Coffee-Table Notes

Most mornings over at the Cameo over the next couple of weeks, prior to the cinema's own programme of screenings, Cameo Live is a new initiative of film-inspired performance-based works from artists you'd be more likely to find on the Forest Fringe. First up was Deborah Pearson, one of the co-founders of that most underground breath of fresh air during festivals season over the last decade. Pearson has a thing about film, having previously created works for the Filmhouse and the now long gone Alphabet video shop in Marchmont. Judging by her latest piece of auto-biographical story-telling, History History History, perhaps it's in the blood. As Pearson sits at her laptop beside the big screen, the credits role on a little known Hungarian film. With a title that translates as The Wonder Striker, it is a Billy Wilder style comedy in a which a pen salesman is mistaken for a real life star footballer in a town where football is everything. The film's premiere was due t

Gladstone Court until August 27 th Four stars The title of Shannon Te Ao's new twin video installation may resemble that of a Godspeed You! Black Emperor album, but the landscape here is the artist's native Aotearoa New Zealand. The tone is similarly mournful, in a starkly poetic study of what seems to be an eternal estrangement between human-kind and the fractured landscape it barely occupies. The first of the two five minute or so films is a close-up of two Maori women slow-dancing in a field, silently holding on for dear life itself before the inevitable goodbye as the sky above them broods its way from day to night. The second focuses on the landscape itself. Filmed in sumptuous black and white, hills and fields are punctured by pylons as cows graze. Both scenarios are sound-tracked with a slow-burning string-led score, and end with a voice-over of the same elegiac verse. Housed for Edinburgh Art Festival in a former Magdalene Asylum for 'fallen' women,

King's Theatre Four stars Everything is black and white in Alan Ayckbourn's new play, a six hour two part epic set in a dystopian future where men and women are segregated from each other following the aftermath of an unspecified plague. Into this landscape, the secret diaries of brother and sister Elihu and Soween are brought to life by Jake Davies and Erin Doherty with a wide-eyed lightness of touch as their hormones get the better of them when they both hit puberty. Annabel Bolton's production for the Old Vic, EIF and Karl Sydow begins with a TED Talk type lecture that reveals the back story to how things turned out this way. It ends with a sentimental love story designed to tug the heart-strings. Inbetween, there is teenage rebellion aplenty against the regime's institutionalised repression. Liberation comes through art and sex, which, in such extreme circumstances become even greater life forces. With both plays told through the siblings' diaries al

First world problems abound in The Whip Hand, Douglas Maxwell's new play, a co-production between the Traverse and Birmingham Rep in association with the National Theatre of Scotland. It opens in Lorenzo and Arlene's swish living room, where Arlene's ex Dougie has just turned fifty, and has a big announcement to make. Arlene and Dougie's daughter Molly is about to go to university, while Dougie's sister's son Aaron is equally smart, but appears to have mis-spent his youth in the pub with Dougie. While Louise Ludgate's blousy Arlene and Richard Conlon's artsy flibbertigibbet Lorenzo have embraced the ghastly pseudo hipster posturing of craft ale culture, Jonathan Watson's heroically unreconstructed Dougie sticks strictly to old-school tinnies. In Tessa Walker's production, what starts out as sit-com style awkwardness awash with wicked one-liners erupts into an explosive treatise on class, racial prejudice, social aspirations, acquired familial

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Distant drums usher in the first of two special Edinburgh International Festival shows by PJ Harvey and a nine piece band performing Harvey's 2016 album, The Hope Six Demolition Project. Conceived during trips to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington DC with film maker and photographer Seamus Murphy, the result was a record as much journalese as work of art. It tapped into global concerns of poverty and the effects of war by way of a swathe of musical influences fleshed out with a driving percussive edge. The title itself was drawn from a project in Washington where rundown housing was demolished to make way for new dwellings. The result was that the original residents were priced out of the neighbourhood. Such is the universal curse of gentrification and social cleansing.   Perhaps this is why Harvey and her black clad nine piece band march onstage like they're leading a funeral parade, martial drums to the fore. Harvey herself walks barel

Death becomes Pauline Goldsmith. Or at least that's how it seems anyway, as the Belfast born actress and writer revives her funeral-based solo show which she first performed it at the turn of the millennium. In the years since she first did the show, which looks at the ritual of a wake in tragi-comic fashion, Glasgow based Goldsmith has proved herself to be one of the country's most adventurous performers. With a track record which has seen her playing Samuel Beckett's solo piece, Not I, at the Arches to regular stints with Vanishing Point theatre company, with whom she is a creative associate, Goldsmith has developed a willingness t o fly without a safety net. Bright Colours Only itself was somewhat ahead of the current wave of solo theatre performers. By returning to it, Goldsmith is part taking stock of her own mortality. “If I wait much longer, it's going to be too near the knuckle,” she says. “Me being in a coffin when I'm at death's door myself mig

Anyone who is a fan of the international phenomenon of White Rabbit Red rabbit since it first appeared several years ago should immediately rush to Nassim , Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour's latest work. Like its predecessor, Soleimanpour's play features a different actor at every show performing a script they have never seen until that moment. In keeping with the spirit of the piece, it would be wrong to give away what happens next, except to say that the performer at the first show was Chris Thorpe, who leapt into proceedings with an all embracing vigour that saw him go willingly into the unknown. In some ways, such open-ness sums up everything about Soleimanpour's play for the Bush Theatre, London, which is introduced by director Omar Elerian. What follows is a delicate series of witty interactions, which gradually through Thorpe reveal a heartfelt plea for understanding through learning about cultures we might not initially understand. Soleimanpour doesn