Coffee-Table Notes

Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh September 27th-October 26 th When documentary film-maker David Peat, who followed Billy Connolly's 1976 tour of Northern Ireland in Big Banana Feet, discovered he had cancer, he decided to unearth his extensive archive of still photographs taken over a forty year period while on location around the world. These included early shots taken of children on the streets of the Gorbals in 1968, a theme which he applied with warmth and compassion to his subjects wherever they happened to be. When a selection of these images was shown at Street Level in 2012, the same year of Pear's passing, it was named in this august organ as one of the best exhibitions of the year. Now expanded to embrace the full span of Peat's canon, this retrospective at the Dovecot coincides with the launch of a book of Peat's work that reveals a fascinating social document as well as the eye of a true artist. “It's really two exhibitions in one,” explains Pea

There's a note that Keith Fleming wrote on the top of his script for Macbeth, in which he plays the title role in a new production of Shakespeare's Scottish play which opens in Perth this week before visiting The Tron in Glasgow. 'Human nature, baby,' the note reads. 'Grab it and growl!' This is a quote attributable to Jack Torrance, the manic anti-hero of Stephen King's horror novel, The Shining, brought to the big-screen by Stanley Kubrick in 1980 with Jack Nicholson as alcoholic writer Torrance. This says much about Fleming's approach to playing Macbeth, because, while Rachel O'Riordan's production looks set to remain faithfully concept-free to the bard's words, in terms of pinning down his character, Fleming is as steeped in pop culture as it gets. It's the wilder characters in particular he leans to, icons full of wounded machismo and a dark underbelly beneath the bluster. “He's a bit Tony Soprano,” Fleming says of Ma

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When post-punk fabulist Howard Devoto distilled Dostoyevsky's nihilistic little novella, Notes From Underground, into the three verse and chorus melodrama of A Song From Under The Floorboards, released as a single by Devoto's band, Magazine, in 1980, it was arguably the ultimate piece of post-modern appropriation. This hour-long devised dramatisation by the newly-formed and archly named Visiting Company attempts something similar in its treatment of the story of one man's self-conscious unleashing of his own despair. There are even some very Magazine-like moments in Andrew McGregor's contemporary score during the six degrees of meta-narrative contained in Debbie Hannan's production. On a TV monitor set among a table packed with empty bottles, a middle-aged Underground Man lays bare the glorification of his own isolation among idiots, dove-tailing his yarn with his younger self, made flesh and blood here by Samuel Ke

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars Beneath a naked bulb in a top-floor high-rise in South London, a reunion is taking place. Cannon has been on an extended tour of duty for the last ten years ever since the untimely death of his wife. His now teenage children Gary and Lou have been in care ever since. Like a prodigal returning home from war, Cannon is going to make everything good again. Except both his children have been seriously damaged, both by his absence and the survival-of-the-fittest brutalisation of the system they've been forced to survive in. While Toby Wharton's Gary likes to play gangsta with his braniac mate Michael,beyond some small-time dealing, the lack of a male influence has seen him bullied and lacking focus. For Anna Koval's initially absent Lou it's been even worse. Both are desperate for love, but all Cannon knows is the violence of the boxing ring and the battlefield, and any bonds the three might have once had are just half-rememb

Arts Producer, Artistic Director Born December 21st 1954 ; died September 6th 2013 Robert Robson, who has died suddenly aged 58, understood more than most the value the arts played at the heart of a community. Having started out in grassroots theatre in Glasgow, Robson may have gone on to helm major institutions, from His Majesty's Theatre in Aberdeen to the Lowry in Salford, but he still managed to navigate the tricky relationship of being on the national and international map whilst remaining resolutely local and accessible to all without ever patronising or falling prey to box-ticking. That he did this in increasingly perilous economic times with a calm and a wisdom that endeared him to his colleagues wherever he worked made Robson a refreshingly human face in the arts world. Robert Robson was born in Hamilton and brought up in Motherwell. After attending Hamilton Academy, he studied English and Drama at Glasgow University, then took a post-graduate diploma in Theatre Studies i

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars When Mike Cullen's play about a debt collector's guilt-induced meltdown first appeared in 1995, the idea of people committing suicide because they were unable to pay their debts was hardly mainstream news. Fast forward eighteen years, and barely a week goes by without some kind of poverty-induced tragedy occurring. Cullen's play, revived here by Rapture Theatre, focuses on the macho men in suits who prey legally on those who fall into a spiral of debt as it navigates its way through the murky moral vacuum that goes with the job description. At the heart of this is Bob Lawson, a man once unwavering in his determination to collect, but who, as his boss Joe makes clear to rookie Billy, has been left broken after a female client kills herself. Now Lawson treats Elena and all his other woman defaulters with kid gloves lest lightning strike twice. He records his conversations with them as he sees the ghost of the dead woman in all

When Mike Cullen wrote his play, The Collection, he was riding high on the back of his debut work, The Cut. Where that play had looked at the aftermath of the 1984 miners strike, The Collection focused on the equally gritty if somewhat murkier world of debt collectors preying on the most vulnerable sector of society. That was in 1995, when the gap between rich and poor was widening by the day. As Rapture Theatre revive The Collection some eighteen years on for a Scottish tour, the austerity culture that has become the norm for many now make the themes of Cullen's play appear more pertinent than ever. As with The Cut, the Tranent-born former mine-worker's second play came from a very real place. “It came from my personal experience in the 1980s when I was on the dole and in debt,” Cullen explains. “One company in particular, the tactics they used were pretty dodgy. I remember one time my young daughter getting to the phone before I could, and the guy from the company engag