Coffee-Table Notes

Loss, migration, the Holocaust and a strange form of post-apocalyptic euphoria filter in various ways through the latest sprawl of nine new exhibitions in Summerhall. The former comes into view most explicitly in 'Kindness of Strangers', the first UK show by German-American artist Stefan Roloff, whose large-scale video installation that charts the story of two refugees – a Sudanese woman and an Iranian man – in Berlin. This tented construction sits evocatively beside shadowed interviews with people describing their ideal world and an exploration of the detention of Roloff's father by the Gestapo . The anonymity of Roloff's subjects is reflected in the black-and-white imagery of Karin Gunnarsson's 'Apparition', while the array of Beuysian detritus in Ian Hughes' remarkable 'Unearthed Tongues Set Free' mixes religious iconography with images from the Holocaust to give real life events a dignity and power, even as it reminds the viewer of the

When Chloe Moss was commissioned by Clean Break theatre company to spend twelve weeks developing a play from working with inmates in a women's prison, she was initially daunted by the terms laid down for her by the company set up in 1979 by two female prisoners to explore the hidden stories of women prisoners through drama. By the end of the process, things had changed somewhat for the Liverpool-born writer. The change was more than evident in the play that was born from Moss' experience with Clean Break, This Wide Night, which played at Soho Theatre in 2008 prior to a tour of prisons where some of the women Moss worked with were still housed. With a major new production directed by playwright David Greig about to open at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow and featuring Jayd Johnson and Elaine C. Smith in the cast, Moss reflects on the play's origins. “At first it seemed slightly restrictive.” Moss explains, “Clean Break do one commission a year, and you write something

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug

The innocuous-looking black door that leads to the Southside Studios may be in Glasgow, but the oasis of creation behind it has more of the feel of an alternative arts lab in Berlin, Prague or New York. Since last summer, Southside Studios have also been the base for Team Effort, an initiative driven by producer Gilly Roche to bring together six artists from different disciplines to work collectively and organically, without any specific end in sight. The artists involved in Team Effort include writer of hit play, Roadkill, Stef Smith, co-founder of the Fish and Game company, Eilidh MacAskill, and writer and performer Martin O'Connor. Also on board is musician, composer and former member of the group, Zoey Van Goey, Kim Moore, while from the visual art world comes painter Fergus Dunnet, and Rose Ruane, who works with sculpture, video and live performance. With this group having worked closely over the last few months, the Team Effort event that takes place at Tramway i

It's not easy getting Lucy Bailey on the phone. For a director who is reviving her production of Frederick Knott's play, Dial M For Murder, in which a telephone call plays a crucial part in a botched domestic homicide, this may be for the best. When contact is eventually made, it transpires that actor Iain Glen has been forced to drop out of Bailey's production of Turgenev's Fortune's Fool at the Old Vic theatre in London, and the headache of recasting and redirecting that show inbetween overseeing technical rehearsals for Dial M For Murder has left her little time for talking. Only when things settle down does Bailey have a chance to take stock on a show she first directed for the Fiery Angel company at West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds in 2009. “It's very exciting,” Bailey says in Colchester, where Dial M For Murder opens prior to arriving in Edinburgh next week. “Sometimes going back to something you can get a bit haunted by what you were doing before,

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Everyone knows that it's in the kitchen where parties really start cooking up a storm. So it goes in Miss Julie, August Strindberg's revolutionary nineteenth century play about the cross-class lust between the eponymous daughter of the manor and her father's servant, John, who Julie grew up beside. Zinnie Harris' version may relocate the action to the post First World War Scottish Highlands in the midst of a strike among the village workers, but the simmering essence of Strindberg's original is retained in a brief but fiercely intense exchange in Dominic Hill's blistering production. The schism between the two worlds is delineated from the off via the stark grey interior of Neil Haynes' design that's highlighted even more by the sickly yellow lighting that contains them. This contrasts sharply with the party noises off and occasional flashing lights beyond. It is not Julie we see first, however, but the m

Tav Falco may make his living as a Tango teacher in Vienna, but the role of dancer and choreographer are just two more notches on the Curriculum Vitae of an artistic polymath who can also include writer, actor, film-maker and artist on what is no-doubt a sepia-tinted document that's been passed around town like a dirty postcard more than once. Top of the list, however, must be Falco's status as avant-blues singer, musical iconoclast and leader for more than thirty years of the ever-changing band of low-slung retro-nouveau rockers known as Panther Burns. For his first dates in Scotland in a couple of lifetimes, Falco brings an all-European band to town in a show that may more resemble an old-time revue than a fleapit or garden gig, featuring as it does a top notch Tango display by Falco himself, while a band that wouldn't look out of place at a bump n' grind burlesque night in a David Lynch film plays on. Falco may have crawled straight out of Memphis, th