Coffee-Table Notes

When playwright Douglas Maxwell first heard his mentor, the late Tom McGrath use the phrase “writers like us,” it was the first real acknowledgement of him as a serious artist that McGrath had received. McGrath, then Associate Literary Director for Scotland and based at Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum Theatre with a brief to nurture younger playwrights, sealed the deal a cheque for 75GBP. As small an amount as it was, this money allowed Maxwell a small amount of time and space to develop his craft while also giving him the sort of personal confidence his first ever professional fee made possible. The now hugely successful author of Decky Does A Bronco, If Destroyed True and Our Bad Magnet related this tale at the launch of the Tom McGrath Trust Maverick Awards in October of this year. A low-key and informal breakfast affair, the newly constituted awards ceremony stayed true the more holistically understated if creatively all-encompassing creative vision of McGrath. This was

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars If Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerrstein's much-loved 1951 musical were to be pitched as a new work today, chances are it would be knocked back at every turn. Devising a show about an eastern despot with a dodgy human rights record and a fondness for American presidents who is enlightened and educated by a prim English school-teacher, after all, hardly sounds like the sort of feelgood fare to keep the nation's post-war pecker up. Slavery, misogyny, bullying, spying and brutality are all in the mix, and if there's anything happy about the ending, it's that the King's death is for a more universal good. Yet even at a Saturday afternoon preview performance of the newly constituted Music and Lyrics consortium's touring restaging of Paul Kerryson's original production for The Curve, Leicester, its eye-poppingly clear just how inspired a yarn this is. The songs and story are intact, with Ramon Tikaram and Josefi

Unlike his work, Martin Boyce doesn't appear to have any angles. Two days before scooping the 2011 Turner Prize for 'A Library of Leaves', his 2010 show at the Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, the Hamilton-born, Glasgow School of Art trained maker of desolate and often decimated imaginary futurescapes sounds quietly relaxed about the forthcoming bunfight. “Everything's done and dusted, really,” a chirpy-sounding Boyce says of 'Do Words Have Voices', an impressionistic imagining of a park in autumn that forms his contribution to the Turner show at the Baltic, Newcastle. “I'm just polishing my shoes and pressing my socks.” The last two years has seen Boyce's cache rise with a series of elaborately wide-open constructions clearly drawn from the same parallel universe as both these exhibitions. Boyce represented Scotland at the 2009 Venice Bienale with 'No Reflections', presented by Dundee Contemporary Arts. This year's Modern In

Imagine Orange Juice era Edwyn Collins skating on thin ice in a pictorial homage to Sir Henry Raeburn's painting, The Skating Minister. Or a pre chart success Associates singer Billy Mackenzie tying up his shoe-lace like a cherubic choir-boy and wearing what looks like a school jumper. How about future Creation Records maestro Alan McGee sporting a full head of hair with his first band The Laughing Apple? A tweed-clad Aztec Camera looking like landed gentry fashion models as they suck ostentatiously on pipes? All these images and more can be seen in What Presence! a long overdue exhibition of photographs by Harry Papadopoulos that opens at Glasgow’s Street Level gallery this weekend. As can too a pixie-like Claire Grogan of Altered Images, Subway Sect’s Vic Godard in full-on crooner mode, Stephen Pastel inventing C 86, Fay Fife getting gobby in The Rezillos, Scars, Strawberry Switchblade, Nick Cave in The Birthday Party, Boomtown Rat Bob Geldof in a Santa suit and S

Ramon Tikaram is in a bit of a daze. The actor who first came to prominence in 1990s generation-defining TV drama This Life has been doing the polka all week as part of his preparation for the title role in a new production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical, the King and I, and, at the end of the day in an Edinburgh sports hall all cosied up in beanie and big jumper, is worn out. This is all a long way from Albert Square, where Tikaram was recently filming his latest stint as Amira Shah in BBC soap, East Enders. Then there was a recent jaunt to Morocco to play a Taliban commander in a new film about kidnapped Channel Four reporter Sean Langan. It's been eight years since Tikaram did a musical, when he appeared in Bollywood Dreams. Where that show was effectively a large-scale ensemble piece, The King and I is a virtual two-hander between Tikaram and his co-star, regular West End leading lady Josefina Gabrielle But Tikaram isn't the only one involved in Th

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars Enlightenment comes in many forms in Jo Clifford's parable-like fantasia, in which David Hume and Adam Smith wake up in the twenty-first century, where the results of their philosophies are in freefall. Their world in Ben Harrison's wide-open production is designer Ali Maclaurin's brutalist breezeblock rotunda on which blueprints for assorted tomorrows are projected, artless and without centre. Their guide is a working-class woman from Fife called Eve, who, arguably like all of us, began life with a false sense of optimism for a future that never quite became the brave new world it was supposed to. As Smith painfully discovers when he embraces new social freedoms with the zeal of a convert, in a corupted free market economy, even sex is flogged off on the cheap, cold and loveless as it goes. Gerry Mulgrew's Hume and Neil McKinven's Smith first come to life on comfy chairs, as if beamed down to some celestial salon

The National Jazz Trio of Scotland has never really been a trio. Nor has Bill Wells’ cheekily-monickered combo ever played jazz in the conventional sense. With a first album of original material, the waggishly christened Standards Volume Two, imminent, Wells and his reconvened NJT play DIY promoters Tracer Trails Christmas shindig to showcase a more vocal-based direction care of Golden Grrrls singer Lorna Gilfeather and Findo Gask/Francois and the Atlas Mountains vocalist Gerard Black. “It started off as one thing and became something else,” Wells says of the NJT’s metamorphosis. “There’s never any definite idea of what we’re doing, and it becomes what it becomes.” With his high-profile collaboration with Aidan Moffat ongoing, the Tracer Trails bill will also feature Pianotapes, Wells’ collaboration with Stefan Schneider of German electronicists To Rococco Rot, and Belle & Sebastian guitarist Stevie Jackson, who Wells may also end up playing with. Wells’ prolific