Coffee-Table Notes

Before Sue Glover wrote Bondagers, books on the subject of female farm workers in the nineteenth century seemed to be pretty thin on the ground. Once Glover's play charting six women's travails through the seasons became a hit in Ian Brown's original production for the Traverse Theatre in 1991, however, everything changed. The play's emotional landscape and lyrical largesse tapped into something that audiences lapped up, and Brown's production was revived for bigger theatres and toured to Canada. Suddenly there seemed to be a welter of literature on the subject, while the play itself was recently named as one of the twelve key Scottish plays written between 1970 and 2010. Twenty-three years on since its premiere, and more than a decade since it was last produced on home soil, Bondagers comes home to roost in Lu Kemp's new production at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. Even with such an extended absence, Glover remains close to the play. “It's difficult

Actor, choreographer, theatre-maker Born June 20 1973; died  October 15 2014 Damir Todorovic, who has died aged 41 following a short struggle with cancer, was an actor prepared to go places others feared to tread. This may not have been immediately obvious in a stream of film and TV roles in which the Serbian-born performer's shaved head and sharp East European features saw him frequently play the bad guy. With the Glasgow-based Vanishing Point theatre company in shows such as the award-winning Interiors, The Beggars Opera and Wonderland, however, he created parts that were quietly intense and which, by way of Vanishing Point's devising methods, were born from a place deep within him. It was made even clearer just how far Todorovic was prepared to go in As It Is, a show created by himself in which he strapped himself to a lie detector while being interrogated about his time as a young soldier in the Serbian army during the Balkan conflicts in 1993.  Originally commissioned by

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Three stars While John Byrne's 1960s reinvention of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters plays to packed houses in the Tron's main house, Marcus Roche's bite-size staging of two of the Russian master's miniatures is an all too fitting curtain-raiser. Roche himself opens proceedings as Chekhov, manning the decks with some particularly riotous Russian dance numbers on the stereo before reading brief excerpts from his diaries. These take place shortly after the original production of The Three Sisters has been a massive flop, and Chekhov considers penning funnier fare once more. This leads neatly into Roche's adaptation of the unfinished The Night Before The Trial, in which a man awaits his fate on the eve of being hauled before the court for attempted bigamy and attempted murder. He is subsequently usurped by a young woman in need of medical assistance he'd be happy to administer if only her pesky husband wasn't also on the scene. Played scr

Young Marble Giants The minimal palette of Cardiff trio Young Marble Giants' first and only album, Colossal Youth, remains as spooky and as fragile today as it was when it crept quietly into the post-punk landscape in 1980. The Pop Group Bristol's incendiary troupe of avant-punk insurrectionists return after this year's Celtic Connections show to perform their just repressed We Are Time album in full. Manic dub-funk sloganeering dangerous enough to bring down governments. Vic Godard & Subway Sect Subway Sect's support slot on the Edinburgh Playhouse date of The Clash's May 1977 White Riot tour at Edinburgh Playhouse inspired what would become The Sound of Young Scotland. Godard's re-recordings of his vintage northern soul period can be heard on 1979 Now. The Sexual Objects One of those attending the Edinburgh White Riot date was Davy Henderson, who formed Fire Engines, Win and The Nectarine No 9 before morphing into The SOBs, who ha

Young Marble Giants never meant to reform. In truth, the Cardiff-sired trio, who play their first ever Glasgow show on Monday night, had been barely there in the first place. The band's sole long-playing release, Colossal Youth, named, like their own, after images of ancient Greek statues, seemed to have come fully formed from nowhere when it was released by Rough Trade records in 1980. The record's collection of fifteen austere vignettes sounded like nothing else around, with brothers Stuart and Philip Moxham weaving clipped, scratchy guitar and bass patterns around singer Alison Statton's fragile, untutored voice as she sang Stuart Moxham's lyrical fragments with a distance that made them sound like the darkest of nursery rhymes. A drum machine and occasional organ added to the eeriness, as did the shadowy image of the trio on the album's suitably stark cover. Lo-fi doesn't come close. “We didn't think it was going to get anywhere,” says Stuart Moxham

Oran Mor, Glasgow Three stars When a convicted prisoner talks about how the real conspiracies in the country are not between trade unionists and workers, but with politicians and corporations protecting the wealthy few, and how trade unions may soon be illegal, you could be forgiven for thinking the words are spoken by some contemporary dissident. As it is, they are the parting shots from striking builders Des Warren and future comedy actor Ricky Tomlinson, who, along with twenty-two other men in 1972 following a volatile period of industrial unrest in the UK, were convicted on the nineteenth century law of 'conspiracy to intimidate and affray.' It is the plight of the men who became known as the Shrewsbury 24 that is the subject of Neil Gore's loose-knit musical play for Townsend Productions which is currently on a whistle-stop tour of the country that takes in North Edinburgh Arts Centre tonight and Blantyre Miners Welfare club on Sunday. With the help of just an overhe

Linda Griffiths - Playwright, Actress. Born October 7 1953; died September 21 2014 Linda Griffiths, who has died aged sixty following a battle with breast cancer, was as wildly inspiring as she was wildly inspired, both as an actress and a playwright in her native Canada and beyond. Nowhere was this more evident in the latter than in Age of Arousal, Griffiths' 2007 play set in a nineteenth century secretarial college where five women search for emancipation in very different ways. In her programme notes for Muriel Romanes' 2011 production of the play for the Stellar Quines theatre company at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, Griffiths herself described her work as being ”wildly inspired” by George Gissing's novel, The Odd Women, which she discovered in the dollar bin of a second-hand book-store. “I turned it over, and it on the back it said ‘Five Victorian Spinsters’,” Griffiths said in an interview with the Herald at the time of the production, “and I