Coffee-Table Notes

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars The black and white portrait daubed on the cupboard door of A.F. Stobbo's carpet factory slab room sums up everything in David Hayman's revival of John Byrne's play that changed so much in Scottish theatre when it was first seen in 1978. Here is the original rebel without a cause who already crashed and burned by the time the play opens in 1957, but who, looking down like a god and painted in a pop art style, points to the cultural revolutions to come for working class wannabes like Spanky and Phil, the fast-talking heroes of Byrne's play. Dean's image is a bridge too between the drab greyness of the cramped slab room and the customised splashes of colour which Spanky and Phil have adorned their work-place with on a set designed by Byrne himself with a sculptor's eye for detail. It's as if his subjects' lives are bursting out of their post-war restraints with a rock and roll abandon born of frustration as muc

King's Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When pipe-smoking Dan Dare-alike Captain Tempest suggests that “It's a trick we might just get away with” in the twenty-fifth anniversary production of Bob Carlton's smash-hit musical, he may be talking about reversing the polarities to save the universe, but it may as well be a mission statement for the show's entire trip. Here, after all, is a play that not only fuses the 1956 science-fiction B-movie reimagining of Shakespeare's The Tempest with a blistering live rock and roll soundtrack, but throws in some hippy-inspired counter-cultural philosophy laced with a soupçon of feminist theory for good measure. None of this may be immediately apparent when Queen's guitar-playing astro-physicist Brian May opens Carlton's Queens Theatre, Hornchurch production with a filmed prologue that sets the tone of comic book kitsch that follows. By the time Joseph Mann's high-kicking robot Aerial has digested Dr Prospero's

One afternoon in the late 1970s, John Byrne turned up at the Citizens Theatre canteen in Glasgow to see actor David Hayman. At that time, Byrne's first play, Writer's Cramp, had been a hit at the 1977 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, though Byrne was still best known as a painter and set designer. Hayman, meanwhile, was the mercurial young star of the Citizens acting ensemble who was about to play Lady Macbeth. Over a cup of tea, Byrne handed Hayman what he called a present. Byrne told Hayman it was a new play he'd written, and which he wanted him to direct. When Hayman read what turned out to be The Slab Boys, it was a revelation. Byrne's tale of Phil McCann and Spanky Farrell, a pair of Paisley teddy-boys with artistic ambitions beyond A.F. Stobo and Co's carpet factory and a mutual eye on Lucille Bentley - the femme fatale of the factory floor - after all, wasn't what Hayman was used to. “I'd been acting in all these reinterpretations of the classics,”

Sneaky Pete's, Edinburgh Thu January 29th Five stars “This song is side 1, track 3 of our new album in case anybody's not heard it yet,” drawls Davy Henderson from behind Factory-issue shades introducing the wiggy wonders of his song, 'Kevin Ayers'.  The joke being, of course, that unless the mystery bidder who paid £4,213 in an eBay auction for the sole vinyl copy of the Sexual Objects' second long-player, Marshmallow, is in the room, none of the hundred or so mixture of the faithful, the curious and the recently converted squeezed into Sneaky Pete's bijou confines are likely to have heard a note of it. The punchline of this conceptual gag is made even better by Henderson's louche delivery and baroque phrasing. As with all his between-song asides, this  makes him sound like a charisma-blessed distant relation of 1970s TV gangster Charles Endell Esq doing a Lou Reed stand-up routine. Which, even without the songs, is sheer performative joy. This Thursday nig

Three stars D. Gwalia has cut a shadowy figure around the unsung sidelines of Edinburgh's myriad of low-key music scenes. Originally from Wales before taking a peripatetic path to Oxford, Gwalia's cracked folk and strung-out gothica was first heard on his 2010 debut, 'In Puget Sound.' This follow-up digital-only release charts even starker terrain in a bleak compendium of scratched-out song collages and apocalyptic portents which conjure up the strung-out ghosts of post Pink Floyd Syd Barrett at his most insular, all whimsy lost. This is most evident on the opening 'A Day Out', in which a sparse but insistent electric guitar pattern is eked out behind a Mogadon choir-boy vocal. 'Vamp', which follows, is Bauhaus' 'Dark Entries' rewritten for the troubadour age. A martial drum-beat adds to the mood of 'Annihilation Pair' before ushering in the muffled spoken-word narration of the album's title track, which sounds like free-as

When Creative Scotland announced their regular funding decisions towards the end of last year, it showed just how much Scotland’s arts funding quango hasn’t changed since the appointment of a new set of administrators following the departure of its previous incumbents at the end of 2012. While the decisions highlighted justified winners, including the likes of Vanishing Point and Grid Iron theatre companies, as well as contemporary music producers Arika, 28 organisations who received funding in 2014-15 were declined regular funding for 2015-18. Those who missed out included Scottish Youth Theatre and Untitled Productions, whose show Paul Bright’s Confessions of A Justified Sinner has been lauded at home and abroad. Untitled have announced that the company is being left dormant for the foreseeable future, while Scottish Youth Theatre is to receive funding directly from the Scottish Government for the next three years, in the run-up to Scotland’s Year of Young People

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars “A little illumination always brings more light.” So says the puppet-sized music hall ham who's just tunelessly regaled us in Autumn Portraits, Eric Bass' meditative compendium on mortality for the American Sandglass Theater. Bass' show was the quietly grand finale of Wednesday's programme for this year's Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival, in which illumination came in spades. The evening opened with a double bill of work by two very different companies. The first, Unchained, saw the aerialist duo Paper Doll Militia in a black and white world where one of them is encased in a tent-like cage which is raised ever higher as their boiler-suited other half cuts through the ribbon-like bars to rescue them. Set to a clanging industrial score, the pair become mirror images of each other in an exquisite physical display before the tables are truly turned. This was followed by an extended version of Tristissimo, a contemporary int