Coffee-Table Notes

In the 1920's at a Surrealist rally Dadaist  poet Tristan Tzara created a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. There was a riot, and the theatre was wrecked. Andre Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut ups on the Freudian couch. I originally thought Tzara did this in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire nightclub in Zurich, but I was wrong. In 1959, painter and writer Brion Gysin cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random. Gysin introduced the cut-up technique to William Burroughs. Burroughs published The Naked Lunch the same year. The Naked Lunch revolutionised literature and made Bill famous. That was Bill you heard just now. Bill once said that “Language is a virus from outer space.” He may have been right. Cut-ups were later used by the band Cabaret Voltaire. That's them you can hear just now. Musically speaking, cut-ups soon became known as samples. Sampling changed dance music forever. Just ask Grand

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars 'No Pseudo Indy Debate' bore the legend scrawled onto a small blackboard slammed on the upstairs bar of Glasgow's best-connected West End hostelry as a pair of punters bordered on the verge of a square go last night. While such an accessory may prove essential for all pub landlords between now and September, the blackboard was actually displaying one of a series of punchlines that made up writer Kevin P Gilday's contribution to the National Theatre of Scotland's marathon twenty-four hour online extravaganza of bite-size works inspired by the forthcoming referendum on Scottish independence. Downstairs, some twelve other playlets were performed live to camera and broadcast globally as part of a programme of more than 180 works selected by playwright David Greig and theatrical maestro David MacLennan, who sadly passed away last week. Oran Mor's selection opened with Victoria Bianchi's touching letter to her unborn ch

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When the increasingly senile old man at the heart of Justin Young's moving, Toronto-set new play declares to his estranged son in Gaelic that “We will go fishing,” the initial reaction is one of incomprehension. By the end of Philip Howard's elegiac production for Dundee Rep, however, Don has built a bridge, not just with his classics lecturer son, Louis, who he hasn't seen for fifteen years, but with Flora, the Gaelic-speaking carer Don hires so he can get on with his self-absorbed and  long overdue translation of Homer. Inspired by an Iain Crichton Smith's poem and set in a pre-laptop, pre-Google early 1990s, what at first looks like a quiet play about fathers, sons, and everyday dysfunction opens itself out to grander themes of odyssey, exile and the gulf that can open up among families when separated by war. Such  classical allusions never lose sight of the basic human cost of this absence. With Lewis Howden's Louis the epitome o

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, June 14-October 19 It was a chance meeting with an Edinburgh councillor on Leith Walk that   eventually led to Sitting Ducks, painter and playwright John Byrne's   show of rarely seen work that opens at the Scottish National Portrait   Gallery this month before touring to Inverness. Having suggested to   Byrne that it was about time he had a major show in the capital, the   councillor wrote to the National Galleries of Scotland, who agreed, and   the wheels were duly set in motion for the exhibition of some fifty-odd   works drawn mainly from private collections dating as far back as the   1960s, many of which have never been seen publicly before. “It was just stuff I remembered that people had bought,” Byrne muses,   “so I made a list. A lot of it is stuff I've not seen since I did it,   drawings of my children, things like that.” There are self-portraits too, including one from the early 1970s “which   can be dated from the fact

The sad passing last week of David MacLennan robbed the theatre world of one of its true gentlemen and artistic pioneers of several decades standing. It also meant that the founder of the A Play, A Pie and A Pint lunchtime theatre phenomenon, founder of Wildcat and co-founder of 7:84 would not be able to witness what has turned out to be his final project. The Great Yes, No, Don't Know, Five Minute Theatre Show was conceived and curated by MacLennan with playwright David Greig as a theatrical look at the forthcoming referendum on Scottish independence. With Greig a Yes supporter and MacLennan having come out for a No vote, it wasn't the most natural of alliances. As the two most diplomatic advocates of their respective causes in the arts, however, mutual respect has been the key to the end result. As the title suggests, Greig and MacLennan's collaboration with the National Theatre of Scotland follows the NTS' previous Five Minute Theatre shows, in which the public a

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It doesn't matter how wilfully potty-mouthed it gets, there's something delightfully and reassuringly old-fashioned about Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx and Jeff Whitty's scurrilous Sesame Street inspired hit puppet musical. This is despite a set of furry characters who not only swear, but have one-night stands, screw each other over and mess up their lives in a manner that would make Kermit The Frog blush. As wide-eyed but unemployed English graduate Princeton moves into the down-at-heel but colourful multi-cultural boulevard of broken dreams that gives the show its title, the monsters that occupy it are either porn-crazed sociopaths, in-the-closet queens, slutty night-club singers or, like Princeton's neighbour Kate, a love-lorn school-teacher. The people aren't much better, not even down on his luck real life child star of kids TV favourite Diff'rent Strokes Gary Coleman, here played by a woman. Cressida Carre's touring r

Rutherglen Town Hall Five stars By opting to reconvene after a decade to perform their 1995 Saint Jack album in full, Davy Henderson's Edinburgh-sired guitar auteurs The Nectarine No 9 proved themselves as maverick as the End Social programme that hosted them to remind the kids where their new pop idols learnt their chops. With the final Nectarines line-up having morphed into the still utterly essential The Sexual Objects, it wasn't that hard to round up the troops to recreate Saint Jack's poundingly dark mix of skewed rock and roll eclectica. Ever the conceptualists, however, Henderson and co don't do things by rote. With the opening screening of silent movie, Death of the Kelly Family, mutating into a Stan Brakhage style abstraction, Douglas MacIntyre strikes up a garage-band bass-line before drummer Ian Holford comes on sporting raincoat and boxer shorts. Holford remains standing to take lead vocals on the magnificently named Couldn't Phone Potatoes as Henderson