Coffee-Table Notes

Four stars Thrrp! is a 1987 comic book by Leo Baxendale, who created Minnie The Minx, The Bash Street Kids and a million other pop-eyed cartoon urchins. Published by the tellingly named Knockabout Comics, Thrrp! spins a near wordless yarn concerning twin brothers Spotty and Snotty Dick, who rid a town of 'a mysterious plague of Snotties and Bogies' by leading them out, Pied Piper fashion. With the book's title referring to the noise made by the towns-folk as they let rip en masse with particularly soggy follow-through farts, Thrrp! was hailed twenty years after its publication on Now Read This!, a blog by former chair of the Comic Creators Guild, Wim Wiacek's, as a 'gloriously gross, pantomomic splurt-fest' and 'the most lunatic slapstick to grace the music hall or comic page'. There is something of this in Usurper, the Edinburgh-based duo of Ali Robertson and Malcy Duff, who, for a decade now since disbanding their sludge-doom-racket combo, Gian

Summerhall, Edinburgh Three stars It's telling that a climate of austerity has fostered a thriving alternative cabaret scene that recalls the early 1980s. Unfortunately, the same era's politics of prejudice and greed have also made a comeback. Both trends have inspired a rash of independent shoe-string theatre companies to embrace such a loose-knit aesthetic and apply it to work that is instinctively dissenting in tone. Edinburgh's Tightlaced Theatre have done exactly that in Susanna Mulvihill's production of her own all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza that looks to Berlin's Weimar era for inspiration, but which at times sounds chillingly of the moment. The setting is Anke's club on the day that Adolf Hitler has seized power. With Anke and her staff who double up as the night's acts serving drinks to the audience sat at round wooden tables, what follows feels like eavesdropping on assorted intrigues while the all night party goes on. While

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Light and shade are everything in Tony Cownie's new production of Eugene O'Neill's mighty quasi-autobiographical epic. This is the case from the way the house lights are kept up on the audience during the bright first act of what initially looks like an everyday family breakfast among the Tyrone clan led by the patriarchal James, to the way James' penny-pinching dimming of the living room bulbs reflects the day's ever darkening mood. “I've never missed a performance yet,” says James at one point, and this is the case both onstage and off for an old ham whose acting career slid into mediocrity years before. James and his two sons, the feckless James Jr and the smart but consumptive Edmund are always 'on', especially when their hopped-up mother Mary is around. Mary's own mask of prim self-consciousness that hides a lifetime of disappointment slips after every hit. Years of gathered baggage has left

02 ABC, Glasgow Celtic Connections Saturday January 18 th Four stars It may have been thirty-three years since Mark Stewart and Gareth Sager's gang of punk-funk avant-provocateurs last played Glasgow, but it was more than worth the wait at this unlikely but inspired Celtic Connections show that laid bare the roots of Bristol's influential post-punk melting pot of free jazz, funk and dub. The night also formed part of the twentieth anniversary of the similarly maverick Creeping Bent record label, hence the appearance of The Sexual Objects, the band formed by ex Fire Engine Davy Henderson following on from his previous band, The Nectarine No 9, with whom Pop Group guitarist Sager played and recorded. While all bar one of The Sexual Objects are time-served Nectarines, the SOBs opening gambit goes back even further, to Henderson and guitarist Simon Smeeton's post Fire Engines project, Win, with a cover of that band's heroic 'You've Got The Power&

The Arches, February 13th in the city there are eight million stories. One of these is 'Pulse', a collaboration between film-maker Ruth Paxton and Grammy nominated composer Dobrinka Tabakova. The world premiere of this thirteen-minute impressionistic noir opens this year's Glasgow Short Film Festival accompanied by a live rendition of Tabakova's Gamelan-based score. “ We started off talking about the idea of the city,” says Paxton of an idea which developed after the Royal Philharmonic Society, who had commissioned Paxton's earlier film, 'Rockhaven', suggested the collaboration. “There was the idea too of this basic human need to connect, and we talked about someone sending a distress signal.” 'Pulse' eventually won the RPS a PRS for Music Foundation commission. With the film's Glasgow screening preceded by a selection of short works by Tabakova, music and image are as inseparable as they were in Paxton's film, 'Nevad

Think of rock and roll Shakespeare, and likely as not the commercial kitsch of Return To The Forbidden Planet, based on a 1950s science-fiction film inspired by The Tempest, will come to mind. When the energetic Filter company decided to tackle Twelfth Night, however, a far more eclectic musical mix came out in the stripped-down ninety-minute version of Shakespeare's romantic comedy that visits the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow next week. Like The Tempest, Twelfth Night opens with a ship-wreck. Unlike The Tempest, Twelfth Night veers off into a madcap sequence of mistaken identity, cross-dressing and thwarted love affairs before the inevitable happy ending as Viola and Duke Orsino get hitched. Originally commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company for its Complete Works Festival in 2006, Filter's thoroughly post-modern take on the play has proved to be a sensation in Edinburgh, London, Holland, Germany and Spain, hence this latest tour. “It's the show that never d

Collective Gallery,  Edinburgh – January 18-March 2 2014 When it was announced that French artist Bertille Bak's home town of Barlin, city No.5 in the Pas-de-Calais in northern France, was to be renovated as part of a programme of urban regeneration, the authorities promised much for the former mining parish. This included vastly increased rents for a tight-knit community who were effectively being priced out of living in what is now described on Barlin's Wikipedia page as being 'a modern and dynamic place that offers its residents numerous amenities...' Bak's response was 'Faire le mur', her 2008 film which in part charts the residents of Barlin's resistance to the proposed changes, yet does it in a way that goes beyond documentary to create a magical-realist meta-narrative that blurs the boundaries of fact and fiction. Rather than the poverty porn of Channel 4's latest underclass-baiting obscenity, 'Benefits Street', Bak has lo