Coffee-Table Notes

When Edinburgh's electronic dance pioneers FiniTribe returned to active duty in 2014 with a set of remixes of their 1980s Acid anthem, De Testimony, it marked the low-key resurgence of one of the most eclectic operations to ever emerge from a club culture that saw them emerge from Edinburgh's post-punk scene in 1984 to release material through Wax Trax, One Little Indian and FFFR, subverting nursery rhyme Old MacDonald to wind up the ubiquitous hamburger joint en route. Since their 1998 album, the more downbeat Sleazy Listening, former member Philip Pinsky has become a successful composer for theatre, with the current line up of fellow originals Davie Miller and John Vick now formally known as FiniTribe with A Finiflex Production in a nod to their old studio base. Since returning, the new incarnation of FiniTribe have played with fellow clubland auteurs 808 State, and are slowly but surely becoming key players in an underground scene personified both by Glasgow's Poe

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Douglas Maxwell’s scurrilous West Coast of Scotland version of Argentinian writer Roberto Cossa’s piece of comic outrage, La Nona, could have been tailor-made for popular fun palaces like the King’s. There’s something about the 1970s setting, the Glam Rock pre-show music and the even louder wallpaper of designer Colin Richmond’s garish living room set in Graham McLaren’s National Theatre of Scotland production that reeks of an unreconstructed music hall turn writ large, loud and at times very dirty indeed. Yet there’s revolutionary intent too in this tale of a small town chip shop owning family caught in the midst of the pre Thatcher recession and up against a shiny new burger bar as the Queen’s 1977 Silver Jubilee looks set to tame the masses. Jonathan Watson’s patriarch Cammy even riffs on an imaginary conversation with HRH in-between defending his couch potato would-be genius brother Charlie to his soon to be emancipated wife Marie. Daughter Maris

When Nicola McCartney was first approached by Garry Robson to write a play about Jane Avril for the Birds of Paradise theatre company, the disability-based theatre company which he is co-artistic director of, on one level McCartney seemed like the obvious choice. “He wanted someone who had written about women and trauma,” says McCartney, “and I've done a lot about both.” Yet the Belfast born writer of plays such as Heritage and Lifeboat hadn't penned a full length work for a decade after she stopped writing several years following a breakdown. McCartney had felt she had nothing left to say, and moved into full-time foster parenting before gradually moving back into theatre by way of dramaturgy and teaching playwriting at the University of Edinburgh. Now she was being offered the chance to dramatise the life of a nineteenth century artist who was principal dancer at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, where she allegedly invented the high-kick for the Can Can. Feted by the great a

The Secret Courtyard, Edinburgh Four stars What a shame that City of Edinburgh Council is in such a mess that they're flogging off their assets to property developers who then turn them into luxury flats, hotels and restaurants with little or no cultural provision. That's what's about to happen to the Market Street Vaults, the site for last year's Hidden Door, a nine day pop-up festival of music, theatre, visual art and film brought to life by the festival's creative director David Martin and his team of volunteers. That's what looks set to happen too to this year's Hidden Door venue, set in the former King Stables Road headquarters of the City's Departments of Lighting and Cleansing, which Martin and co have transformed into a multiple space endeavour dubbed The Secret Courtyard. With art of one form or another occupying every crumbling nook and cranny either side of the courtyard itself, the result is the sort of hippified autonomous zone and

Whenever people say there's nothing musically going on in Edinburgh outside of August I find myself bristling, because I know it's not true. Ten years ago when it seemed like there were only a handful of bands, while assorted venues and club nights that existed then have been and gone for a variety of reasons, including fire, mismanagement and demolition, I could maybe understand such a complaint. Right now, however, live music and a grass-roots arts scene in Edinburgh is thriving. This despite what feels at times like every effort from City of Edinburgh Council and it's archaic laws on noise restriction to police or else stop live music completely. The fact is, there is plenty of live music – and I include a club culture here that goes beyond boys with guitars - that takes place pretty much every night at small venues such as Sneaky Pete's, Electric Circus, Henry's Cellar Bar, the Wee Red Bar at Edinburgh College of Art, Citrus, the Caves, the Bongo C

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh 23 May − 6 September 2015 When Lee Miller met Pablo Picasso in 1937, it was a meeting of minds that lasted more than three decades up until Picasso's death in 1973. Somewhere inbetween the pair became mutual muses, with Miller photographing Picasso more than a thousand times, while Miller was painted by Picasso numerous times. The bond between these two major artists is made clear in Lee Miller and Picasso, a major new exhibition in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery's Robert Mapplethorpe Gallery, and which forms part of the SNPG's 2015 Season of Photography. More than 100 images and objects selected from the Lee Miller Archive will highlight Miller and Picasso's friendship during turbulent times, and will include the wedding photograph of Miller and English surrealist Roland Penrose. “ Miller and Picasso's legacy is still very much with us,” explains the show's curator Annie Lyden, “and their endurin

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars “What interests me is not what uniform a man has on,” says Nazi death camp commandant Franz Stangl at one point in Robert David Macdonald's piercing adaptation of Gitta Sereny's forensic journalistic dissection of Stangl. “It is what is inside the man.” The fact that his interrogator is Sereny herself, attempting to get to the root of how a lonely zither-playing boy can grow up to oversee one of the largest mass murders in history is a telling indictment, both of his own lack of self-awareness and his long buried desire to offload his previously unacknowledged guilt. Behind plate glass in an austere grey prison office, Sereny peels back layer after layer of Stangl's psychological skin. Initially buttoned up in a tight-fitting suit, by the end of the play he's down to his shirt-sleeves. Where Cliff Burnett's Stangl appears wraith-like and haunted, he remains quietly cocksure as he wearily confronts his own crimes. In his p