Coffee-Table Notes

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, September 26th-April 24 th 2016 One of the main legacies of the 2014 Scottish Referendum will be the multitude of images from all sides that document the pains and the passions of one of the country's pivotal political moments of the twenty-first century thus far. With this in mind, it's only fitting that some kind of collective response is gathered. Step up photographers Colin McPherson, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, Sophie Gerrard and Stephen McLaren, who as Document Scotland have pulled together some fifty to seventy-five images of Scotland and its people from the front-line to commemorate the first anniversary of such a seismic event. It is this sort of thing that makes documentary photography so evocative of moments great and small as the human hearts behind those moments are framed in a way that both historicises and mythologises them in the best senses of both words. While a patina of politics is inherent in such an undertakin

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars If war is a curse, pity the official opening night of Rapture Theatre's new touring revival of Arthur Miller's post World War Two dissection of the business of bad government. Not only was actor Paul Shelley temporarily indisposed from playing the play's pivotal character, Joe Keller, requiring company member David Tarkenter to step into the breach, but midway through Act Two, actress Trudie Goodwin, leading a crucial scene as Joe's self-deluding spouse, Kate, passed out, causing the action to be halted for several minutes before the curtain raised once more. While both unfortunate incidents made for an understandably uneven evening, they also lent a certain edge to proceedings, so that by the time we get to a funereally played last act, the tension is palpable to all. Prior to that, things had started off in a wonderfully sunny American suburbia, where Joe and Kate's forced niceties barely hide how Kate pines for her pilot son, w

What does music mean when you can't hear it? That was one of the questions composer and sound designer Danny Krass asked before making Kind of Silence, his new piece of theatre for the Solar Bear theatre company, which opens in Glasgow this week. Loosely drawn from the legend of Echo and Narcissus, which featured in the third book of Ovid's Metamorphosis, Kind of Silence fuses physical theatre and choreography with state of the art technology that enables Krass and co to explore the relationship between them all in a deaf theatre context. “It's quite a strange thing to be a sound designer on a deaf theatre production,” Krass points out, “and whenever I've done it I've always considered my role to be about making things accessible for a hearing audience. I've worked on a couple of shows for deaf people, which is I suppose where the initial idea for Kind of Silence came from. It always made me think about communication in different ways, and how you might look

Pleasance Dome Five stars Don't mess with Effie, the hard-nosed, hard-drinking, shag-happy heroine of Gary Owen's blazing reinvention of Greek myth that bursts onto the streets of Cardiff with a lust for life that matches Effie's motor-mouthed and alco-popped libido. Into the Friday night mess Effie meets a squaddie war veteran whose leg has been blown off in action. This doesn't prevent Effie from getting pregnant following their one-night stand that leads ultimately to tragedy by way of an ill-equipped ambulance that crashes while rushing her to an even worse resourced hospital. Laced throughout with a ferocious back-street Cardiffian poetry, Owen's play is brought to brawling life in Rachel O'Riordan's ferocious production for Cardiff's Sherman Cymru. A stunning Sophie Melville strides through the littered striplights of Hayley Grindle's set as they pulse into life or else black out like a stopped heart machine. As with most of us, it&

King's Theatre Five stars The red carpet that adorns centre-stage as the audience enter the auditorium for Herbert Fritsch's production of Dieter Roth's previously presumed to be unstagable concrete poetry epic may suggest a formal air for what's about to follow. The absurdist game of peek-a-boo that nudges its way from the wings, however, points to something altogether wilder. There's a flappy arm here, a distended leg there, and manic shapes thrown pretty much everywhere over the next eighty minutes of prat-falling Dadaist slapstick. Given that Roth's 178 page text consists of just one word, the eponymous 'murmel', there is no end of fun to be had in what is a meticulously choreographed riot involving eleven retro-clad performers overseen by a conductor dressed in a military uniform who supplies the live soundtrack of marimba-led exotica. At times it's a physical symphony involving sketch-like movements that morph into lounge bar bump n

One of the biggest musical draws on this year's Fringe has been Summerhall's Nothing Ever Happens Here programme, so named in ironical homage to those who mistakenly believe Edinburgh to be a musical desert and to City of Edinburgh Council's ongoing lack of civic will towards live music. By far the most interesting date was the return of The Ex , the Amsterdam-based quartet who have been marrying angular punk guitar noises to African rhythms for more than thirty years. With strong Edinburgh roots care of guitarist Andy Moor, who formerly played in the capital's own wonky punk auteurs, Dog Faced Hermans, The Ex's first Edinburgh date in twelve years in a co-production with experimental music promoters Braw Gigs was a prodigal's return to be reckoned with. Opening the show were My Two Dads , a knowingly named collaboration between Drew Wright, aka solo troubadour Wounded Knee, and Dylan Mitchell, formerly of Pet. With both men on guitars and Wright giving vent

Six women line the stage at the start of Paul Lucas' new play, Trans Scripts . At first glance, such a disparate array seem to have stepped out of a common or garden piece about female bonding. As it is, the stories that unfold over the play's ninety minute duration presents a very different kind of sisterhood. Culled and cut-up from some seventy-five interviews with trans women, Lucas and director Linda Ames Key have shaped six disparate stories from true life experience that lay bare the agonies and ecstasies of being a woman trapped in a man's bodies. The ecstasies, of course, only come later, after the women have risen above lifetimes of verbal and physical abuse. The stories that emerge are by turns angry, funny and at times wilfully saucy. There are flirtations with the audience and there are heartwarming tales of acceptance by families and local churches and communities as they support each other through the purging in this most beautifully realised of emancipati