Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 4stars Love, death and everything inbetween fire this inspired double bill by director Ramin Gray's invigorated ATC company, who tour Sarah Kane's free-associative meditation on the painful highs and lows of an obsessive and possibly self-destructive amour to the theatre it was first seen in 1998. That was in a production by future National Theatre of Scotland director Vicky Featherstone. Played fourteen years on in tandem with Cazimir Liske's translation of Russian writer Ivan Viripaev's equally serious dissection of how romance can be the greatest of deceivers, the plays are fascinatingly revealed as mutual flipsides of the same coin. The same four actors line up side by side in each to lay bare things that are more often left unsaid. In Crave, they stand on a platform in pyjamas and nighties, as if what comes out of their mouths over the next forty minutes is some kind of bedtime nightmare. In Illusions, they sit on chair

Pilrig St Paul's Church, Edinburgh Saturday May 19 th 2012 Anyone au fait with Sacred Music, BBC 4's two-series trawl through the history of choral worship, from plainchant to polyphony and beyond, will be as versed in the integral relationship between music and church architecture as they are with presenter Simon Russell-Beale's penchant for gazing earnestly into the middle distance while sporting regulation arts mandarin baggy black suits or else peering longingly at Harry Christophers' media-friendly choir, The Sixteen, perform especially for him. Leith Walk on an all-Edinburgh Scottish Cup Final Day a couple of hours after Hibs are unceremoniously gubbed by Hearts might seem a somewhat apposite locale for such ruminations to be put into spectacular practice. As a curtain-raiser to what is Quebecois electronicist Tim Hecker's second ever Scots date, however, witnessing such radically different brethrens gathered on either side of the street looks

Dundee Contemporary Arts April 7th-June 10th 2012 4 stars It makes sense that the site of DCA used to be Scott Myles’ playground. Back then he was a skater-boy and it was a bricks-and-mortar garage reimagined as the sort of makeshift skate-park for local heroes and future high-flyers which under the Scottish Government’s recently imposed changes to public entertainment licensing laws would today be illegal. For his first major UK solo show, the Dundee born and trained artist has reclaimed the building’s interior with an even more playful flourish in DCA’s latest world-turned-upside-down subversions of everyday work, rest and play. Mass production consumables are reinvented for some half-remembered dreamscape as retro Habitat reproductions are painted black and stuck to the first gallery wall, while a swivel-seat skeleton on a chat show platform has a giant prism where its seat should be. ‘ STABILA (Black and Blue)' is a series of twenty-four screen-printed im

The Modern Institute, April 20th-June 2nd 2012 3 stars ‘I will now call to mind our past foulness and the carnal corruptions of my soul’ goes one missive culled from the now opened pages of almost a hundred notebooks left behind by the Brooklyn-born painter and sculptor, which came to light following his death in 1988. Given the sculptures and installations that formed the body of much of his work from the 1960s Technological Reliquaries series onwards, where one might expect blueprints for the environments shown at this year’s Thek retrospective at the Whitney in New York, one is hit instead with something infinitely more personal. Such a panoply of ripped-up autobiographical scraps and pencilled-in dreamscapes lays bare a candid close-up into one man's self-reflexive, self-absorbed but self-aware quest towards a higher state of being. Thek's ruminations on art, sex and spirituality are Me-Generation pre-cursors to a similarly confessional Zine and blog cultur

When legendary Radio 1 DJ John Peel died suddenly in 2004, it left a musical and cultural void that has never quite been filled. As several generations of indie-kids weaned on groundbreaking obscurities ranging from DIY post-punk to dub reggae, techno and experimental noise went into, mourning, it became increasingly apparent just how much Peel changed the landscape of popular culture forever. One of those who knew this already was writer and some-time performance poet John Osborne, whose very personal one man homage, John Peel's Shed, was one of the most heartfelt mini hits of last year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Inspired in part by Osborne's book, Radio Head: Up and Down the Dial of British Radio, which charted his experience listening to a different radio station every day, John Peel's Shed was an appropriately lo-fi geek's-eye view of a record-buying subculture which has since gone viral. It's only fitting, then, that Osborne's current

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars The Tron’s socially-minded Mayfesto season may have been scaled down for this year’s incarnation, but it has continued to throw out an array of theatrical fire-crackers regardless. Many of these have been brand new Irish works by writers and companies little-known or seen in Scotland. So it goes with Gavin Kostick’s blistering little solo piece about an on-the-ropes young boxer who finally squares up to his entire family to prove he can go the distance. Michael Sheehan plays Dan Coyle, a one-time middleweight contender who blew it aged twenty-two. After six years of flabby living, however, he’s match-fit once more, whatever his estranged old man might think. Over the course of a week-long work-out before he steps back into the ring, we’re let into Dan’s world, a high-octane mix of back-street macho pride, hand-me-down defiance and a rediscovering of his mojo via a steadyish relationship and the kid who came with it. If Dan has been shadow

When Molly Taylor performed Love Letters To The Public Transport System just over a year ago as part of the National Theatre of Scotland's Reveal season, it was advertised as a work in progress. While such a safety net covered everybody's back in case things went wrong, what audiences got instead was a lovingly crafted semi-autobiographical monologue performed simply and beautifully by Taylor in one of the most fully-rounded productions of the entire Reveal season. Taylor's real life quest to track down the drivers of buses and trains who led the Liverpool-born performer to significant moments, and indeed significant others, returns for a short run of schools and public shows prior to a full Edinburgh Festival Fringe run as part of this year's Made in Scotland programme. Any fears that such a bespoke success story has been transformed into an all-singing, all-dancing spectacular are mercifully unfounded. “It feels like Love Letters is about to take off on