two extra tracks on this special tour edition don't really constitute a new album, neither do they take away from the ice-cool machine-age sexiness of an appositely warm revisitation to a sound designed for serious young men to suck their cheekbones in to while standing on their own in neon-lit nightclubs watching lip-sticked women dance. The List, October 2011 ends

If Abi Morgan hadn't met a couple of nuns on train, her new play for the National Theatre of Scotland might not have happened. The writer of lauded TV drama The Hour and forthcoming Margaret Thatcher biopic, The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep, was travelling up to the Edinburgh Festival, and fell into conversation with the pair sitting opposite her. “They were in their late seventies or early eighties,” Morgan remembers, “and were very sweet and very inspiring. But during the course of the journey it became apparent that they were being left behind, and that there were no new young women coming up in their order. Suddenly they were looking beneath them at this society they'd lived in all their adult lives, and there was no new blood. These women’s' lives can be traced and mapped out. They don't have children, they don't smoke, they've never married, and there's something anthropological going on there about a way of life which is maybe going

Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh 4 stars Everything's Getting Older, an album which paired pianist Bill Wells with former Arab Strap vocalist Aidan Moffat, is a delicate creation of wisdom and beauty. In the flesh, Moffat's evocatively deadpan portraits of middle-aged ennui framed by Wells' equally melancholy tinkles sound even more heartfelt. This could have something to do with Moffat's cold, however, which he announces on the first night of this mini-tour with an unhealthy sounding clearing of the throat following Tasogare, the instrumental that opens both the album and tonight's show. Moffat is surrounded by drums and a music stand, while a pair of dictaphones containing recordings of rain hang on his microphone stand. As the evening progresses, Wells' compositions lend Moffat's words a patina of sophistication that suggests jazz as their perfect backdrop. If that sounds a little bit lounge-core, think again, as Wells throws some left-field

Dundee Rep 3 stars It's something of a baptism of fire in Dundee Rep's revival of Vivian French's adaptation of her novel for teenagers, which tours community centres following a short run at the Rep itself. Ostensibly a vehicle for the Ensemble's two new graduate actors, Baby Baby's depiction of teenage mums can't be the easiest of calls. As two young women forced to grow up too soon and with more in common than they think, however, Kirsty Mackay and Natalie Wallace rise to the occasion with an unsentimental steeliness that does the subject proud. April and Pinkie run in different packs. Where April is a parent pleasing little miss perfect, Pinkie is a black-clad rebel. Both, in their own ways, are desperate to impress. Until the inevitable happens and the pair are thrown together in a hostel, only a mutual gal crush brings each to the other's attention. With new sets of responsibilities to get a grip of once their babies are born, the messy

'Strength. Endurance. Tenderness.' Such a legend is one of half a dozen gracing a series of covers for the 2011 Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival. 'Power. With some twenty-eight productions on show over three weeks, and with sixteen produced by Irish companies, such epithets cover all bases in a festival which, along with the Dublin-based Absolut Fringe festival, which immediately precedes the Theatre Festival, appears to bear little resemblance to its Edinburgh counterpart. Both are smaller for one thing. Despite the 'Dublin Loves Drama' banners posted around town, there's little sense of the city-wide saturation of Edinburgh in August. Unlike the free for all of the Edinburgh Fringe, its Dublin equivalent is curated, and the care taken over both the Absolut Fringe and the Theatre Festival programmes is more akin to Edinburgh International Festival. With Dublin concentrating solely on theatre, however, and with no crossover between the two ev

“I don't think I've ever seen a farce before,” claims playwright Owen McCafferty. “It was an eye-opener for me, because everyone around me was laughing, and I just didn't get it.” McCafferty is talking about his visit to the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, the night before, when he watched Kenneth Branagh and Rob Bryden mug their way through The Painkiller. Adapted and directed by Sean Foley, one half of The Right Size, The Painkiller is a version of a work by French screen-writer/director Francis Veber, who originally filmed it in1973 as L'emmerdeur, or A Pain in the Ass. Notable for the casting of Belgian torch singer Jacques Brel in the lead role, L'emmerdeur has since been remade twice, once by Billy Wilder. For McCafferty, at least, Foley's version seems to have lost something in translation. “Irish writers don't tend to go down that route,” he says of what now in his eyes look like some very English japes. McCafferty certainly hasn't, as h