Coffee-Table Notes

If the Edinburgh Festival Fringe must start with a bang, there are few more graphic ways of doing it than with Spanish actress Isabelle Stoffel's solo adaptation of Toni Bentley's singular sexual memoir, the Surrender. In both the book and the play, Bentley is a woman in search of spiritual enlightenment who finds it through the physical extremes of anal sex. While such libertine excesses aren't anything which the likes of the Marquis de Sade's works fantasised about a couple of centuries back, the fact that Bentley made it flesh gives her story an extra edge. While Bentley's words lean towards the sort of counter-cultural confessionals of the 1960s, in Stoffel's hands, and indeed every other part of her body, it's not nearly as po-faced as it could be. While Stoffel's delivery is laced with an apposite sense of levity, theatrically, she either cavorts on a bed or behind a screen, places candles on a wooden shrine or else listens to her own

If there is one venue that is an essential visit during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, it is the Traverse Theatre. This legendary home of new writing has been around in one building or another since 1963, and is arguably the home of the Fringe, even though its current home just off Lothian Road beside the Usher Hall is infinitely glossier than the former High Street brothel where it first opened its doors. Co-founded by a coterie of 1960s bohemian types that included ex American GI turned founder of the UK's first ever paperback bookshop, Jim Haynes, and art impresario Richard Demarco, the Traverse has blazed a trail over the last half century, and over the last decade has won numerous Herald Angel awards. If all goes well, the theatre' fiftieth anniversary programme should prove no exception. One of the Traverse's flagship shows will feature former Taggart star Blythe Duff in Ciara, a new one-woman play by David Harrower. Duff has more than proved her mettle as

It's not every day that a major writer pens a play with a specific actress in mind. This is exactly what happened, however, when Knives in Hens and Blackbird author David Harrower approached former Taggart star Blythe Duff, who performed Harrower's two-hander, Good With People, at last year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe before transferring with it to New York. The result of this collaboration is Ciara, a solo piece in which Duff plays a woman who runs a successful Glasgow art gallery, but who also happens to be the daughter of a just-deceased big city crime lord. “David told me he wanted to write something about Glasgow,” says Duff of the roots of the play that now forms the flagship production of the Traverse Theatre's Edinburgh Festival Fringe season. “That was in 2010, then in 2011 he came back, and we worked quite closely on the play. It was so exciting being part of that process, and what we've got now is this piece about a woman in her fifties who has e

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