Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Lyceum Theatre Five stars When Matthew Lenton's Glasgow-based Vanishing Point theatre company first presented Interiors in 2009, this close-up meditation on human behaviour behind closed doors put the company on the international touring map in a way that became a benchmark for how expansive home-grown theatre can be. Seven years on, seeing it back to back in an Edinburgh International Festival double bill with the company's's more recent construction, The Destroyed Room, first seen earlier this year, is a chance for long-term VP watchers and novices alike to reflect on the umbilical link between the two pieces. In Interiors, the audience peer through the windows of a small house on the longest night of the year in the bleakest of mid-winters. Inside, an annual dinner party held by an older man and his grand-daughter is being prepared to celebrate the move from darkness into light. As the guests arrive, expectation and social politesse give way to a set of

Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop 16 July – 31 August 2016 It's good to talk. Just ask Sian Robinson Davies, whose new sound work, Conversations, which has just opened at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop as part of Edinburgh Art Festival, features thirteen bite-size dialogues between inanimate objects, intimate body parts and intangible universal constructs. Over almost half an hour's worth of speed-dating size exchanges, assorted odd couples flirt, rub up against each other or else just try to explain themselves through snippets of philosophical enquiry. Characters include a Credit Card attempting to explain to a Penis the notion of contactless transactions, an on-heat Lipstick coming on strong with some sexless Breezeblock and last words from a Pillow in conversation with Revenge. “I started writing the conversations because I was asked to write textual responses to a couple of artists' work, both of whom work with objects,” Robinson Davies explains about the roots of Conver

Matthew Lenton's view of the city is immense. High up in what looks from the outside like a Brutalist office block, but which has been converted into flats, the theatrical visionary behind Vanishing Point theatre company can peer through floor to ceiling length windows and watch Glasgow's throbbing heart in motion. It's a city Lenton loves, and which has provided endless inspiration for his series of impressionistic everyday epics that concentrate on visual and sonic poetry as much as any words spoken. Perched somewhere between several of Glasgow's more iconic artistic institutions, even such geographical markers seem loaded with symbolic weight. It's hard not to stand besides Lenton's window without thinking of Interiors, Vanishing Point's internationally acclaimed show first seen in 2009, and which is revived this weekend for a short run at Edinburgh International Festival. The production will be seen alongside the more recent The Destroyed Room, whi

It was Groucho Marx who wrote how 'I don't want to belong to any club that will have me as a member'. Marx quoted his resignation letter tendered to Milton Berle's private members showbiz haunt, the Friars Club of Beverley Hills, in his 1959 autobiography, Groucho and Me. Immortalised in this way, Marx's words tapped into a form of wilful outsiderdom courted by would-be geniuses ever since. Even outsiders, however, have to belong somewhere, as three very different Edinburgh Festival Fringe shows look set to demonstrate this year. In The Red Shed, Mark Thomas presents a loving homage to the forty-seven foot wooden hut that forms the Wakefield Labour Club where he cut his stand-up teeth. In his play, The Club, Ruaraidh Murray sets up a fictionalised account of life in The Tardis, the Clerkenwell-based railway arch turned 1990s hedonist's hang-out, where Brit-artists rubbed up against great train robbers, Boy George was on the decks and absinthe was all the r

When Tim Crouch brought his show The Author to the Traverse Theatre in 2010 as part of that year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe, his dissection of the right to be offensive onstage provoked several walk-outs. While this was in part a conscious provocation for such a reaction, the fact that Crouch's then teenage daughter Nel was ushering the show gave things an extra edge that neither have forgotten. “I used to have all these irate members of the audience going 'This is appalling',” Crouch senior remembers, “and Nel had to stand there, and all she probably wanted to say was 'That's my Dad.'” For Nel Crouch, it is the very first Traverse performance of The Author that she remembers. “About a third of the audience left,” she says. “I've no idea why that was, because it was never that many again, but there is this plant at the start of the show who walks out, so that sort of invites it, and then if people do it means the show is kind of working.” Six ye

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Four stars Out of the darkness, thirteen Syrian women line up wrapped in a multitude of coloured robes and head-scarves. Speaking in their own language, they become the chorus of Euripides' battle-scarred tragedy, The Trojan Women, telling of fictional peers robbed of everything they had by battles not of their making. This is just a prologue, however, for the series of real life testimonies that come from the frontline of the war these women fled from, seeing refuge in strange lands in what they repeatedly call 'the boats of death'. Over a brooding minimalist underscore, each woman takes it in turn to read letters, to their parents, children, brothers and sisters they left behind. Delivered directly to the audience, the women's' experiences are still raw, and there are moments when you fear they might not get through it. As their words are undercut by more passages from Euripides, however, the women gain strength from Hecuba, Androma

Horse McDonald was in a recording studio in Cornwall when the seriousness of telling her life story onstage kicked in. The Lanark-raised singer/songwriter had just had a two-hour Skype session with writer and actress Lynn Ferguson, her long-term friend and artistic peer, who was turning Horse's true life tales into what has become a one-woman theatre show performed by McDonald called Careful. With Ferguson in Los Angeles where she now lives, such transatlantic brainstorming sessions had becoming part of the creative process for Careful, and this session had tapped into some of the more painful areas of McDonald's story. Hyped up on adrenalin and the emotional anxiety of revisiting her past, McDonald's asthma kicked in, and a whole lot more besides. “I was having flashbacks,” McDonald says midway through explaining the roots of Careful, which runs throughout August as part of the Gilded Balloon's Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme. “There are a couple of stories