Coffee-Table Notes

Caroline Paterson reckons she was about seventeen years old when she and fellow students were allowed in to watch rehearsals of Cuttin' a Rug, the second part of John Byrne's Slab Boys trilogy of plays. That was at the Traverse Theatre's old Grassmarket space, which premiered all three of Byrne's plays in productions directed by David Hayman. A few years later, and by now a professional actress of note, Paterson appeared in Byrne's 1950s set play in Edinburgh and Dundee, playing the object of the play's male double act's affections, Lucille Bentley, in a cast that also included Robert Carlyle and Alan Cumming. More than thirty years on from her first encounter with Byrne's play, Paterson herself is directing Cuttin' a Rug in a brand new production at the Gorbals-based Citizens Theatre, where Hayman directed a revival of The Slab Boys in 2015. Cuttin' a Rug is set a few hours after the first play, which focuses on the thwarted ambitions of Span

It's all too fitting that Dundee Contemporary Arts' overview of work by artist Katy Dove has moved north to Inverness, where it opened in January of this year en route to Thurso and Wick following its Dundee run. There are few contemporary artists, after all, whose work evokes the playful spirit such wide open spaces can inspire as much as Dove. She may have lived in Glasgow prior to her untimely death following treatment for cancer in January 2015 aged forty-four, but her upbringing as one of five sisters in the village of Jemimaville in the highland peninsula of The Black Isle was key to everything that followed. This is evident in Melodia (2002), a four and a half minute film in which Dove took a watercolour landscape by her grandfather and breathed swirling life into its skies, seas and other landscapes. It was there too in Dove's series of caravan residencies run on a farm in Balfron, the Stirlingshire village close to the Campsie Fells in conjunction with fellow artis

To suggest that the musical output of Daniel Patrick Quinn has existed under the radar is putting it mildly. Over the best part of fifteen years, the Lancaster-sired nomad has moved from releasing a stream of albums on his own Suilven Recordings label during a period when he also worked at the National Gallery of Scotland. With his band The Rough Ensemble, he performed what sounded like extracts from an ordnance survey log in a Mark E Smith style address over Wicker Man style psych folk drones. At a time when he could have easily hopped aboard the then burgeoning nouveau trad wagon, Quinn decamped to London, where he formed One True Grain, combining fourth world funk with anthropological excavations over two genre-melding albums. Leaving a final gift to the world of an expectation-confounding cover of Scarborough Fair , Quinn announced his retirement from music in 2008, and upped sticks to Indonesia, where he studied Gamelan and climbed volcanoes for five years. On returning,

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Four stars All the ladies in the house strut their stuff with the nobility of queens at the opening of this all-female take on Shakespeare's Scottish play, performed in Ian Wooldridge's dynamic production by a cast of twelve second year BA Acting students. This makes for a bold opening statement as they pace the catwalk-styled stage area, dressed almost identically in black, but with key personal motifs, be it for combat, the elements or for the greatest power to come.   Seven performers take on the role of Macbeth over the course of the play's interval-free hundred-minute duration, with four more playing Lady M. Such mantle-passing switches of identity may allow each actress a fair stab at the two main roles, but more significantly it heightens each facet of their ever-morphing characters. While Macbeth is by turns soldier, statesman, monarch and madman, his partner in crime takes a similar journey, from devoted wife to doomed so

Winter is coming. Or rather, as the turn of the year chill bites deep presumably on track for a white Easter, winter is not only coming thick and fast, but so is William Shakespeare's late-period play, The Winter's Tale. So blessed are Scottish theatre audiences, in fact, that not one, but two productions of it open on opposite sides of the central belt over the next few weeks. First out of the traps is Declan Donnellan's production of the play for the internationally renowned Cheek By Jowl company, who open the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow's 2017 season next week. Hot (or cold) on the heels of this, next month, the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh open their own production of the play, here directed by Max Webster, currently an associate director at the Old Vic theatre in London. Not actually set in winter at all, but named after the sort of fireside tales one might be told during the season, The Winter's Tale is is a play of two very different halves. The fi

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars Joan Lindsay's darkly gothic novel concerning a group of private schoolgirls who vanish without trace on a Valentine's Day outing in 1900 has haunted the Australian psyche since it first appeared in 1967. It was made even more ethereal by Peter Weir's film version nine years later. Given fresh life onstage by writer Tom Wright and director Matthew Lutton, this international co-production between Malthouse Theatre Melbourne and the Perth-based Black Swan State Theatre Company captures the essence of Lindsay's beautifully evoked mystery with a hypnotic staging. At first, the cast of five women are lined up across the stage like maids in a row, their lives hanging in the balance as each pupil of the Appleyard Academy becomes the narrator of their own destiny. As they take slow-motion steps in unison while they talk, it is as if the girls are possessed by something drawing them beyond the fragile veneer of civilisation the

A brooding melancholy pervades from the opening chord of FOUND vocalist Ziggy Campbell's debut full-length release, which is a world apart from the electronic abstractions of his Edinburgh-sired band. Having fled the not so big city to hole himself up in a dilapidated Highland school-house, Campbell's self-imposed exile has seen Ziggy morph into Lomond. The isolation the move has brought with it has given him space to breathe in a way that has clearly affected this set of seven songs and two instrumentals. Like a home-grown musical reflection of Henry Thoreau's novel, Walden , and Big Sur by Jack Kerouac, this second release on the Campbell co-owned Triassic Tusk label is very much the sound of one man getting his head together in the country. Rather than bask in some wide-eyed nouveau-hippy idyll, this is Campbell, not in retreat, but more in bewildered and world-weary confrontation with himself. As a scene-setter, Fallen Stag may begin with a low strum and a mour