Coffee-Table Notes

One of Rory Middleton's earliest memories is of a childhood holiday with his family. This isn't unusual in itself, except for the fact that his free-spirited parents never booked any accommodation in advance, but would wing it once they reached their destination. One time they arrived in Greece at around two in the morning, and, with Middleton in tow, ended up sleeping in a graveyard. Once they did find somewhere with a roof over their heads, misunderstandings due to the language barrier saw them wind up in a kitchen full of chickens. Exposure to such environments has clearly fed into Middleton's own adventures in imaginary landscapes, the latest of which, The View, takes its audience on a bus trip to Cove Park in Argyll as the latest in the Cryptic company's Cryptic Nights series of one-off events. Where previous Cryptic Nights have explored works in progress in the CCA's state of art auditorium, The View gets back to nature with a panoramic architec

Collins Gallery, University of Strathclyde March 10th-April 21st 2012 4 stars Environmental art may be all the rage these days, but, as with the soon to be moth-balled Collins Gallery, George Wyllie was way ahead of the curve. While best known for huge public spectacles The Straw Locomotive and The Paper Boat, as well as fully-fledged stage show with actor Bill Paterson, A Day Down A Goldmine, this huge archive of small works and papers, posters and other ephemera taps into the ever enquiring mind of the now ninety-year old polymath, who was reimagining Glasgow long before the cultural tsars moved in to take the credit. Having first exhibited his self-semanticised Scul?tors at The Collins in 1976, with other shows following in 1981 and 2005, it's fitting that the venue's last ever show show be the launchpad for the inaugural event of the Glasgow-wide Whysman Festival to celebrate Wyllie's nutty professor-like take on the world. Perennially captured in perma-sm

Theatre Royal, Newcastle 3 stars When the lights go up on a real life Susan Boyle before she launches into her now anthemic take on I Dreamed A Dream, everything that’s happened in the previous two and a half hours pales into insignificance. It’s not that this musical and dramatic tribute to the West Lothian woman who became a global phenomenon following her 2009 appearance on TV freak show, Britain’s Got Talent, doesn’t hit the spot occasionally. It’s just that the still wonderfully untutored SuBo does it so much better. Written by Alan McHugh with Elaine C Smith as a star vehicle for the latter, the play finds Boyle hemmed-in and hounded by paparazzi and unable to cope with her sudden fame. The audience becomes her confidant as she watches over her own story, from a low-expectations birth to that fateful Glasgow audition that changed her life. Inbetween come snapshots of small-town life; school bullying, thwarted romance, low self-esteem, all set to a series of sixtie

Theatre Royal, Glasgow 4 stars Eugene O’Neill’s late period epic is a tale of monstrously corrupted intimacy. While neither parent or sibling sleeplessly pacing the floor of the Tyrone clan’s wood-lined house have actually caused any harm in a global sense, but, the damage they inflict on themselves and each other has consequences that fester before exploding into the sickly yellow light. It starts innocuously enough in Anthony Page’s slow-burning but oddly fast-moving production, with David Suchet’s increasingly compromised patriarch James swapping mid-morning niceties with Laurie Metcalf as his fragrant wife Mary and their grown-up sons, feckless first-born James Junior, played by Trevor White, and Kyle Soller as his fragile brother Edmund. By the time all stumble together for an after-hours post-mortem on their sorry lot, their sunny facade has been ripped open to lay bare assorted litanies of failure, disappointment, bitterness and addiction. It would be easy to

Kendall Koppe, Glasgow International 2012 April 12th-May 7th 'In Revolution one wins, or one dies.' When this slogan appeared aloft Emory Douglas' image of a couple of beret-clad African-American guerillas on a big-screen back-drop at major concert halls around the world, it was a far cry from the roots of Douglas' work thirty years before. Then, such visual provocations were on the front-line of the American black power movement via the pages of The Black Panther Party's weekly newspaper, which regularly sold more than 250,000 copies. In the current climate of born-again activism, the archive of Douglas' newspaper images, collages, posters and lithographs that visits GI is especially pertinent. Fusing the iconic immediacy of poster art with a loaded polemical intent, the images by the Black Panthers Minister of Culture up until the party's demise in 1980 are a living record of one of the most turbulent times of American history that neither pr

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars Love, sex and money are all the rage in D.C. Jackson's ribald twenty-first century re-telling of Beaumarchais' eighteenth century romp. In Jackson's world, Figaro is a thrusting young banker in partnership with his equally on the make squeeze, Suzanne. Together they're about to merge with a top-floor firm that will make them the biggest financial institution in Scotland. To get there, the young lovers must negotiate their way around a series of increasingly compromising positions involving an even more lascivious power couple, predatory PA Margery, a cross-dressing Ukrainian office boy-toy and an overdose of Glass Ceiling perfume by Jackie Collins. Thatcher's children are alive and kicking in Mark Thomson's production, which, while peppered throughout with a series of trademark spiky one-liners by Jackson, also shows off a new-found maturity from a writer who seems to have moved on from adolescent fumbling.

Adam Smith Theatre, Kirkcaldy 4 stars It would be so easy to make a mess of Tony Roper’s classic wash-house set comedy. For all the Galloway’s mince routine, the make-believe telephone call and other set-pieces in this loving study of post Worlds War Two working-class women have become the stuff of popular theatre legend, one off-kilter interaction is all it takes to destroy the comic rhythms that make such moments so hilarious. Fortunately, Roper’s own twenty-fifth anniversary production is flying from the off, as Anita Vettesse’s Magrit, Jane McCarry’s Dolly, Fiona Wood as Doreen and Kay Gallie’s Mrs Culfeathers present a pan-generational portrait of women at work and play on one very lively Hogmanay between the sheets. Beyond the beautifully observed knockabout sentimentalism, there are moments of pure pathos, as it’s only with hindsight that Doreen’s dream of a flat in Drumchapel can be recognised as the beginning of the attempted break-up of inner-city communities. As much it tap