Coffee-Table Notes

The Arches, Glasgow 3 stars To get over the things you fear, you first have to confront them. Whether novelist Alan Bissett is scared of spiders or not isn’t on record, but he certainly gets stuck in to the little blighters in this arachnid-friendly solo effort first performed by himself during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. From the hoodie-sporting common or garden variety who comes on like some wannabe chancer straight out of an Irvine Welsh story, to the black-booted southern belle Black Widow with predatory intentions, Bissett’s sextet of comic thumbnail sketches are life studies akin to biology lab dissections with extra added amateur psychology thrown in. Bissett’s subjects are being held captive under glass in a St Andrews research centre, where the female of the species rules the roost. The pecking order elsewhere is made clear by the presence of a swarthy Latino tarantula and the neurotic New Yorker who embodies the recluse spider. As well observed as all th

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars There’s something deeply troubling at the heart of this double bill of solo plays by Simon Stephens, which say much about the love/hate relationship with the city it takes its collective name from, be it at home or away. The first, T5, finds a woman in a hotel bedroom on the run from the crime scene she’s just witnessed, but unable to flee completely from the responsibilities she’s left behind. The second, Seawall, follows a shaggy dog story told by a man who seems to have everything, right through to the holiday accident that changed everything. Both plays have appeared separately in different productions during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Seen together in George Perrin’s touring production for Paines Plough in association with Live Theatre, Newcastle and Salisbury Playhouse, these beautifully written studies of urban neuroses and everyday tragedies form a complimentary whole made even more powerful by how each story is told. The Wom

Inverleith House, Edinburgh November 1 to January 13 2013 4 stars Scary monsters and super-creeps abound in the Berlin-based artist formerly known as Andreas Hofer's first UK museum exhibition, which features five new works among an epic forty-one on show. Seen side by side, there are moments when they resemble an outsize pulp fiction collage of pop culture ephemera swirling around Hofer's brain, over-lapping each other as they burst through the frame. Even the fact that Andy Hope 1930 has a secret identity speaks volumes about where he's coming from. Because, drawing a line between Roy Lichtenstein and Daniel Johnston, Andy Hope 1930 takes the trash aesthetic of golden age comic book iconography and invests it with a subverted mythology born of the more questioning, me-generation years. So, against a Zabriskie Point style landscape in 'Impressions d'Amerique', Batman and Robin are dressed as The Lone Ranger and Tonto, making the umbilical link b

Banshee Labyrinth, Edinburgh Wednesday October 24th 2012 3 stars “ It will all work out fine,” murmurs Merja Kokkonen, aka Finnish electronic chanteuse and Fonal Recordings artiste Islaja, as she stands before her keyboard and assorted accoutrements. Kokkonen is sounding decidedly snuffly for her return trip to Edinburgh following her last visit in 2010. Islaja's appearance is a slightly downbeat climax to a quadruple bill of very different electronic imaginings. First up is Anak-Anak, the solo guise of Conquering Animal Sound vocalist and knob twiddler Anneke Kampman, whose looped warbles sound like a strangely penetrating and appositely spartan chorale. 'Raven 'Shuns is a Noise-scene supergroop of Rhian Thompson, aka CK Dexter Haven, Stuart Arnot and Susan Fitzpatrick, who record as Acrid Lactations for their own Total Vermin label. Combined, it's a quiet riot of toy-town scrapings that might just have discovered the true sound of string. Tomutont

Summerhall, Edinburgh, until November 24 th 2012 4 stars The path-way from Johnny Cash to Bob Dylan is a tellingly symbolic one in the two most straightforward of seven big shows exploring the relationships between sound and vision in very different ways. The images of these two icons of popular music may be a short stroll from a dark room to the basement, but, captured at their creative peak, these two pop cultural giants mark out the co-dependent leap from blue-collar street-songs to the avant-garde. In 'A Hero of the True West, Jim Marshall's images captures the Man in Black in transit via thirty black and white shots of Cash in concert and with his family in the late 1960s. When Cash peers through the grille of a van en route to Folsom Prison, so stony-faced is he that it's as if he's in as cell of his own making. If Cash appears on the run from his own demons, the image of him with Dylan is a kind of baton-passing. Because, as captured by celebrity snapper

When Theatre Uncut was awarded a Bank of Scotland Herald Angel Award during this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe, it was vindication for a radical idea borne from adversity. Theatre Uncut''s three programmes of brand new plays were performed script-in-hand in the Traverse Theatre bar at ten in the morning. Many of the plays had been penned just a few days before by an array of international writers, and were performed by a top-notch cast pulled together from other Fringe shows with only a couple of hours rehearsal. The plays themselves were akin to living newspapers, responding to current events with a sense of immediacy that mattered more than any rough edges there might have been. There weren't many. Nor were the plays old-fashioned polemics, but offered up instead a more lateral set of responses which retained a very human and poetic heart amongst the seriousness of their concerns. The new works ranged from a piece by American playwright Neil LaBute that loo

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 3 stars The popcorn handed out to the audience on the way in to see Made in China's two-handed dissection of happiness is as playfully deceptive as everything that follows. The black-clad young woman standing atop a platform licking an ice lolly who greets us similarly wrong-foots any implied fun and games. Over its fifty minute duration, however, Tim Cowbury's script morphs into an increasingly manic and unreliable memoir of apparently shared experience in search of meaning. The woman on the platform is Jess. The young man that slinks on sporting a Sideshow Bob hair-do is Chris. As the pair gaze out at the audience, they claim to be best friends. In-between downing cans of beer pulled from an ice-box beside Jess, the duo tell elaborate shaggy-dog stories and do dance routines to David Bowie's Rebel Rebel and Susan Cadogan's reggae take on Hurt So Good. They cover themselves in flour and tomato ketchup, putting themselves through dram