Coffee-Table Notes

1 - Would the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh's Board of Trustees agree that Inverleith House is a major international public artistic asset? 2 – If so, could the Board of Trustees explain why they have chosen to close Inverleith House down as a contemporary art gallery without notice? 3 - Could the Board of Trustees clarify what Creative Scotland's explicit expression of 'disappointment' with the Trustees' decision to close Inverleith House as a contemporary artspace without notice might refer to? 4 – Given that the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is a publicly funded body, could the Board of Trustees provide the minutes of the meeting at which the decision to close Inverleith House as a contemporary art gallery took place, presumably at the Board's quarterly meeting on October 5 th 2016? 5 – As a publicly funded body, could the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh's Board of Trustees also provide a list of all those in attendance at the meeting whe

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Sacrifice is everywhere in Rob Drummond's brooding new play, co-produced here between the Tron and the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, where it visits following its Glasgow run. It's there in Andrew Rothney's near silent figure of Isaac, on compassionate leave from the prison he's been rotting in since he attempted to bring life through death during harvest time in his rural home years before. Now he's back, and with John Michie's stoic prison chaperone Burt watching over him, it's his twelve-year old daughter Autumn who needs saved. Isaac's mother Sophia would do anything to see Autumn survive, as would Frances Thorburn's Violet, who would kill to replace her own lingering loss. There's an eerie sense of foreboding that looms large in Traverse artistic director Orla O'Loughlin's production that is ushered in by Michael John McCarthy's cracked chamber folk score. Even at it's most sombre, h

When the Arika organisation started out as producers of experimental music festivals, their work on Instal at the Arches in Glasgow and later Kill Your Timid Notion at Dundee Contemporary Arts broke the mould in terms of bringing major international left-field musicians and sound-makers to Scotland. As the artistic landscape shifted, the ground Arika occupied opened up for a new generation of sonic explorers to put on their own events, perhaps inspired by some of the veteran acts they'd seen at Instal and Kill Your Timid Notion . As more experimental music festivals grew up around them, Arika moved beyond sound to consider the social and political forces that gives art its meaning. The end result has been a series of weekend-long Episodes , in which Arika have hosted various provocations, discussions, performances and screenings which create a dialogue where art and activism meet in a kind of counter-cultural salon. This weekend, Episode 8 – Refuse Powers' Gras

Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh Three stars The baby won't stop crying and scary men are shouting obscenities through the letterbox at the opening of Lisa Nicoll's curiously creepy new play produced by the Glasgow-based In Motion Theatre Company. Graffiti is sprayed across the walls of Carrie's house, and rubbish is rotting in the summer heat in the back garden. Just to add insult to injury, Emily has moved in next door, and is already invading Carrie's space enough to make her paranoid. The cause of Carrie's siege mentality is her husband's imprisonment for a crime he says he didn't commit, and the bad lads left on the outside who say he did. Emily may not be in league with them, but she has a few secrets of her own, largely to do with her absent daughter Annabel. Beth Morton's production begins with a kitchen-sink style set-up that looks at two very different women living alone with their pain, then lurches into psycho-thriller terri

It has been confirmed by the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh that Inverleith House, contained within its grounds, will no longer be used as a contemporary artspace. This comes after thirty years as a gallery, in which, under the curatorship of Paul Nesbitt, Inverleith House became a pioneering venue that showed early work by many Scottish artists alongside a bold international programme which has consistently sat alongside a parallel programme of botanical-based work. Inverleith House has also presented more exhibitions by Turner Prize winners and nominees than any other gallery in the UK apart from the Tate Gallery in London. The gallery's current exhibition, I still believe in miracles... closes this weekend on October 23rd, after which the building's future is uncertain. In a statement released on October 18th, RBGE said that ' After considerable consideration the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) has accepted that, in the interests of prioritising its core miss

On December 21 st 1988, Pan Am flight 103, a Boeing 747 named Clipper Maid of the Seas, which was making a regular trip from Frankfurt to Detroit via London, fell from the air over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie, in Dumfries and Galloway. The aeroplane's 243 passengers and sixteen crew members were killed by a bomb placed inside a suitcase stored onboard the aircraft. As the plane careered into residential areas of Lockerbie, eleven people on the ground were also killed. Passengers on the flight included Paul Jeffreys, onetime bass player with Steve Harley's Cockney Rebel, and poet Joanna Walton, a former girlfriend of Robert Fripp who had written lyrics for Fripp's 1979 album, Exposure, and who had coined the term Frippertronics to define Fripp's tape-looping techniques. The subsequent arrest and imprisonment of Libyan national Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, followed by his release from Greenock Prison by the Scottish Government in 2009 on compassionate

When Elliot Roberts saw writer and performer Rob Drummond's show, Bullet Catch, at the Arches in Glasgow, he never thought he would end up working as assistant director on a new play by the prolific writer and performer presented on the main-stage of the Traverse, the world-renowned Edinburgh-based new writing theatre. Three years on, however, and Roberts has been installed for the last few weeks on Traverse artistic director Orla O'Loughlin's production of Drummond's play, Grain in the Blood. This co-production with the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, where it opens this week, finds Drummond putting a noirish thriller into a rural landscape where a prodigal's return home to an isolated community steeped in local folklore raises moral dilemmas about personal sacrifices made for a greater good. For Roberts, his tenure on Grain in the Blood also marks a breakthrough for the young director and former dramaturgy student at the University of Glasgow enabled by a bursary i