Coffee-Table Notes

Glasgow Sculpture Studios Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art April 20th-June 12 th 2012 4 stars Life’s a riot in Teresa Margolles’ new work for Glasgow Sculpture Studios’ new space in Glasgow’s old Whiskey Bond building, which sources a photographic archive in the now decaying Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez alongside a new piece mined from frontline Croydon during the 2011 London riots. In the small Project Gallery, three projectors quick-fire off more than 6000 images by Luis Alvarado that charts a historical landscape from the 1960s to the 1980s peopled by heroic masked wrestlers, politicians, wedding parties and street corner night owls, all captured in the throes of a thousand social rituals. In the main room, the phrase ‘A DIAMOND FOR THE CROWN’ is carved across the back wall like an epitaph. On another wall in a glass box sits the tiniest and loveliest of diamonds sourced from burnt wood and carbon from the riots and painstakingly buffed into

Home is on James Brining's mind a lot just now. As Dundee Rep's artistic director for the last nine years prepares to up sticks back to his Leeds birthplace to take up the equivalent post at West Yorkshire Playhouse, he's also in the thick of rehearsals for his swansong production at Dundee of a play that itself sounds closer to home than even he perhaps realised. “What an amazing play,” Brining says of Further Than The Furthest Thing, Zinnie Harris' breakthrough work about an island community forced out by the eruption of a volcano. “It's extraordinary, but it isn't that well known. It's got such richness and scope in its themes. It's about religion, capitalism, displacement, refugees, deceit, truth, lies. It's about epic themes and domestic themes. The more you mine it, the more you find in it. “My wife's from Orkney, and being Leeds born and bred, I'm not really a country person. But when I got to know Orkney, I started to,

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars The dead, decapitated cat that is the big reveal at the opening of Martin McDonagh's scabrous black comedy sets the tone on one of the bloodiest and most outrageous plays to make it to the main stage for years. Set in one of McDonagh's trademark rural Irish backwaters, the seemingly accidental cat killing opens the door to an increasingly absurd world of rubbish terrorists whose scatter-gun approach to things looks ever more futile, and all the more hilarious for it. When Irish National Liberation Army loose cannon Padraic is interrupted from his self-appointed duties torturing drug dealers and bombing chip shops with the news that his pet pussy is at best unwell, we see the full sentimental face behind the fanaticism he espouses. With his former comrades laying in wait, as well as a girl with an air rifle who still believes in heroes back at home, the dramatic explosion that follows is a deranged mix of Beckettian munda

Tramway, Glasgow 3 stars When film and theatre director Lindsay Anderson allowed his own cameras to be seen filming the action of Alan Bennett’s 1979 TV play, The Old Crowd, it caused a tabloid outcry. Anderson had used a similar device in his film, O! Lucky Man, which ended with actor Malcolm McDowell seemingly auditioning for Anderson’s previous feature, If… One is reminded of this stepping into the latest collaboration between Suspect Culture director Graham Eatough and visual artist Graham Fagen, with a major contribution here from film director Michael McDonough. Commissioned by Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art and co-presented by the National Theatre of Scotland, The Making of Us opens by having the audience sign a disclaimer that allows them to be filmed, before we’re ushered into a room that is part film set, part installation akin to Eatough and Fagen’s Killing Time project at Dundee Contemporary Arts. With the cameras rolling, bar-maid Helen enc

Eastgate Theatre, Peebles 3 stars  Robert Louis Stevenson probably wasn’t the first to rewrite Scottish history as a Boy’s Own style adventure, and he certainly wasn’t the  last. On the one hand, Kidnapped’s eighteenth century orphan Davie Balfour’s on the run rites of passage over land and sea en route to  reclaiming his stolen birthright is a heroic yarn of discovery and derring-do. On the other, it’s a state of the nation dot-to-dot through  history that throws Davie together with real-life figures in the ferment of some of the most crucial moments that followed the Jacobite  Rising.    Cumbernauld Theatre’s Ed Robson takes advantage of this in his pocket-sized three-person touring production which utilises live and  recorded back-projections, puppets and story-telling techniques in a quick-fire romp through the landscape.   If the TV news report is an idea pioneered in Peter Watkins’ seminal  film, Culloden, the projections of puppet gladiators on the battlefield looks straight off

1 Picture this. A lazy, sunny Sunday afternoon in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh a couple of decades back. I'm looking at a painting I can only remember as something busy with a multi-coloured, all-angles splurge, zinging off every which way so it grabs the attention, pop-eyed, and so wonkily off-kilter and sketch-book play-pen alive I can almost hear a prat-falling absurdist soundtrack to go with it. “It's like the opening credits to a Mr Magoo cartoon,” I say to the person I'm with. “But that's not the sort of thing you can say about abstract art.” “Why not?” she says back. “If the opening credits of a Mr Magoo cartoon are what a painting reminds you of, and if that's what you feel about it, then it's as valid as anything else. And besides, whoever the artists were drawing Mr Magoo, they would have known what was going on elsewhere in art movements, so of course they'd be bringing that to the table. They were artists too,

If Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government and its heirs had had their way, there would be no such thing as society, community, and quite possibly the two pieces of theatre that are this year's winners of The Arches Platform 18 award for new directors and theatre makers. As it is, both Gary Gardiner's tellingly named Thatcher's Children and Kieran Hurley's response to the Criminal Justice Bill, which effectively criminalised rave culture, BEATS, combine historical significance and a renewed political pertinence for a younger generation who've discovered protest for themselves with renewed activist vigour. While Gardiner's piece sets up a mock Houses of Parliament in which a series of authoritarian speakers explore the legacy of Thatcher's ideas, Hurley puts a live DJ onstage to explore one of the most absurd laws in history, which made gatherings of people listening to music with repetitive beats effectively illegal. “I wanted to make