Coffee-Table Notes

December 1 st 1970-January 27 th 2015 It is with sadness that Scottish Art News reports the death of Glasgow-based artist and musician Katy Dove, aged forty-four. Dove's vibrant animations were invested with a sense of colour and rhythm, something she also applied to the music of Muscles of Joy, the all-female band which Dove was a key member of. Dove was born in Oxford and grew up one of five sisters in Jemimaville on the Black Isle. After studying psychology at the University of Glasgow, Dove made jewellery before gaining a scholarship to Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee in 1996. Here Dove began to explore sculpture, and introduced animation to her automatic drawings with Fantasy Freedom (1999), a ninety-second film that formed the core of her degree show. Dove went on to become part of Zenomap, Scotland's first Venice Biennale show in 2003. While recent works such as Meaning in Action (2013) continued her exploration of bodily movement,

Karen Dunbar didn't know much about Samuel Beckett's work before the Tron Theatre's artistic director Andy Arnold asked her to play Winnie in Happy Days, which opens next week as part of the theatre's Mayfesto season. Now, however, she's something of an expert on a play which at first glance looks like one of the oddest ever written. “It's pretty left field,” says Dunbar, sitting in an upstairs meeting room at the Tron, all wrapped up in a warm coat and woolly hat as she sucks on an E-cigarette attached to a small cannister with the word 'zen' on the side. “I can't say I came to it as a big Beckett fan. Nah. I just said, Samuel Beckett He's a writer. Is he Irish? No, he's American. No, wait. So that would've been my answer on Who Wants to be A Millionaire? Now, of course, I could tell you what colour flannel he prefers wearing. I do enjoy studying, studying for a cause. I actually like reading random pish about nothing, anyway, so it

Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, May 2nd-June 21st. Inside Inverleith House, Nicolas Party and a small regiment of assistants are painting every available inch of wall-space with rich blocks of colour. These will form the scenic  backdrop  to a series of new works that will make up the Swiss-born, Glasgow-trained, Brussels-based artist's first major solo show in a UK public gallery. As a former graffiti artist, Party is used to transforming the landscape, and in keeping with this, the murals will be as integral to the experience as a stage set. As the consciously effete and decidedly unmacho title of the show suggests, the characters that eventually do appear are equally theatrical and exclusively male figures. Whether seen singly or in conspiratorial pairs, with their rouged cheeks and puffed-out, exaggerated demeanour, if not for their unsmiling expressions that give them the air of ever so slightly predatory Victorian dolls come to life, Party's boys mig

Mayday looks set to be an extra special occasion for Kevin Williamson this weekend. This has little to do with the political past of a man who, as a one time Scottish Socialist Party firebrand, was the first person to be ejected from the Scottish parliament building in Holyrood while making a protest against the Iraq war while sporting a George Bush mask. It is to do with the launch of #UntitledOne, the new poetry anthology and accompanying music compilation produced in association with Birlinn's Polygon imprint by Neu! Reekie!, the monthly poetry, music and animation night presented at assorted Edinburgh venues over the last four and a half years by Williamson in partnership with poetic whirlwind Michael Pedersen. While the former features the likes of Tom Leonard, Scotland's Makar Liz Lochhead and Douglas Dunn nestling up to Jenni Fagan, Aidan Moffat and Jock Scot, the latter sees Mercury Music Prize winners Young Fathers line up with the likes of The Sexual Objects, Momus

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Once upon a time there was a fifteen-year old boy called Christopher Boone, who loved prime numbers and his pet rat Toby, but hated being touched. When one night Christopher finds a dead dog run through with a garden fork, he turns detective and accidentally embarks on an adventure that will open up a world beyond the assorted codes he's constructed to protect himself and change his life forever. The several million fans of Mark Haddon's novel that inspired this stage adaptation by Simon Stephens may already know the intricately obsessive ins and outs of all this in ways akin to Christopher's whip-smart but socially awkward demeanour. Seeing it brought to life in Marianne Elliot's hit production for the National Theatre, however, is something else again. The above is framed by having Christopher's teacher Siobhan read out Christopher's story to the class, then having his classmates act it out. Siobhan herself, p

Kings Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It's hard not to think of the all too recent tragedies of migrants seeking sanctuary while watching Stephen Unwin's mighty new production of Arthur Miller's 1956 play for the Touring Consortium Theatre Company. In Eddie Carbone's gradual betrayal of all the blue collar codes he's lived by with his wife Beatrice and orphaned niece Catherine, after all, is a global tragedy played out in one cramped living room in a poverty-stricken New York neighbourhood. Not that such a thesis is pushed too far, as Eddie's insular life as king of his tenement castle is shaken up by the arrival of Beatrice's Italian cousins, Marco and Rodolpho, a couple of 'submarines' who travel to America illegally. Where Philip Cairns' Marco is a grafter, James Rastall's Rodolpho is a blonde and seemingly feckless aesthete whose ability to sing, dance, cook a meal and sew a skirt gives Daisy Boulton's initially guileless Cathe

Everybody loves an outsider. In literature and film, it's the oddball, the geek and the troublesome, the shyly intelligent but socially awkward or emotionally damaged anti-hero who readers and audiences identify with. If such protagonists are teenagers angrily coming to terms with a world that seems to be against them, the appeal is even greater, whether it's James Dean's sensitive tough guy in Rebel Without A Cause or an entire coterie of misfits in John Hughes' ultimate teen angst flick, The Breakfast Club. In books, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye has itself become a rites of passage for young readers who can identify with the book's narrator, Holden Caulfield, while Jay McInerny did something similar for teenage girls in his 1988 novel, Story of My Life. All of which goes some way to explaining the phenomenal and enduring success of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ever since Mark Haddon's novel was first published i