Coffee-Table Notes

Napier University, Edinburgh Three stars It is more than thirty years since Stephen McDonald's study of the relationship between poets Sigfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen while both residents in the Edinburgh-based Craiglockhart War Hospital appeared during MacDonald's tenure as artistic director of Dundee Rep. Arriving in Edinburgh in a new touring production by Feelgood Theatre Productions as the latest in a flurry of plays produced to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, the play's mix of poetry and condemnation looks more pertinent than ever. This is especially the case when performed inside the striking looking building where Sassoon and Owen first met long before it became Napier University's Craiglockhart campus. Here we see Owen as a young, nervy and shell-shocked literary groupie who suddenly finds himself in the same institution as one of his idols. While Owen is initially cowed, under Sassoon's

Scottish independence referendum pollsters take note. Gabriel Quigley is here to help. It's not that the actress's current stage role as Fiona, the first ever Foreign Minister in an independent Scotland in John McCann's play, Spoiling, has gone to her head or anything. Neither is it the fact that the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh's Festival Fringe production of McCann's play, which is currently playing at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London, will return to the Traverse during the week of the vote. Indeed, Quigley will seize the reins of power as Fiona in Spoiling on referendum night itself. It's just that, being a familiar face off the telly in prime time comedies like Chewin' The Fat and the Karen Dunbar Show, Quigley gets to chat to taxi drivers a lot. In the current climate, there is pretty much only one subject that comes up. “I'm doing a secret survey,” deadpans Quigley, spilling the beans that YouGov and co have unilaterally failed to take int

Hammersmith Apollo, London Five stars   A flash of white lights up the blue, and Kate Bush leads her five backing vocalists, who include her sixteen year old son, Bertie, onstage in a jaunty conga as her seven-piece band kick into Lily, from Bush's 1993 The Red Shoes album. Twelve nights into her twenty-two night marathon, it's a playful opening to Bush's first live shows for thirty-five years, which have rightly generated screeds of praise for their inherent theatricality. Over the course of three acts, a delighted Bush get back to her pub-band roots in the first six numbers of sophisticated funk and a couple of hits punctuated by showbizzy “I really hope you enjoy this,” type cooings. This is followed by two suites, The Hounds of Love's The Ninth Wave, and, following an interval, Aerial's A Sky of Honey, performed in their entirety. With dialogue by novelist David Mitchell and co-direction by former RSC boss Adrian Noble,  these are revealed as a

King's Theatre, Edinburgh When Tom Waits hung his nightclub barfly shtick out to dry in favour of something more primal with his 1983 Swordfishtrombones album, as Tristram Bath made clear in a thirtieth anniversary study of the album in The Quietus in September 2013, it was composer Harry Partch who in part liberated Waits' muse. Partch, who died in 1974, built his own instruments with extravagantly other-worldly sounding names such as the Chromelodeon and the Quadrangularis Reversum. He also worked with micro-tonal scales that ditched western systems for more exotic-sounding sonic provocations gleaned from Africa and Japan. Partch's interest in the East may have been voguishly in keeping with the trappings of post World War Two modernist esoterica, but his interests in ancient Greek drama and Japanese Noh theatre lent his increasingly ambitious fusions of sound, song and spectacle a classical formality that gave what was effectively the original junkyard orchestra a gravit

Telfer Gallery, Glasgow September 13th-28th The missile testing range on South Uist built by the RAF in 1957 may have been privatised in 2001, but the fascination of what is regarded as the largest air and sea range in the UK goes on. Nick Thomas' filmic portrait of Uist that makes up his show at the Telfer looks at the impact of the range on those who live, work and have grown up in its shadow that dominates a landscape where the ancient and modern rub up against each other. “There's also a consideration of the Catholic iconography of the area and its historical role,” the Glasgow-based artist explains, “as public art, in the initial ideological conflict around the site.” Thomas' fascination with the site has seen him make other Uist-based work since graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 2012, though this is the most substantial piece to date, with much of its research techniques learnt while Thomas worked on the moving image archive of pioneering Sauchiehall Street art

Playfair Library, Edinburgh Five stars It's the eyes that get you first when you step into South African artist Brett Bailey's searing damnation of historical and modern-day racism. Set up as a series of tableaux vivants in the most quietly ornate of human zoos, the audience are invited to peer at living representations of black people down the centuries in this presentation by Bailey's Third World Bunfight company for Edinburgh International Festival. Flanked by the white marble busts of  the victors of the official history books, we pay witness to those abused and treated as a novelty or freak-show by their white masters. Captions use the triumphant colonialist clichés of the 'Civilising The Native' variety, only for the small print to spell out what really happened. Most damning of all are the three so-called Found Objects, in which real life immigrants from Jamaica, Ghana and Nigeria portray, not figures from  history, but themselves, with the details of whe

Talbot Rice Gallery until October 18th Three stars Waiting plays a big part in the Talbot Rice's compendium of eight relatively off-piste artists for their EAF show. Nowhere is this more evident than in Ellie Harrison's 'After The Revolution, Who Will clean Up The Mess?' an installation of four confetti cannons which may or may not be detonated on September 18th this year at a post-referendum party ONLY if there is a Yes vote.  This is something Ross Birrell's uncertainty-based works also point too in their pointers to Heisenberg and Mallarme's poem, A Dice Throw. If Harrison's specially commissioned piece in search of an audience for a once in a lifetime event isn't enough motivation for the accompanying all-night party to go with a bang, one might turn to Michelle Hannah's ongoing fantasy-wish-fulfilment fascination with retro-futuristic electronic torch ballads and the vogue for ice-cool dystopian iconography that defined the accompanying rise of