Coffee-Table Notes

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, August 1st-October 18 th There's something very Zen at the heart of Gabriel Orozco's work. This is clear from even the title of the Mexican-born artist's new show at the Fruitmarket Gallery, and which forms part of this year's Edinburgh Art Festival. Comprising a mix of works old and new, including some pieces from the 1990s never shown before, 'thinking in circles' offers a conceptual overview of Orozco's work and his fascination with the circle as a structure. “ The idea for the show,” according to curator Briony Fer, “was to take one work, a painting called 'The Eye of Go,' and look at the artist's work through the lens of that work. Orozco began at the beginning of the nineties, and made his name as the kind of artist who definitely didn't make paintings in the conventional sense, yet in 2004 he started making paintings again. His work is characteristically radically diverse; photographs, temp

Trinity Apse, Chalmers Close, 42 High Street, August 1st-September 1 st Sarah Kenchington has no desire to be a one-woman band. This is clear in her latest hand-built musical instrument/installation for Edinburgh Art Festival, am interactive construction made from a hundred decommissioned church organ pipes, which, with no keyboards involved, requires at least six players to operate the bellows. “The pipe organ's becoming a bit of an endangered species,” says Kenchington, who began making Heath Robinsonesque musical instruments out of collected detritus a decade ago. “A lot of them are being scrapped, because they're incredibly expensive to maintain and repair, so this has become a bit of an orphanage for unwanted pipes. There are enough bellows for twenty-four people. Normally only one bloke gets to play a church organ, but now anyone can play. ” This is part of a mission Cambridge-born Kenchington appears to be on to reclaim the effort of making music as well

4 stars It's not every day a free-jazz-punk-skronk-funk combo get to strut their stuff on a prime time BBC TV sit-com. This, however, is exactly what happened on December 7 th 1982 when Rip Rig and Panic appeared on the living room set of The Young Ones to perform their single, You're My Kind of Climate, featuring Andrea (mum of Miquita) Oliver miming vocals in place of absent teenage chanteuse Neneh Cherry while roadie and performance poet Jock Scot similarly mimed trumpet. Granted The Young Ones, set in an anarchic student flat occupied by Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson, Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson was hardly Terry and June, created as it was on the back of the burgeoning alternative comedy boom. Set alongside The Young Ones' other musical guests who included Madness, Motorhead and Dexy's Midnight Runners, however, Rip Rig and Panic stood out like a mad uncle making a charming nuisance of himself at a wedding. So much so, in fact that they were informed th

When considering cabaret acts, the names of composer Benjamin Britten and poet WH Auden don't immediately spring to mind. Yet the most revered British composer of the twentieth century and the equally iconic Auden briefly dabbled with the form after early collaborations on the films, Coal Face and Night Train, and the radically inclined song cycle, Our Hunting Fathers. Tell me The Truth About Love is a new show in which playwright Mark Ravenhill and composer Conor Mitchell bring together the four songs the pair wrote alongside new treatments for another four sets of lyrics by Auden, for which Britten's music is presumed to be lost or incomplete. As a flame-carrying bonus, Mitchell has also composed brand new settings to a quartet lyrics penned by Ravenhill. These will be performed by Jamie McDermott of flamboyant ten-piece chamber-pop ensemble, The Irrepressibles. “I'm a complete Britten geek,” Mitchell says of his interest in the composer, whose centenary was recentl

When David Greig woke up to a newspaper interview he'd done about his latest play, what he read bore little resemblance to the work he was still in the process of writing. The Events, according to the report, was to be a musical about the Norwegian killer Anders Brevik, who slaughtered seventy-seven people in July 2011 when he bombed central Oslo before opening fire on an island youth camp. Brevik claimed the attacks were to prevent what he saw as the Islamisation of Norway, and is currently serving a twenty-one year prison sentence for terrorism and pre-meditated murder. To suggest that such a serious writer as Greig would do anything so crass as pen a musical about such a horrific occurrence, then, was as headline-grabbingly misleading as it was innacurate. The Events, which runs at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh as part of its Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme, may or may not draw inspiration from massacres such as Brevik's, but it looks set to be a far subtler exp

As tragic heroes go, former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown's downfall was one of the most public examples of vaulting ambition gone wrong. This is prime material for drama, which award-winning journalist and film maker Kevin Toolis has taken full advantage of in his forthcoming Edinburgh Festival Fringe play, The Confessions of Gordon Brown. While this solo work performed by Ian Grieve is ostensibly about Brown, as Toolis explains, there's a lot more going on beyond the purely biographical. “The first job I ever had in 1983 was as a parliamentary press gallery reporter,” he says, “then I did a lot of work in Northern Ireland and in the Middle East. I encountered a lot of political structures and a lot of political leaders, in all different shapes and forms, from terrorist organisations, to bureaucracies. I was always very interested in leadership, and who is the leader, and I was always very interested in Gordon Brown. I think the play began when I was listening to BBC ra

When British professional wrestling legend Mick McManus passed away in May this year aged 93, it was the end of an era this cauliflower-eared villain helped to define. Two other arbiters of the original sports entertainment who are no longer with us were Shirley Crabtree and Martin Ruane, better known as larger than life kings of the ring, Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks. When 25 stone Daddy, named by his promoter brother Max Crabtree after Tennessee Williams' thundering patriarch in his play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and 33 stone Salfordian Haystacks clashed in the ring, the earth moved, even as the white trash Greek tragedy they played out became a microcosm of a little Britain that was itself being killed off. This rise and fall is poignantly captured in Big Daddy Vs Giant Haystacks, a new play by comedy writing duo Brian Mitchell and Joseph Nixon, which is just the latest example of a resurgence of interest in a form of spectacle still mocked by many, even as it gave way to