Coffee-Table Notes

Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh until September 30 th Four stars On the big screen in Talbot Rice's downstairs gallery, a film shows two men at work and play on an imagined approximation of a film set. One is a macho brute, who uses his physical prowess to torment and prick-tease the other, more effete, and clearly hopelessly devoted object of his ire. A second film shows the same actors playing similar characters, but with a blunter, more melodramatic denouement. This is 'Casting Through and Scenes from Radcliffe', Stephen Sutcliffe's latest reimagining of a very northern English form of pop cultural iconoclasm that forms the core of his Edinburgh Art Festival show. The first part is a staged re-enactment drawn from diary entries of film and theatre director Lindsay Anderson while working with actor Richard Harris on his feature film adaptation of David Storey's novel, This Sporting Life. The second depicts dramatised scenes adapted from Radcliffe, St

Michael Colgan and Barry McGovern sit at either end of the sofa like book-ends. Domiciled in the airy office usually occupied by Edinburgh International Festival director Fergus Linehan on the top floor of the Hub, director and producer Colgan and actor McGovern talk away at length as any pair of sixty-something old friends might do . They're preparing their EIF production of Krapp's Last Tape, Samuel Beckett's 1958 solo work in which an old man rewinds on his life's lost loves by way of a series of ancient reel to reel tapes. The production is a collaboration between EIF and Clare Street, a new company founded by Colgan and McGovern to do Beckett's work, and named after the Dublin address of Beckett's father. The pair set up the company following Colgan's departure from the Gate, the Dublin theatre he ran for thirty-three years. Age, however, does not appear to have withered either man. “We've been talking about doing this for years,” says Colgan

Actors love a guru. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is especially fertile in terms of its influx of young performers willing to argue the toss between Stanislavsky and Uta Hagen, possibly in a workshop type situation. Enter How To Act, a new play by Glasgow-based director and co-founder with playwright David Greig and composer Nick Powell of turn of the millennium theatrical supergroup Suspect Culture. Eatough's own production for the National Theatre of Scotland pitches up internationally renowned theatre director Anthony Nicholl, whose own global quest for artistic enlightenment shar e assorted methods picked up in Africa and other cultures around the world. Cue aspiring actress Promise, a hand-picked participant who ends up turning the tables on the maestro in a meeting where the reality between life and art becomes blurred. “It started at a time when I was doing quite a lot of large-scale visual art collaborations and inter-disciplinary projects,” says Eatough of the root

Sam Shepard – Playwright, screen-writer, actor, director Born November 5,1943; died July 27 2017. Sam Shepard, who has died at his Kentucky home aged 73 following a battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), was a literary outlaw who explored America's mythology in more than fifty plays. Shepard's career as a dramatist began at a time when the 1960s counter-culture he fell into was exploring a sense of rootless disaffection which his work in part defined . From his early plays seen on the Off O ff Broadway circuit, Obie and Pulitzer Prize winning success saw him mature in ways that took hi s work beyond the claustrophobic motel walls where many of his anti heroes dwelled, to an expanded widescreen backdrop where his poetic existential meditations could be fleshed out. As an actor, he was acclaimed in a Hollywood mainstream he never quite fitted in with, but was nominated for an Oscar for his role in The Right Stuff anyway. With one foot inside and the other ou

In a former design studio sitting on the edge of an industrial estate just outside Glasgow city centre, Vox Motus theatre company are creating a brand new world. Their new show Flight opens as part of Edinburgh International Festival this week, and is adapted by Oliver Emanuel from Caroline Brothers' 2012 novel, Hinterland. Like its inspiration, Flight tells the story of two refugee brothers, aged fourteen and eight, on the run from Afghanistan in the hope of finding sanctuary in the west. As a journalist in France, Brothers had come into contact with many lost boys of Afghanistan in makeshift refugee camps, and her report on them made the front page of the New York Times. Wanting to go further than the bounds of journalism would allow her, she wrote Hinterland as a fiction to get to the refugee crises full human heart. As one might expect from a theatre company whose previous work has embraced puppetry and magic tricks, their telling of the story takes a leap into something mo

In 1843, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson stumbled on a working partnership which began when painter Hill asked the younger Adamson to take a picture of more than 400 renegade clergymen from the newly formed Free Church of Scotland. Little did they realise that by documenting such a key moment of Edinburgh life in such a new-fangled fashion, they were kick-starting a revolution of their own. Photography had only been invented four years before, but the pioneering collaboration forged by the pair paved the way for what would become one of the major artforms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The result of the partnership can be seen in A Perfect Chemistry, the first major showing of Hill and Adamson's work in fifteen years, which is currently on show in the Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Gallery, situated in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh as part of Edinburgh Art Festival. The fact that the duo's array of social documentary studies of N

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars When an institutionalised posh boy with mental health issues and a messiah complex the size of his family's mansion inherits his father's title, the old school way of doing things appear to be in ruins. Given that young Jack's ascension comes as a result of an unfortunate incident during a bout of auto-asphyxiation, his apparent madness is just one more skeleton in the familial closet. What follows in John Durnin's rare revival of Peter Barnes' 1968 satire is a piece of madcap classicism which, while clearly a product of its time, points up how little has changed in a world of back-scratching toffs. At first, Jack Wharrier's mercurial Jack is a voguish hippy, flirting with notions of peace, love and spiritual enlightenment in a way that sees him mounted on a cross in a statement of his own self-deified glory. I ncreasingly absurdist lurches of style involving references to Richard III, Victorian pot-boilers and mus