Coffee-Table Notes

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars Given the current state of the world, watching a mob of banner-wielding demonstrators intent on electing a populist demagogue at the close of the first act in Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's greatest collaboration is a slightly odd experience. Given too that the mob are singing about how the voice of the people cannot be divided, the effect borders on chilling. It's unlikely this was Rice and Lloyd Webber's intention when they premiered their finest couple of hours on the West End back in 1978. The staying power of the duo's real-life latin-tinged rags to riches melodrama suggests it taps into something that goes beyond the appeal of the show's best songs in Bob Tomson and Bill Kenwright's grandiloquent production. It begins and ends with a funeral, as Argentinian people's princess Eva Peron lies in state beneath a portrait of her still young self. As things rewind, we watch a small-town girl with big ideas, b

It isn't immediately clear what's going on behind the big wooden double doors that lead into Scottish Opera's Glasgow rehearsal room. Inside, it's known that Vanishing Point theatre company director Matthew Lenton is rehearsing his production of The 8 th Door, a devised work created with Scottish Opera composer Lliam Paterson in a co-production between the two companies that marks Lenton and Vanishing Point's first foray into opera. The 8 th Door forms the first part of a double bill with Bluebeard's Castle, composer Bela Bartok and librettist Bela Balazs' blood-soaked one-act work, which was first performed in 1918. Outside, in the corridor, all that can be gleaned comes from a dissonant orchestral blare that seeps through the pitch-black that can be seen through the crack left between the doors. Once the music stops and the lights go on, things become more familiar. Two large screens are fixed at one end of the room, onto which are projected the close

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh/Dundee Contemporary Arts, March 4-June 4 Making your mark is everything if you're an artist, whichever side you're coming from. This is evident in this expansive body of largely recent work by Mark Wallinger, which runs parallel in galleries across two separate cities. Based largely around the sixty-six works that make up Wallinger's id Paintings, the twin shows focus on a fascination with symmetry that saw him pursue a more instinctive and personalised line of inquiry than his more overtly politically driven works. That period arguably peaked with Wallinger's 2007 Turner Prize winner, State Britain, a recreation of Brian Haw's tented anti Iraq protest outside Westminster. That the twice his height size paintings that resulted are literally hand-made speak volumes about where Wallinger is coming from today. “The id Paintings grew out of a series of works I call self-portraits,” Wallinger says, referring to the group of paintings

SSE Hydro, Glasgow Three stars It's already been quite the year for sequels judging by this month's itinerary of home-grown blockbuster film and theatre. Hot on the heels of T2: Trainspotting comes this second stadium-size outing that puts an extended version of Greg Hemphill and Ford Kiernan's sit-com phenomenon onstage once more following its predecessor's record-breaking 2014 run. Whether their return is down to a collective nostalgic need to revisit and rediscover these twin touchstones of popular culture or not, they have more in common than you might think. Both T2 and Still Game are set in an unreconstructed and largely male dominated world. Both too focus on old pals regrouping for one last hurrah. While the point is never laboured, there is something there too in both about ageing and mortality. So it goes with Still Game 2, which begins with a filmed introduction from Methadone Mick, Hemphill and Kiernan's most recent and most youthful addition

The title of this cassette collaboration between two of the most prolific exponents of minimalist drone has the playful feel of an old-school dub soundclash plate a la King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown . Such implications may be of good-humoured competition, but the cover's funereal monochrome collages beg to differ. The titles of the seven pieces which the images illustrate point to something darker. It's as if the force behind the music has surrendered control, and is now being held hostage in sense-deranged captivity. The result is filtered through a lysergic fug that moulds it into something amorphous and harder to pin down. This is sort of what happened when Gateshead-based Lee Stokoe went willingly after sending seven then works-in-progress to Fraser Burnett, the Edinburgh-based sonic auteur who records as Fordell Research Unit, or F.R.U. As Culver, Stokoe has released a slew of material over two decades. With his own Matching Head imprint, he has released more than 200

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Three stars Everybody is play-acting in Richard Norris and Dick Scanlan's stage musical of the prohibition era 1967 comedy film concerning a Kansas City wannabe who moves to the Big Apple to get herself a wealthy husband but ends up with much more than she bargained for. It's there in the way Joanne Clifton's Millie makes all her lifestyle choices from the pages of Vogue magazine. It's there too in the way her wannabe starlet gal pal Miss Dorothy affects even more airs and graces. Most of all it's there in the form of speak-easy chanteuse and society hostess Muzzy Van Hossmere, as the seemingly penniless Jimmy Smith falls for Millie in every way. Featuring music by Jeanine Tesori with lyrics by Scanlan, this makes for much archness in a new touring production directed by Racky Plews more than a decade after the show won six Tony awards on Broadway. The songs reference everything from Gilbert and Sullivan to showtime schmaltz. The wh

When the Arches was forced to close down in 2015 following Police Scotland's recommendations to Glasgow Licensing Board that the pioneering club and arts venue should have its late license withdrawn, it seemed to mark an end to a spirit of artistic freedom in Glasgow that the former railway arch so playfully defined. That freedom had existed over almost twenty-five years, ever since the Arches Theatre Company was founded by its original director Andy Arnold as the accidental progeny of Glasgow's Year of European Culture in 1990. Under the leadership of Arnold and then Jackie Wylie, the Arches became a globally recognised experimental hothouse that nurtured and developed artists, many of whom went on to become a kind of in-house artistic family. Two years since the Arches closed, that spirit is back in Take Me Somewhere, a three-week city-wide festival of the sort of radical performance work from a younger generation of artists who first cut their teeth at the Midland Stre