Coffee-Table Notes

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One) until September  8th 2013 5 stars From the opening tease of Magritte, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed physically and mentally by this major mix and match collection of twentieth and twenty-first century work from the moment you step into the first corridor. Which, for a show that’s about the body, but which, in its epic parade through both floors of Modern One, says just as much about mind and spirit, is how it should be. The first room sets the tone by off-setting Sarah Lucas’ spindly and be-stockinged Bunny Gets Snookered #10 with Otto Dix’ more bulbous Madchen Auf Fell, and things seem to swell up into something spectacular with each wonderland entered. Cock, balls and cunt are of course in abundance, but this is no prick-tease, despite the rise and fall of Matthew Barney’s stunningly glossy five-screen Cremester Cycle of phallic fantasias (the cremester, of course, being the muscle that lifts and separates the tes

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh until April 14th 4 stars Like a moth to a flame, the habitual party-goer will always be drawn to Kraftwerkian big-city neon. So it goes in ‘La Strada di Sotto (The Street Below)’, the toytown style installation that maps out the whole of the Fruitmarket’s main downstairs room in Italian artist Massimo Bartlini’s first solo exhibition in Scotland. A working model culled from frameworks of lights used during Sicilian street celebrations, this complex network of criss-crossing track-lines is operated by the rise and fall of voices from the film in the adjoining room. The fact that the man onscreen is Don Valentino, the man behind Sicily’s mass illuminations, speaks volumes of the light and shade intensity of what looks like a denser, Michael Bentine’s Potty Time version of Blackpool in all its after-dark glory. Upstairs, there’s a similar sense of playfulness to the large table-top chock-full of out of context looking miniatures picked and mix

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh 4 stars The recent spate of main-stage co-productions may have been borne in part from economic circumstances, but they have been delivering in spades. This timely revival of J.B. Priestley's time-shifting family saga is a case in point, especially as Jemima Levick's elegant and haunting production explicitly points up how human potential can be crushed by economic decline. The play opens to the sound of laughter in an empty room, where the Conway brood are celebrating the writerly Kay's birthday with a game of charades. With Kay's brother Robin returning from the trenches, optimism is in the air, be it from the potential romances of glamorous Hazel, the political idealism of Madge, or the sheer joie de vivre of Carol. Only withdrawn Alan appears to have portents of uncertainty. With the final act set seconds later, sandwiched between the two is a scenario set in the same room in 1937. By this time, the family is fractured, wi

When Grant Smeaton was working as a Saturday boy in Listen records in Glasgow in the early 1980s, he had access to music by artists he might not ordinarily have heard. One of these was Klaus Nomi, a shock-haired singer with a piercingly high voice, who fused post-punk performance art with operatic arias. Thirty years on, Smeaton, in collaboration with choreographer Alan Greig, has created Do You Nomi?, a dance theatre homage to Nomi, who died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1983 aged thirty-nine. As Smeaton explains, Nomi was a fascinating character, whose own performances were hugely theatrical. “He just seemed to be part of this very different scene. It was a very fertile time, and you could be more avant-garde and experimental, which Reaganism and Thatcherism kind of knocked out. While it went on, Klaus was a fascinating, enigmatic character who was very much part of that.” The idea for the show came from Smeaton's creative relationship with Greig. Smeaton had been draf

When Hannah Waterman invited one of her friends to come and see her play Beverly, the suburban matriarch at the heart of Mike Leigh's 1977 devised play, Abigail's Party, she asked her what they thought of it. “Oh,” came the surprised response. “She's a sexy Beverly.” “I thought she always was,” says an equally surprised Waterman in her dressing room in Cambridge on a tour of Lindsay Posner's production which arrives in Edinburgh next week. “ She's massively sexually frustrated, which is why she behaves the way she does when she gets pissed, but she's in a very lonely marriage. There's this thread of loneliness that runs throughout the play. They talk about nothing. It's all cars and sofas, but that says so much about who they are. “I play Beverly fairly overtly sexual. She doesn't have sex with her husband. She gets drunk. She doesn't have many friends. Her husband is sniping at her all the time. She's aspirational materially in the

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars “Inspired is when you think you can do anything,” says one character in Donna Franceschild’s psychiatric ward-set play adapted from her 1994 TV drama. “Manic is when you know it.” Such a bold statement becomes a kind of manifesto for this moving, funny and heart-breakingly pertinent story about how a hospital radio station awakens its damaged residents from their TV-watching torpor. When window salesman and would-be DJ Eddie arrives at St Jude’s, his radio show is initially met with indifference by all except hyper-active Campbell. Eventually, the redemptive force of soul music gives a sense of purpose to Francine, Rosalie, Fergus and all the others who don’t quite fit in with the big bad world outside. Eddie too has his demons, as becomes painfully apparent when the station and the community that’s built around it is threatened with closure. There’s a sense of empathy as well as anger in Franceschild’s writing that’s brought to devasta

CCA, Glasgow November 29th-December 1st 2012 Preamble – Beginning of A Great Adventure In 2002, veteran saxophonist Evan Parker played a gig at the old Free RadiCCAls festival in Glasgow alongside a plethora of the city's more switched-on musical explorers. During the event, Parker declared it the inaugural meeting of something called the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra. In the decade since, Parker's careless talk has inspired and enabled a welter of activity based around the loose-knit institution GIO has become. Activities have included live and recorded collaborations with major figures in what might be regarded as free music's first wave during the 1960s and 1970s in Britain and beyond. GIO albums have been recorded with Parker in 2004, vocalist and co-founder of the Feminist Improvising Group, Maggie Nicols, in 2005, and composer and bassist Barry Guy in 2007. Significantly, all three were members of John Stevens' Spontaneous Music Ensemble at various