Coffee-Table Notes

In a rehearsal room in the Icelandic Academy of Arts, something is stirring. A posse of six Scottish musicians has just arrived to join forces with a similar number of their Icelandic contemporaries to prepare for The Great Scottish Icelandic Concert, a musical Burns Night celebration taking place in the bar of the uber-hip Kex hostel on the edge of Reykjavik.   A couple of Canadians have just arrived to prepare for their scheduled performances the next night, and they too will become part of one of the richest under-the-radar international exchanges that could only happen in Iceland. These aren’t just any musicians either. From Scotland, maverick pianist and composer Bill Wells is here with his National Jazz Trio of Scotland, consisting of vocalists Lorna Gilfedder, Kate Sugden and Aby Vulliamy, the latter of whom doubles up on viola. Between them, the trio have a multitude of connections with some of Scotland’s more exploratory left-field combos. Also in attendance is Alasdair

When Julia Donaldson was first approached by Tron Theatre director Andy Arnold with a view to him adapting her novel for teenagers, Running on the Cracks, it never crossed her mind that she should be the one to do it. This despite the fact that the Hampstead-born Bearsden resident is not only the current Children’s Laureate, but has been responsible for the words of some 184 books for children, many in tandem with illustrators. One of these, The Gruffalo, became a publishing and story-telling sensation, and has sold over ten million copies, been translated into some forty languages, been hailed as a modern classic and has been adapted both for stage and screen. Which, for an illustrated story about an imaginary monster, isn’t bad going. One would think that all this high-profile activity would make Donaldson relish such an opportunity. “If he’d said do it, I could have,” she says of Arnold. “I think I’m quite good at stripping things back. I’m the same with illustrated books. I h

The family that plays together, stays together. Gameswomanship is certainly on the cards for the three-headed hydra that is Ortonandon, featuring the triple whammy of sisters Katie, Sophie and Anna Orton, who exist collectively and separately, skirting the boundaries of performance and experience as they go. Previous Ortonandon outings have included Ortonandon: Get Set, at Intermedia Gallery, Glasgow, in 2010, Net Working, Shuttle Cocking, in which people were invited to play badminton in a mate’s back garden as part of the Back Garden Bienale, and They Made A Three Headed Monster, a billboard for Glasgow International Festival of Visual art 2012. This took a school photograph of all three Orton sisters writ large. There was a four minute film, Like Affects Like A Pickle, a collective contribution to art-zine, Zug, and, for the 2012 Edinburgh Annuale, Come On Live In Ortonandon. Here attendees were invited to observe and take part in a life in the day of the Ortons over twenty-four

4 stars Fuck miracles. The art/pop diaspora of the last few years transverses regions, as this first non-CDr release from Forest Pitch imagineur Craig Coulthard's revolving musical troupe proves in spades. With a title taken from a nineteenth century German theory of the country's 'special path,' Sonderweg opens with some very wise spoken words before Coulthard and cohorts take their own special path through a terrain of bad-ass guitar garage, deep-fried saloon-bar twang, space-jazz chorales and a hint of ceilidhism to flesh out Coulthard's erudite epic narratives. With synthesised burbles and operatic warbles lending jauntiness throughout, Where Did You Come From? is weirdly infectious enough to sound like a Caledonian take on Bob Dorough's Three is A Magic Number, while Heather The Weather is a novelty smash hit in waiting. Think of a po-mo Proclaimers corrupted by swathes of Zappaesque dryness, and you're still only halfway to paradise. The List, Januar

Talbot Rice, Gallery, Edinburgh, until February 16th 5 stars Libido and revolution are not so strange bedfellows in New York-based Edinburgh ex-pat Beloff's first solo show in Scotland, in which imaginary worlds collide in two complimentary takes on utopia. In Dreamland, Beloff mines the archive of the Coney Island Psychoanalytic Society and Its Circle, reimagining its founder Albert Grass' extravagant vision of a Freud-inspired theme-park for the mind that the Brooklyn-based fun palace could have become if its own pleasure principle had been unleashed. Beyond comic books and assorted ephemera, films of the Society's members dreams are shown, while a model of Grass' proposed design incorporating a giant figure of a young girl as Libido is at its centre. Upstairs, The Days of the Commune finds Beloff putting Days of the Commune, Bertolt Brecht's 1948 play about the Paris Commune on the streets and in the moment via a series of filmed stagings involvin

Edinburgh Printmakers until March 2nd 3 stars There’s a muscular gloss to much of the work on show in this showcase of four Slovakian print-makers that forms part of an ongoing international exchange initiated by the Scottish Society of Artists. Much of this is to do with the mezzotint techniques by two of the artists, which lends their extravagant images the air of 1970s fantasy graphics, which captures some of the wilder imaginings of the decade all four came of age. This is most apparent in Karol Felix’s gold-tinged apparitions, in which parallel worlds reflect back on each other with an ornate totemic sheen. There are intimations of ancient alchemy too in Igor Benca’s more technologically inclined work.   Both Robert Jancovic and Marian Komacek’s contributions are even more beguilingly opaque. Komacek’s pieces veer between a brooding seductiveness and, on ‘Crosses’, a near Beuysian sense of post-industrial detritus. Jancovic’s work is most interesting of all, occ

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh 3 stars From the opening bars of Over The Rainbow played on a lone trumpet, it’s clear we’re in Coronation Street country in Tony Cownie’s revival of Shelagh Delaney’s neglected back-street classic. History has lumped Delaney’s boisterous yarn concerning clever clogs teenage school-girl Jo and her extended dysfunctional family in with the kitchen-sink social-realist set by way of Tony Richardson’s big-screen version. In truth, it is more playful than that, both in its writing and playing style. If anything, the straight-to-audience asides need accentuated more on Janet Bird’s revolving boarding house set, as if the characters are doing a turn in the local social club. Delaney’s writing is peppered throughout with enough acerbic bon mots and witheringly dry put-downs to resemble a series of heightened routines played to the max by Rebecca Ryan’s stern-faced Jo and Lucy Black as her bottled-blonde mother, Helen. Helen is a terminal survi